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.

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sees opportunities for open source firms that might be putting undue burden on their dwindling IT departments because of the current economic downturn. Whitehurst offered his views in a press conference in Munich. His conclusion: "When people look at alternatives, often Open Source wins."

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst sees opportunities for open source firms that might be putting undue burden on their dwindling IT departments because of the current economic downturn.