Ubuntu has introduced a new Patent Policy to help developers and rights holders deal with software patent issues. With the Private Support, Canonical hopes to improve its revenue.

Controversy over fixed release cycles for Debian is nothing new. Now Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth has entered into the fray.

Up to Novell's takeover of the Suse Linux AG, KDE was without doubt the preferred default for the German distribution. Now openSUSE users are increasingly demanding the return of KDE as default desktop.

The Debian project is planning a whole series of enhancements for Debian 5.0 "Squeeze." A few results of the currently running Google Summer of Code are beginning to creep into it.

An appeal on Lance Davis, the temporarily absent main administrator and co-founder of CentOS, has obviously worked -- the highest hurdles in the further course of the project seem to be taken.

Even though reiserfs belongs to the veterans of journaling filesystems and established ext3 and ext4 as standard Linux filesystems, a new patch serves to markedly improve it.

The Debian release team decided on July 29 to adopt a two-year development freeze cycle for its 6.0 "Squeeze" release. A day's worth of discussion to follow led the team to revise its plans again.

Microsoft had to report a 30% slump in sales for the last quarter. Their report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors. Among their concerns are Linux and open source untertakings, but also their own partners HP and Intel.