As you will see if you read our news, Hewlett Packard, which everyone calls HP, was big this month. The computer giant announced some sweeping changes, including sweeping changes to undo the sweeping changes they announced a few months ago.

Free/​Open Source isn’t just about software, it’s also about hardware. Open hardware projects are proliferating, and just like open source software, you can get started inexpensively. Here are three projects that are fun, useful, and suitable for beginners to embedded programming, robotics, and building electronic devices.

Zorin announces its own commercial Linux computer called the Zorin PC and is marketing the new PC as a gateway for Windows users to move to a Linux-based system.

Red Hat announces IBM, Accenture, Alfresco, Cisco, HP and Intel representatives are scheduled to deliver keynotes at the seventh annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, May 3-6, 2011 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Cloud.com today announced the release of CloudStack 2.2, the latest version of its open source cloud computing platform.

Announced today, the open source community will be able to buy the Snowball development boards that use ST-Ericsson's AP9500 chipset and run free open source software and tools that have been optimized by Linaro.

“There has not been a comprehensive, up-to-date freely available catalog like this for a long time,” said Victor Palau, Platform Services Manager at Canonical. “By making this open and easily searchable we want to speed the component selection for Ubuntu machines, and allow us and our partner manufacturers to focus on the value-added user experience.”

The little boy behind me was really excited about his first airplane trip. When the plane started to take off, he gave a very loud countdown to “blast off!” It was refreshing to hear that much enthusiasm, particularly because air travel has become a “magic elevator” for me. The doors close in one location and open in another, but I have little excitement in the journey, only the destination.