The annual developers’ conference FOSDEM will take place in Brussels on February 23 and 24, 2008. As a teaser, organizers of the open-source event have now placed interviews with some of the speakers online.

Version 4.0.0 of the server-based backup and recovery software, Restore, has just been released. The developers have fixed various bugs in this version, and packetized the GPL'd software for Debian/Ubuntu systems.

Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba.

Virtualization specialist SWsoft is changing its name. As of 2008 the company will be using the name of its subsidiary Parallels as its new corporate identity.

Version 3.0.0 of LM Sensors, a software package for hardware monitoring has just been released.

The hot topic of virtualization has developed into a must have for any vendor’s portfolio: following Oracle, Sun has now announced its own virtualization and management platform titled xVM.

At Oracle’s own Open World fair in San Francisco, Oracle recently presented a virtualization software titled Oracle VM, based on the free Xen virtualization solution.

The official test phase for VMware Server 2 by virtualization specialists VMware has now started. The final version is due for release in 2008 and will be free of charge.

Linux distributor Red Hat has updated its enterprise platform Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and released version 5.1.