This year's release of version 1.0 of the free runtime environment Wine is a milestone in itself. Developer Maarten Lankhorst has set another (experimental) stepping stone by getting the first 64Bit Windows program to run.

Thunderbird is nearing its premiere. Not too much is new, but there are many changes. The first beta of the free mail client provides a faster search and better IMAP integration. Creating email accounts and managing addresses and the calendar should be more intuitive.

The second beta of Firefox 3.1 has arrived with a new JavaScript engine, data security mode and web worker threads.

The Creative Commons Attribution License should already be familiar to many Internet users. Now the Science Commons license should revolutionize the exchange of scientific research.

The FTP team at the Debian project have decided that the Affero GPL version 3 licensing (AGPLv3) is consistent enough with the guidelines of the Linux distro that software with the licensing can go into Debian's main archive.

After many years of development, the Songbird open source software is finally released as version 1.0.

Aimed mainly at sysadmins and text tool users, the Debian-based Linux distribution Grml is now available in version 2008.11.

Governments need a better understanding of the flexibility and security of open source software.