2010 will see the first Debian developer conference to be held in the US. On the Debconf mailing list, organizing team member Martin F. Krafft, announced the New York venue.

Linux is proving to be a stronger competitor than Apple for Microsoft, says Steve Ballmer at a recent Strategic Update meeting with investors, and has a supporting graphic to prove it.

An alliance is forming between virtualization providers Novell and VMware with a strategy for teamwork. At the same time Novell is providing a glimpse of its upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 11.

Even though the OpenSSH project emphasizes that the focus of 5.2 is bug fixes to the 5.1 version, 5.2 does contain some notable enhancements.

Since the end of 2008, Psion has actively defended its copyright of the term netbook, with some success. Now Dell has issued court papers disputing the claim.

Formerly regarded as technical gimmicks, open source programs have meanwhile become firmly established with companies and public institutions and provide an effective alternative to conventional software products. The trend towards open source systems will be very much in evidence at CeBIT 2009. For this reason, a dedicated area has been created in Hall 6.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is persisting in its worldwide battle against software patents with comprehensive background information and has hired lobbyist Ciaran O'Riordan to fight the next round.

The new OpenOffice 3.0.1 is the release of a portable, USB loadable version of OpenOffice.

The GNU Project's Bourne Again Shell (bash) is now in its fourth major version, which provides numerous enhancements.

According to current figures from Netbookdigest.com, Microsoft has lost $435,000,000 over the last year in netbook sales.