Richard Stallman's strong position against proprietary applications is butting heads with some members of the GNOME Foundation. A call to split with Stallman's GNU Project is being considered.

With the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE), Red Hat has put one of the components of its desktop virtualization under GPL and BSD licensing.

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.

The FreeNAS project had discussed whether the free storage systems should use BSD or Linux in the future. The result is that both variants will now be available.

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.

When the graphical interface setup under openSUSE didn't work just right, one could always run SaX2 to correct it. Now Novell wants to retire the tool.