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The OSCON Open Source Convention wrapped up Friday with a feminine touch as some of the community's most prominent women discussed the possibilities, problems, and parenthood aspects of open source software participation.

Petr Baudis announced the creation of a homepage for git, the directory content manager used to manage the Linux kernel. Git was originally written by Linus Torvalds in early April of 2005 [story], and is now maintained by Junio Hamano [story]. Other online resources available for the tool include atutorial that walks through the process of setting up and using git, aman page, and thegitweb interface providing easy browsing of the many kernel trees managed by git. The new webpage explains:

"GIT falls into the category of distributed source code management tools, similar to Arch or Darcs (or, in the commercial world, BitKeeper).

This is a detailed guide for Linux beginners about how to setup a web, mail and FTP server with Mandrake/Mandriva 10.2. It covers every aspect of the installation and demonstrates the setup process with the help of 39 screenshots. Experienced system administrators will benefit from this tutorial as well.

Novell will provide support for Siebel Systems' business applications in its Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Red Hat and HP are giving the battle against vulnerabilities top billing at this week's show.

I recently stumbled across a posting on NewsForge about a new (but usable) project. The aspect is simple: a GUI front-end to GNU source-based installations. Personally, I've never got a functional install of Gentoo or SourceMage or Sorcerer or any other source-based distribution, but I've still always been a fan of compiling my own software. It makes me feel more in control, and as kindof a geeky type, it makes me more proud to run that software.

IBM said it will make its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) framework freely available to help make unstructured data more easily searchable--and findable. The technology will find its way onto the SourceForge open-source repository by the year's end, IBM said. The company already incorporates its UIMA implementation in WebSphere Information Integrator Omnifind Edition, WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Workplace

ThinkFree today announced the release of the Linux Edition of ThinkFree Office 3. The cross-platform, high-performance office suite offers the best compatibility with Microsoft® Office of any program to date for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh users.

LinuxWorld is now a venue for all sorts of open-source wannabes and rubberneckers.

SONY HAS stuck an interesting sentence into the very last line of a release that tells us the wonderful technological heights that the console will be able to aspire to. The company said: "The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger)."

FVWM, the F Virtual Windows Manager, is a window manager for computers running the X Window System. While KDE and GNOME offer more features, they are also heavy on memory usage. FVWM is light and fast, and you can customize it to meet your needs, and apply these customizations throughout your organization.

Based on our Clear Choice Test of OES, we think it's a major breakthrough in Novell's long-stated intention to marry its directory and administrative applications to Linux. OES layers a highly competitive directory service onto Linux, provides decidedly evolved administrative and management components and offers very good, egalitarian client support.

More than 11,000 people, fans of the Linux operating system and its penguin mascot, dive in to the annual LinuxWorld conference at Moscone West this week. The conference, featuring 180 companies, runs today through Thursday.

Sometimes and usually in the rarest of instances, experience converges at the least-expected moment to form an important insight. Abraham Maslow would call this a peak experience or a moment in life that takes us beyond our ordinary perceptions, thoughts and feelings. I thought I had spotted such a moment in an article I read by Doc Searls. So, I called him and asked him about the following quote, which he said surfaced while on-stage giving a presentation:

The confab's not just for Linux anymore. Instead, the open-source operating system acts as a focus that draws a certain desirable audience.

Linux developers with the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) are getting back to full speed after last spring's interruption to kernel development from the BitKeeper affair, and the organization is shifting gears to focus on intellectual property and European growth, leaving behind the SCO suits against Linux users and providers, which are now "dead," OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen says.

Red Hat plans to debut its Red Hat Certificate System at LinuxWorld this week as part of a broader strategy to build out a robust security platform. The RH server, based on assets that Red Hat acquired in September from America Online’s Netscape Security Solutions arm, will manage user identities and offer strong authentication, single sign-on and token management using X.509 certificates, LDAP and PKI security technologies

Jason Schultz's "What every open source project should know about patents" was the last session I got to attend at this year's OSCON, and I'm really glad I did. Even though I knew the most crucial things about patents, there were a number of things that Jason managed to clue me in on

A longtime Microsoft ally whose organization has been on the software maker's payroll is now President Bush's pick to be the U.S. representative to the European Union. Bush this week named C. Boyden Gray, a Washington lawyer, to the post -- which comes as the European antitrust bureaucracy is embroiled in a bitter legal dispute with Microsoft (including a 497 million euro fine). Gray's nomination, which has the rank of ambassador, requires Senate confirmation.

Eric Laffoon, the project lead for KDE's Kdewebdev module, takes exception to Butler's arguments and makes the case for his view on the issue of Qt, below.