The GNU Project celebrated its 25th birthday on September 27, 2008. With its GCC compiler and bash shell, GNU was ever at the forefront of today's Linux distribution. To kick off the celebration, British humorist Stephen Fry appears in a video in defense of free software.

IBM declared in a new corporate policy that it was establishing new IT standards and redefining its ties with the International Standards Organization (ISO). If developing countries want to develop their own standards, IBM is willing to support them. Ramifications are clear regarding the turbulent debate around acceptance of Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) data format.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's keynote address at the Linux Plumbers Convention 2008 was officially about the Linux Ecosystem, but started as a direct attack on Ubuntu developer Canonical. He claims that the company contributes next to nothing to kernel development.

U.S. company Codeweavers today offers a special Google Chrome version of their CrossOver runtime environment for free download, giving Linux and Mac users the opportunity to test the search engine vendor’s new browser.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, wants a more elegant and user-friendly Linux-Desktop for it's users. In a full blown statement at this year’s OSCON, Ubuntu grounder Mark Shuttleworth proclaimed: ‘'The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that is art'’.

Linux kernel developer John "Warthog9" Hawley assumes the full time role of kernel.org web administrator for the Linux Foundation (LF).

The screencast is from Douglas Napoleone of the Python Software Foundation, programming a step-by-step solution for a simple database web application,

For more than 36 episodes over the past 10 months, Trier and Rosner, the co-hosts of TWiD, have been weekly voices of the Django community – discussing big news, tracking trunk releases, covering community notes, and inviting the occasional guest to join the discussion. And this weekend, at the first ever DjangoCon, the TWiD crew gets its chance to broadcast live and uncut in front of all their peers – the community that powers the content driving TWiD each and every week.