The Swiss Federal Office for Construction and Logistics (Bundesamt für Bauten und Logistik, or BBL) is reported as having purchased Microsoft licenses in the order of 42 million Swiss francs (about $38 million). Because no public bids were tendered, open source organizations are now requesting a review of the decision.

Some users might know KPhotoAlbum under the earlier name of KimDaBa. Now, after a time-intensive migration, the album-software is available in version 4 for KDE 4.

Are you an artist or a 3D specialist? If so you can apply for a job at Blender. The project will begin work on its latest open source movie in September. The film title: Durian.

Cute but astute: the new minor version of OpenOffice can do more than ever, such as cast shadows, position chart axes and provide structured conversations through comments.

AVG Technologies has released a new version of its virus scanner for Linux as AVG 8.5. Biggest features are its malware protection, improved virus filter and on-access scanner based on the RedirFS filesystem.

As Debian developer and package manager Aurélien Jarno says in a recent blog, Debian will soon switch from the standard GNU C library to the slimmer EGLIBC.

Open source project Nagios is being forked into the Icinga project. The Netways firm, which specializes in open source IT management services and particularly the monitoring solution Nagios, will be managing the fork.

The new version of the X2go terminal server, code-named Uthörn, is particularly Debian 5.0-compliant. Print requests result in files compressed to about 10% before being sent to the client, and the terminal server now supports a third sound architecture through PulseAudio.