Jonathan Riddell has just announced the first Alpha of the KDE version of Ubuntu 8.04 (codenamed Hardy Heron).

Following security fixes for Firefox, Camino & Co, the developers of the Thunderbird email client have now taken steps to remove known vulnerabilities, closing down five security holes, one of which was and classified as critical.

The European Commission has imposed a fine of 899 m Euros on Microsoft, stating that the company had demanded unreasonable prices for interface documentation for it Workgroup servers.

Adobe has joined the SQLite Consortium which promotes the development of the embedded database.

The Gnome Foundation is awarding a total of US$ 50,000 for individual contributions to Gnome software accessibility.

After 32 years as the maintainer of the Emacs editor, Richard M. Stallman, has assigned the task to two younger developers.

Three years after the initial version, the Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) has finally released version 1.0.

Several members of the Fedora project, which is the basis for the Linux distributions offered by Red Hat, have formed Fedora EMEA, based in Germany on the fringe of the FOSDEM conference in Brussels.

Trolltech is releasing version 4.3.4 of its GUI library under the version 3 of the GPL. Apart from this the makers of Qt have simply fixed bugs in the release.

Novell today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. The purchasing price is said to be US$ 205 m.