LinuxFest Northwest, held in Bellingham, Washington April 30- May 1, 2011, announces finalized schedule of events.

The Linux Foundation kicked off the 5th Annual Linux Collaboration Summit with four announcements: the formation of the new High Availability working group, the release of the Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 specification, Yocto Project Release 1.0 availability, and the 20th Anniversary Video Contest.

"Project Harmony is like Creative Commons for contributor agreements. We've set out to capture the best practices of free and open source software contributions, across a diverse array of project cultures, communities, and values." said Allison Randal, a community participant in Project Harmony. "The public review process for the Alpha versions of the documents launches today, and runs through May 6th. After a year of hard work by the original ~100 drafting volunteers, we're really looking forward to broader participation in this public review."

"In the face of constant change, both in software technology itself and in people's attitudes toward it, long-term software projects need to reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant. I'm encouraged to see the GNOME community taking up this challenge, responding to the evolving needs of users and questioning the status quo," says Matt Zimmerman, Canonical CTO.

The first Qt Contributors’ Summit is scheduled to be held at the ParkInn Alexanderplatz in Berlin, Germany on June 16-18, 2011.

Mozilla announces two developments that bring its Do Not Track privacy feature in Firefox closer to being respected by industry.

Likewise announced today that over 100,000 organizations have downloaded Likewise Open, its cross-platform integration software used for joining desktops and servers running Linux, Unix and Mac OS X to an organization's existing Active Directory environment.

"Android is poised to take over as the leading smartphone operating system in 2011 after racing into the number 2 position in 2010," said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Devices Technology and Trends team.