The Ubuntu Developer Week, which began yesterday and runs until Friday, is a perfect opportunity to look over the shoulders of the Ubuntu developers.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a consortium of commercial Open Source providers, sent its members a survey as to the challenges ahead for free software and received some optimistic responses.

Canonical has released its third alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04. It brings a few new features to test, including notification settings in the user interface and the much publicized ext4 filesystem support.

The latest stable release of the GNU Restricted User Shell (Rush), version 1.5, includes new configuration offerings and a notification feature.

Core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 are now available as open source. Re-named Open Web Server 1.0, Sun Microsystems has released the server under the BSD license.

Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer Shuttle has released a series of mini-desktops running Linux. The next generation will have power-efficient VIA Nano processors.

The US market researcher IDC has recorded an increase of 1.8% in European PC sales for the last quarter of 2008. A weak rise compared to 2007.

Canonical, the company behind the Linux distro Ubuntu, will open-source the software development platform Launchpad.

Novell kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has released statistics on his personal email activity.

Evgeniy Polyakov has released a patch to the kernel's out-of-memory (OOM) killer function, which was designed to prevent a system freeze in an OOM condition by sacrificing one or more processes. The patch "tames" the function by defining the specific process to kill.