Microsoft had released a tool in mid-November that generated bootable USB media or a DVD from the download version of Windows 7 and that conflicted with the GNU Public License. They now followed up by putting the tool under GPLv2.

After saying farewell to the functionally replete Ubuntu 9.10, developers are working on the next version, 10.04, which should be particularly stable. The first alpha of its LTS version has now arrived.

Google has released the first beta version of its Chrome browser for Linux and Mac OS for download. Until now, only an open source variation, Chromium, has been Linux compatible.

With SUSE Studio, individual versions of openSUSE can be created with just a few clicks of the mouse.

On Thursday, the first alpha version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is to be made available. The official release will be out in April 2010. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS should feature significantly more stability, being based on the just released Kernel 2.6.32 as a precedent to the Long Term version.

The openSUSE team is breaking with a long tradition of providing updates as backport patches instead of version updates. KDE 4.3.4 will soon be brought in as a version update.

Pentoo, a LiveCD used for penetration testing, is available in version 2009.0.

In its fourth fiscal quarter of 2009, Novell achieved a net revenue of $216 million, a figure down on the $245 million for the same period last year.