35 of the top Linux distros out there, and how they got their names.

Most of the readers of this blog probably already know about Big Buck Bunny, Blender's open movie project codenamed Peach; some may even know about Sintel (Durian). Few, however, know about the Morevna project, an anime project dedicated to using only open-source tools in its production.

This post from Matt Asay on whether open source needs consolidation asks an interesting question, and some of the comments that came in on it were interesting. This comment caught my eye: "No. Open source does not need consolidation. Open source needs product managers."

Adobe has announced that it is sponsoring the SQLite public domain database engine project by joining Mozilla and Symbian on the SQLite consortium. The news is interesting in that it balances Google’s recent sponsorship of efforts to support Photoshop on Linux, while it also raises an interesting question about Microsoft’s attempt to define commercial open source.

Groovy++, the static typing compiler extension for Groovy, is to be released as open source under the APL2. The Groovy++ project started last year and at the time Alex Tkachman, project founder said Groovy++'s compiler "uses several pieces of technology, which our company uses and plans to use in our commercial products.

Damien Katz, whose Apache CouchDB recently hit 1.0, provides some excellent tips on creating a successful open source project in his blog Getting your open source project to 1.0.

Organic open source. Non-organic open source. Genetically modified free software. None of these are phrases that are in common usage but exploring what they mean is an interesting exercise. MySQL's Brian Aker used the first two terms when responding to a post by Linux kernel guru Ted T'so about what Sun was trying to do with its OpenSolaris project. I made up the third one myself!

"Dangerous Prototypes is a two-year old organization with the stated mission of producing "one new open source project every month."[...]All are being sold by another interesting company, Seeed Studio."

x2go is an open source terminal server project offering a comprehensive "server based computing" solution. Combining the advantages of existing systems it features ease of use, performance and scalability. x2go provides you with access to your desktop as an individual as well as a corporate user - from within your own network and via the internet.