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The Mozilla Foundation has posted its financial statements and tax info for 2008, and a FAQ on the topic for those of us with short attention spans. While plowing through financial statements may not be the most exciting topic for Free and Open Source advocates, it's worth taking a look at what Mozilla has achieved as an independent project, where it's going, and how other projects might be able to emulate Mozilla's success to fund more and more FOSS development.

Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch have joined forces against a common enemy. For months Mr Murdoch has been railing against the search engine Google and Microsoft wants to transform its own puny search engine Bing into a true competitor to Google. The impetus for the discussions between Microsoft and News Corporation came from News Corp. The talks have arrived at a proposed deal that will likely attract the attention of anti-trust lawyers. Under the agreement Microsoft, with its available huge war chest to fight Google, would pay News Corporation to remove its content from the Google search index.

In case you are not aware, GIMP is an open source image editing software that is bundled in most Linux distro and is touted as the closest alternative to Photoshop. It comes with plenty of toolset and filters for you to create/edit your image, and the best thing of all, it is free. However, as good as it can get, there are several handy and useful features Photoshop that are not available in GIMP and one of them is the Save For Web feature. I used the Photoshop’s Save For Web feature extensively as it enables me to optimize my screenshots to the smallest possible size without affecting their quality to a great extent. Luckily, GIMP supports plugins and there is this plugin available for this purpose.

Defenders of the somewhat unwieldy vi editor say, "Sure vi is user-friendly; it's just peculiar about who it makes friends with." Joe Brockmeier of openSUSE fame has now come out with a beginner's guide to Vim and what it does.

The Debian GNU/Linux project is looking at a development freeze in March next year for its next release, Squeeze, the project leader Steve McIntyre says.

One of those Powerful Ideas is to provide Sharp Tools, as opposed to the weak idea of canned lessons on individual topics that go no further. They were originally designed for the factory automation model of education. You know, everybody in an entire state or country gets the same lesson from the same textbook on the same day. Efficiency! Except when some students don't get a particular lesson, and there is no provision for helping them to catch up.

If the new Google interface design is any indication, it appears that Google might actually be feeling a little heat, or at least some influence, from Bing, but it's hard to extrapolate that to any real concern on Google's part.

Synology America Corp. is shipping a four-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device, offering up to 8TB sharable RAID storage for home and small business users. The Linux-based DS410j is equipped with an 800MHz processor, a gigabit Ethernet port, two USB ports, and version 2.2 of Synology's DNLA-compliant Disk Station Manager software.

For over a decade, KDE has supplied Linux and Unix users with a graphical desktop environment and a suite of useful applications. It has become one of the most popular desktop environments and is the default on many Linux distributions. With the coming of KDE 4, developers promised native KDE applications running on Windows. While the current release is still not ready for production, as of KDE 4.3.3, it is coming closer and worth trying. What follows is a brief guide to getting KDE running on Windows.

The Mozilla Foundation survived 2008 fairly well despite the economic downturn, says chairman of the foundation Mitchell Baker in her blog. In it she's pretty detailed about its financial status and lays out the figures.

LXer Feature: 23-Nov-2009

Intel released Moblin 2.1 earlier this month, Canonical released Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 late last month, and various other vendors have offered up their fall distribution refreshes too. Oh yeah, and Google just released the Chromium OS source code a few days ago! With all of the netbook-focused distribution updates, we found it time to run an onslaught of new benchmarks, comparing some of the leaders in this field along with running a couple full-blown desktop distributions for this round of Linux netbook benchmarking. Here are our benchmarks, including the world's first look at the Chromium OS (Chrome OS) system performance from the latest development build. Covered is everything from the video playback performance to encoding to battery power consumption and CPU/memory usage tests.

There are many faces behind what goes on at the Linux Foundation: the officers and employees who run the day to day show, the Board of Directors who keep the ship on course, and of course, the volunteers who support, promote, and participate in the Foundation's activities. Among that number are those that act as the voice of the people themselves. The Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board is described as one that "collaborates with the Linux Foundation on programs and issues that affect the Linux community" and "fosters bi-directional interaction with application developers, end users, and Linux companies." The ten individuals are elected by the kernel community itself — half one year, half the next — and sit on the TAB for two years, with the possibility of re-election. Its chair — who will be elected at the Collaboration Summit next March — holds a seat on the Foundation's Board of Directors.

With the arrival of the first code of Chrome OS, also known as Chromium OS in its open source form, the H takes a deeper look at the browser-centric operating system. When Google announced Chrome OS, many people assumed Google was launching an assault on the desktop - going after Microsoft Windows and were just not saying that was what they were doing. Now Chromium OS, the open source branch of Chrome OS, has arrived The H has taken the source code and built it to see how it feels in practice.

Setting up proper wireless encryption is easier than ever on Linux. WEP is broken and has been for a long time, but WPA and WPA2 are still going strong. Eric Geier shows how to configure your Linux client to connect to a proper wireless encryption and authentication server.

Some people are already convinced that Google will fail with its Chrome operating system. Others think that Chrome can't possibly be a threat to Windows. Both groups are so, so wrong. First, for those who think that Chrome is simply a failure from the word "go", their reasoning is pathetically flawed. They argue that Chrome will fail because it's based on Linux. What century are these people from?

A chief information officer for engineering giant General Electric (GE) has said that open source software is only suited for internal “playground” applications and that businesses that use it for mission critical infrastructure are taking a huge risk. Responding to a question from eWEEK Europe UK on the first day of the Central and Eastern European IT Leaders Summit & Expo, in Budapest, Peter Gyorgy, chief information officer of GE's Consumer and Industrial division in Europe, said non-proprietary code presents a significant risk to companies.

Digium is expanding its partner program -- potentially engaging more consulting firms and resellers that want to embrace Asterisk, the open source IP PBX. Digium has been particularly active with a range of partners in recent months.

It's interesting, for sure, but Google Chrome OS as a game changer? No way! Everything from assuming people will want another Apple-alike 'buy the hardware to get the OS' model to thinking the average user is ready to surrender a PC paradigm for a cloud-based existence is wide of the mark. Google would appear to have got this one about as wrong as it got Google Answers or Google Lively. Remember them? No, thought not...

It could happen. For the curious at heart, Linux is just around the corner for Windows 7 users.