The KDE project has released a first alpha version of Plasmate. The small development environment is meant for writing Plasmoid applets for the KDE4 desktop.

Command line downloader Curl and its Libcurl library are available in version 7.20.0 with expanded protocol support.

Ubuntu's Community Manager, Jono Bacon, has announced the Opportunistic Developer Week, to take place from March 1 to 6, 2010. The distance learning course will deal with the speedy creation of applications on the Linux desktop.

The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) is among the 15 projects presenting their work in Hanover, Germany, enabling the Linux kernel for real-time Ethernet.

Computer science veteran Andrew Tanenbaum presented the third version of his Minix operating system at the FOSDEM 2010 conference on February 6-7 in Brussels, Belgium.

Mollify is a PHP application for managing and downloading files from a web server. The new version 1.5 comes with numerous changes.

The embeddable database Berkeley DB is available in version 4.8.26 with new APIs.

Palm hits the gas pedal: with a six-figure monetary award for the most downloaded webOS applications the California company wants to heat up the app development market.