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One of the most controversial freedoms of free software is the right to simply take the code and go make your own competing project — what is popularly called a “fork”. It’s controversial because it seems like a betrayal of the original developer; because it distributes resources into competing groups, which may waste effort; and because it may create confusion in the marketplace of ideas that is free software distribution. But it is a critical freedom to have, and the recent fork of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org, like the fork of X.org from Xfree86 years ago, shows why it’s so important. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

When reviewing a lightweight distribution, the term Swiss Army knife is sometimes employed to indicate that it's packed with features despite a diminutive size. However, at 11MB for the ISO, Tiny Core is more of a blank-slate distribution, as when booted from a CDROM or a USB stick, it presents the user with a simple desktop consisting merely of a task launcher and a package manager. It contains some good ideas and it's already perfectly usable, but I think it needs a few more refinements in order to become great.

The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in the city center of Berlin at the Humboldt University, Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events.

Microsoft released an early developer version of an open source package manager, dubbed NuPack, for its .NET platform yesterday. Independent coders on the Nublar (NU) project worked with Microsoft on NuPack, and on Wednesday it was handed over to MS-sponsored Outercurve Foundation.

Within the next few weeks, Rackspace will announce key milestones for OpenStack, the open source cloud computing standard. But how will partners potentially benefit from OpenStack? The VAR Guy went straight to the source, interviewing Jim Curry, chief stacker for Rackspace’s OpenStack effort. Here's the conversation.

Its time for a new q4wine release tagged by the 0.120 version.

Most of us will install our GNU/Linux system once or twice and then use the excellent package management systems to upgrade when new releases of our chosen distribution come out. Users of Debian and Debian-based systems (such as Ubuntu) will be quite used to the idea that you only need to install it once. But what happens when you want to replicate one Debian system on another machine? Do you use cloning tools? Yes you can but only if the hardware is similar on the two machines. What if one has an Intel Pentium-based processor and the other has an AMD64? In that case what you need is some way to replicate the package selection but use the appropriate ones for the new architecture. Enter dpkg. Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

We can reveal today that Ubuntu One, Canonical’s cloud storage solution, will be updated in Maverick Meerkat to include Windows, Android & iPhone syncing and music streaming…

I challenge you to program a Open-Source DWF file viewer!!! I love Computing and Linux in particular, I even know some C++, Basic, Fortran Pascal, VBasic and Gambas, but beside "Hello World!", I'm rusty, very rusty.....

This is unbelievable: after suggesting extra taxes to fix (Windows!!!) computer viruses, now Microsoft says that, in order to prevent the same computers from spamming the whole Internet, governments should establish and enforce "health certificates" for computers as necessary prerequisites for Internet access. Why not just install Linux instead?

Two weeks left before Microsoft ends Windows XP sales. Windows XP no moreIt's been delayed more than once but now finally Microsoft is pulling the plug on Windows XP. From October 22, PC users will no longer be able to buy a PC with Windows XP pre-installed. Instead they will have to buy a Windows 7 version. It's the final call for what has been one of Microsoft's most popular operating systems.

The openSUSE Goblin Team, which was originally formed to bring the latest Moblin innovations into the openSUSE world and now are focusing upon pulling in MeeGo innovations after Moblin and Maemo merged, has a new announcement. This openSUSE team is now announcing the first public release of Smeegol, which combines MeeGo with openSUSE into one netbook-designed Linux distribution.

Motorola's G2 goes a step further than the Droid X in combating hackers' attempts on rooting by automatically detecting when a phone is rooted and then automatically reinstalling the stock Android OS back onto the device.

Apple Inc. is challenging a federal jury's order that it pay $625.5 million in damages for violating a small technology company's patents. If upheld, the verdict would be one of the largest in a patent lawsuit. Last Friday, the jury in Tyler, Texas, found that Apple infringed on three patents held by Mirror Worlds LLC, a company founded by Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter to commercialize his ideas. The patents cover characteristic features on Apple's Macintosh computers, iPods and iPhones. The technologies include Cover Flow, which lets users flip through album covers and other content as if through a stack of cards; Time Machine, which performs automatic backups; and Spotlight, which is software for searching computer hard drives.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab is the post child of the Android Tablet movement. This being the case we’ve put its specifications and features head to head against the current king of the hill – the Apple iPad. As you can see it raises the bar in several key areas including processing power, pixel density, system memory and storage among others…

We have been covering different aspects of Blender extensively during the past few weeks. We even featured one of the best collection of Blender made movies and animations few days ago. Now it's time for some real learning. Here is an incredible collection of 12 hand picked Blender tutorials every Blender and animation enthusiast should know of.

Users sick of waiting on Amazon to provide current downloaders for Linux will be pleased with Banshee 1.8. Just released, the new version can browse the Amazon MP3 store and act as a downloader for Amazon’s .amz files, plus a number of other new enhancements and features.

Microsoft’s virtualization team is taking a close look at OpenStack -- the open source cloud computing platform promoted by Rackspace and NASA. In fact, sources say Microsoft Hyper-V will likely gain some integrations with OpenStack, with an official announcement potentially surfacing in late 2010. Here are the preliminary details, only from The VAR Guy.

Reactions to Ubuntu are rarely balanced. Too often, people love or hate it so extravagantly that the opinions negate themselves. Often, the reactions are so extreme that a fair assessment of the popular distribution is difficult. Add some genuine mis-steps, and the assessment seems almost impossible. So exactly what does Ubuntu contribute to free software? The answer, I think, is different from what those in either extreme seem to believe.

G'MIC has been made available as an easy-to-use plug-in for GIMP. It extends this retouching software capabilities by offering a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects. Of course, this plug-in is highly customizable and it is possible to dynamically add your custom G'MIC-written filters in it.