As a director of the Linux Foundation and a Linux SCSI developer, James Bottomley opened the Linux-Kongress in Hamburg, Germany this week with a keynote investigating the commonalities and differences among the various Open Source operating systems. He describes Linux as the liveliest variant among them.

Information Appliance Associates have started a beta test program of a synchronization tool for Linux and Blackberry.

The International Standards Organization (ISO) is up in arms over the fact that documentation for Microsoft's OOXML data format is now publicly available on the Internet. Meanwhile, ISO members are nervously watching IBM's behavior in the standardization process.

The developers of Mono, the free implementation of the .NET framework, have achieved a major milestone with version 2.0.

On September 29, 13 out of 23 employees from the technical committee of Standard Norge signed an open letter announcing their resignations. The reason: Norway’s “yes” to OOXML

As the International Herald Tribune reports in an Associated Press news article, Venezuela has ordered a million Magellan laptops that are based on Intel's Classmate PC design.

A new product, Iron, is a viable alternative for those reluctant to reveal their personal data when using Google's Chrome browser. The Iron browser is based on Chrome's source code.

Eee manufacturer Asus has expanded its sub-notebook series with a desktop version. The Eee Box with the Intel Atom processor is available in Linux and Windows XP.

The OpenOffice project has taken the next step toward version 3.0 of its free office package by publishing release candidate 2 (RC 2)

The Dutch company Zarafa turns its groupware of the same name to open source.