The U.S. is known for its patent friendliness. But a Supreme Court decision in 2008 overturned a patent application by Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw for a risk mitigation process. Now Red Hat is using the so-called Bilski case in support of software non-patentability.

The now released test version of openSUSE 11.2 is to be the last beta. The first release candidate will appear mid-October.

Like openSUSE, the Ubuntu project has released its first beta version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The final version should appear October 29.

Tea, a source code editor for HTML, DocBook and Latex, is now available in version 26.0.0. The new release includes support for more programming languages and new features.

The X.org project has some discussion ahead of it, instigated by developer Peter Hutterer's call for an ordered release strategy. The current rather unpredictable release schedule makes the work and test process harder, according to Hutterer.

Among the countless announcements in the Intel Developer Forum regarding Moblin was a joint press release from Intel and Microsoft. In it is announced that Microsoft wants to port Silverlight to Moblin.

Linus Torvalds has announced RC1 for Linux Kernel 2.6.32.

This past weekend the Wine project released a new version of its Windows emulator. Apart from the numerous obligatory bug fixes, the release includes improvements to the Direct3D 10 API and an initial support for the Open Audio Library (OpenAL).

The Gentoo project is celebrating its tenth anniversary, which inspired the Gentoo-Ten team to produce a special DVD that is now available in a test version.