Now into its eighth year, the FOSDEM developer conference in Brussels, Belgium, demonstrates that it is very much alive and kicking, and even celebrating records.

In February, Linux and open source enthusiasts met in southern California for SCALE 6x. The conference kicked off with a day of "Friday Special Events," including a Women in Open Source conference.

Python inventor Guido van Rossum is known to have a good sense of humor and probably had a good laugh when he heard about the Guido van Robot project. If you are learning how to program, or would like to teach others, this software gives you a light-hearted introduction.

Open Source software is likely to dominate the Software as a Service (SaaS) segment for reasons of economy and community building says market researcher Gartner: Open Source is cheap, and communities keep it popular.

The results of the election are confirmed: Debian veteran Steve McIntyre has won the Debian Project Leader (DPL) election in the third round of voting.

According to reports, the department of education in the Australian state of New South Wales has decided to install Open Office on its 41,000 computers.

For over a year now, the Linux Driver Project (LDP) has offered free development of hardware drivers. Novell gave its employee and the project initiator Greg Kroah-Hartman a sabbatical for driver programming; Kroah-Hartmann recently published a status report.

The Brazilian election authority has announced that voting systems based on Linux will be used for the election later this year.