It's not the first time Microsoft has tried to wrestle away market share from free software using shady tactics. Suddenly, Microsoft seems to have discovered that education is strategic for their enterprise and they are pouring resources into cornering the market... at least in areas where Linux has the lead.

Sebastian Trüg has announced that the Xesam vs. Nepomuk issue is settled and that they will merge into a single desktop ontology.

A fairly long list of projects will take part in this year's Google Summer of Code, the fifth since 2005. Students will be working in grand style to improve products from these popular open source projects.

At the last KDE developer's Akademy conference, the Plasma team had assembled some ideas for KDE 4 on netbooks. These ideas will now become reality.

Debian developer Ana Guerrero, as spokesperson for the KDE team, has announced that KDE4 will appear during the first week of April 2009.

The Fedora project has released the first beta test version of Fedora 11 after an announced delay from its original milestone.

Finnish software developer Jerry Jalava uses Linux on a USB stick, although in a rather unusual way: the USB is part of his prosthetic finger.

The free OpenSolaris UNIX derivative from Sun has not exactly been known for its multimedia capabilities. This should soon change.