Mandriva's financial situation appears to be none too rosy. At the end of the year, the distributor will terminate the employment of two of its freelance workers, Adam Williams, effectively the Community Manager, and Package Manager Oden Eriksson.

MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius warns in his blog against putting the current version 5.1 of the popular database package into production. He's critical of the release policy and fears that the product's quality may suffer.

Once considered by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer as a plague on all software and the work of the devil, open source software is now accepted with open arms by Microsoft, even evoking their active support.

The opening keynote Thursday of the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego was by author and security expert Bruce Schneier. In his opinion "perceived security" should be an aspect of all security implementation.

A whole week of success stories for Linux and Open Source, while Microsoft is battling the press, thus the summary from Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Even the New York Times sees a good positioning for Linux on desktops.

The openness of free software spurs innovation across generations and time zones.

The free wiki project TWiki is currently embroiled in a contentious dialogue. The TWIKI.NET venture is undergoing a new governance model that many developers consider a hostile takeover. Without further ado, developers have decided to launch their own, separate NextWiki.org project.