Over the weekend the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) took place in Brussels. In his keynote, Mozilla's Mark Surman hoped for Open Source's success and Debian key contributor Bdale Garbee supported its social contract. As an aside, Debian Lenny's target release date was reconfirmed.

Network Backup vendor Arkeia has an infusion of cash, a new CEO and marketing chief, a move back to a former headquarters, and a new version with a virtualization client. Linux Magazine Online had the opportunity to interview Bill Evans, Arkeia's new CEO, and Frederic Renard, the new VP of marketing.

Debian, Mandriva and Fedora developers call them Sid, Cooker and Rawhide. OpenSUSE calls them Factory and they are ringing the changes for the Factory development.

Over a year ago Microsoft bought the software company Danger, popular in the U.S. for its Sidekick mobile phone. A new model is coming out, this time running on NetBSD.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client is now pre-installed on the newest Dell thin clients.

Fred Emmott has released the Slackware-based 64-bit distro with 2.6.27.7 kernel.

The countdown for Debian Lenny has begun with the project team putting the code in deep freeze. The release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 is expected mid-February.