Microsoft Corporation has opened an Open Source Interop Technology Center near Munich, Germany that should promote open source software on Windows and improve the relationship of its products with the free software community.

The pending release of Ubuntu 8.10 was announced by Steve Langasek last night. The Ubuntu team is confident the latest candidate, codenamed Intrepid Ibex, is stable enough to be used without risk.

In a recent report of the European Union's IDABC agency, numerous software tenders in Europe run against regulations in that they favor proprietary software. If it were up to the IDABC, the tendering organizations would be liable for these practices.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) is up in arms over the fact that documentation for Microsoft's OOXML data format is now publicly available on the Internet. Meanwhile, ISO members are nervously watching IBM's behavior in the standardization process.

On September 29, 13 out of 23 employees from the technical committee of Standard Norge signed an open letter announcing their resignations. The reason: Norway’s “yes” to OOXML

Not only is the cross-platform Qtopia application framework now called Qt Extended in its current version, but Nokia has renamed recent purchase, Trolltech to Qt Software.

As the International Herald Tribune reports in an Associated Press news article, Venezuela has ordered a million Magellan laptops that are based on Intel's Classmate PC design.

The GNU Project celebrated its 25th birthday on September 27, 2008. With its GCC compiler and bash shell, GNU was ever at the forefront of today's Linux distribution. To kick off the celebration, British humorist Stephen Fry appears in a video in defense of free software.