Novell today announced a new initiative to increase revenue and profitability for solution providers and consulting partners who specialise in selling Novell® technologies. Among other benefits, Novell will offer enhanced partner education, joint marketing opportunities, and free technical support for those partners demonstrating expertise in selling and supporting Novell software.

Astaro Corporation, a leading manufacturer of unified threat management (UTM) security appliances, today announced the beta availability of version 7.1 of its Astaro Security Gateway software appliance. The latest release of Astaro's
security platform offers a range of innovations, including advanced web filtering based on a new HTTP proxy which allows for extended functionality and performance improvements. Astaro has also launched its new beta program for Astaro Security Gateway.

Shortly before the project’s first anniversary, Sidux 2007-04, code name "Eros" has just been released. The distribution harvests packages from Debian Sid.

Following eight alpha versions, Mozilla has now released for first beta of version three of the Firefox web browser.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution has just launched its "Launchpad Personal Package Archive Service" for developers on the Canonical "Launchpad" platform.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today published the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (GNU AGPLv3). The license based on version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv3) has an additional term to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. By publishing this license, the FSF aims to foster user and development communities around network-oriented free software.

Shuttle Inc., the market leader in the Mini-PC sector and manufacturer of multiple form- fctor solutions, is now offering its mini PCs preloaded with Linux in the UK.

IBM has published plans for its own network service for IT infrastructures under the "Blue Cloud" heading.

Oracle has just released the first, major JRuby application, thus demonstrating the viability of the Java port of the Ruby scripting language.

Linux distributor Red Hat has released the sixth updated for version 4 of its discontinued Enterprise Linux product.