Trevan McGee talks to Google's open source and public sector programs manager, Chris DiBona.

While the decision by the US Library of Congress to create exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for unlocking cellphones and jailbreaking iPhones (among other things) in the USA are very welcome, the reaction has been just a touch too euphoric. Not by everyone, mind you.

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Starting August 1.

Brian Purchia of Burson-Marsteller has a post over on GovFresh about the value of open source to unions. His argument pivots on cost-savings. I think you could make a more expansive argument that includes risk mitigation and innovation, but describing the advantage to unions is an interesting angle I hadn’t seen before.

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Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

As more software shifts into the cloud and users increase their reliance on the browser for daily computing tasks, browser tabs will have to evolve from a primitive mechanism for switching between documents into a full-blown task management system. The mainstream browser vendors have been slow to address this issue and haven't applied much innovation to the problem over the past few years. Mozilla has stepped up to plate and is aiming to hit the ball out of the park with some unique and truly compelling improvements to the tab concept.

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If you're looking forward to the next desktop environment, you'll have to wait until March.

During GUADEC 2010, the GNOME Release Team met and decided to hold the GNOME 3.0 release for the March 2011 release instead of September 2010. Even though it means an additional six months to GNOME 3.0 is officially released, it could be a good thing.

The official release of Eclipse 4.0 SDK, which reworks the underlying platform of the IDE, is now available for early adopters. Production users will have to wait for tools to be updated to feel the benefit...

.NET for Android - dubbed MonoDroid - has come a step closer.…...

At last week's OSCON conference, the big topic on the minds of open sourcers was whether or not an open source social networking offering can break down the walled gardens of popular services such as Facebook, and win...

Nokia has unveiled a knock-off of Opera's Mini phone browser, intended for use on its low-end handsets in emerging markets. It's the first manifestation of Nokia's own ad engine.…...

Oracle has shut down servers Sun Microsystems was contributing to the build farm for open source database software, PostgreSQL, forcing enthusiasts to scramble to find new hosts to test updates to their software on the Solaris operating system.

So the Gnash team is broke, and has been for most of a year. This has forced many, but not all of the Gnash developers to find paying work, and mostly stop working on Gnash. The few of them left focused on Gnash like to eat and pay bills.

Why do some people choose to run Linux as their PC platform of choice while others opt instead for other ways of running their computing experiences?

I recently tried the new Sabayon 5.3 LXDE release and found it to be lightweight yet still hold up Sabayon’s feature packed, out-of-the-box way of doing things.

In our final report from OSCON 2010, Amber Graner talks to one of the key organizers.

I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they’re happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves.

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Updated: We've had a number of reader requests to make available some of the imagery we use in Linux Format magazine. Naturally we're happy to share with you all, so we've put this page online where we'll upload artwork as it's requested.

The URL for this page is fixed so you can come back here and check for updates later. As with our podcast, we're releasing this artwork under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, so feel free to monkey with it if you want.

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Expect to see MeeGo in a car near you.

The developers behind the GNOME project have gathered in the Netherlands this week for the annual GUADEC conference. During a meeting that took place at the event, the GNOME release team made the difficult decision to delay the launch of GNOME 3, the next major version of the popular open source desktop environment.

The new version has been deemed unready for mass consumption and will need another round of refinements before it can achieve the level of maturity and robustness that is expected by the software's users. Although the news will likely disappoint some enthusiasts, it is consistent with the GNOME development community's conservative approach to release management and strong emphasis on predictability.

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