At CeBIT Open Source 2009 Martin Michlmayr, past Debian project lead, presented his current projects FOSSology and FOSSBazaar, and spoke about the role his employer Hewlett-Packard is giving him in the governance project and how the FOSSBazaar work group is organized within the Linux Foundation.

Microsoft's current patent suit against navigation software maker TomTom has caused quite a stir in the Open Source arena and might turn into a wave of MS attacks on Linux.

In March (3-8, 2009), CeBIT will once again be opening its gates in Hannover, Germany. The world's largest and most renowned trade fair for the world of IT and telecommunications will be featuring Open Source topics in hall 6. The CeBIT Open Source Forum 2009 will be the venue of daily lectures on the use of Linux and free software - and you can watch them online, live and for free!

The GNU Project's Bourne Again Shell (bash) is now in its fourth major version, which provides numerous enhancements.

In his blog, "The Geek Stuff", software engineering manager Ramesh Natarajan offers tips and advice for Linux users.

Big Blue is now providing images for Amazon's cloud. A cloud software-as-service (SaaS) for SUSE Linux, among other products, is to follow.

FreeBSD and NetBSD are among the 15 projects that will present their work at CeBIT, sharing a booth and representing "Berkeley Software Distribution" operating systems. If you paid attention -- you're right, actually it's 16 projects at the Open Source Project Lounge.

Dag Wieers of Project Centos made a passionate plea for more private users to turn to the free Red Hat Enterprise clone, and stressed that commercial companies with non-critical machines could also benefit from Centos.