At the start of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit on the Canary Islands, Richard Stallman, Robert Lefkowitz and Walter Bender rallied open source developers in their common tasks.

Voice over IP on the Internet gives communication a personal touch, but it takes applications like Cheese and WebcamStudio to exploit the creative potential of Internet telephony.

Linux is getting much better at managing devices, and the versatility of open source software leads to some interesting innovations.

Makagiga includes a bulletin board, an RSS reader, a notebook, a calendar, and a task scheduler, with all the components intelligently linked.

KDE e.V. President, Aaron Seiger, is calling for help to rescue freedesktop.org. Seigo warns of the danger of the free open source software platform sliding into insignificance and he's appealing to community members for help.

In his keynote at the LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich spoke about the future of user interfaces on mobile devices. In the process he presented QML, the newest development from his employer Qt Software.

The middle of June, Yahoo! introduced a small change to its user login protocol that practically barred access from all Linux clients. IM services Pidgin and Kopete were hit and responded quickly.