Steve Ballmer's deal with the Catalonian government is seen as a leverage against their existing Open Source strategy.

Xandros has launched an ARM based Linux version for netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices at the Mobile World Congress in Spain's Barcelona.

A new version of Wine, the program loader that lets Windows run on Linux, has been released.

The KDevelop team released its first beta version of the development environment for KDE and Qt programs.

This first Beta brings developers another step closer to the scheduled release of Gnome version 2.26 in March.

Debian, Mandriva and Fedora developers call them Sid, Cooker and Rawhide. OpenSUSE calls them Factory and they are ringing the changes for the Factory development.

Gnome is among the 15 projects that will present their work at CeBIT, offering free desktop environment of Linux and Linux-like systems that is especially focused on offering easy access.

Gears is an open source application that allows users offline access to Google's documents and spreadsheets. But not entirely problem-free.