This year's release of version 1.0 of the free runtime environment Wine is a milestone in itself. Developer Maarten Lankhorst has set another (experimental) stepping stone by getting the first 64Bit Windows program to run.

The Open Invention Network (OIN) organization has instituted the Linux Defenders program with the goal to improve the overall quality of patents and shield against patent trolls.

Hewlett-Packard has partnered with Novell in developing a new, secure Linux desktop product. At the same time, HP has joined up with Mozilla to promote a desktop virtualization project for small business customers.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a lawsuit for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) against network giant Cisco Systems.

Slackware is widely regarded as the oldest active Linux distributions. Right on time for Christmas, the distro, which once served as a basis for (open) SUSE, is available in a new version.

The many years of hard work and reverse engineering that went into developing the free Nouveau drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards have finally paid off. Nouveau is now included in the repository of the next Ubuntu 9.04 release.

In its upcoming version 11.1, the openSUSE Linux distro will be integrating the Smolt program, which collects hardware profiles in a central database from end users on a volunteer basis.

A Microsoft study once more tries to prove that a company is clearly better off with Windows as its platform. Our colleagues at the Australian iTWire Magazine have reported back with an analysis to dispute that claim.

Good news is that China is increasingly shying away from Microsoft and adopting Linux in its Internet cafés. However, can we trust the Red Flag Linux they're using?

Bazaar, the open source distributed version control system software has been released in version 1.10.