KDE released the first release candidate for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. 91 more bugs were fixed since the beta2 release and about 40 regressions were identified and mostly fixed as well.

When you received a favor from someone, you show your appreciation. When you love someone, you also show your appreciation. Now, Linus Torvalds did all of us a favor by releasing that Linux source code in year 1991 and we all love Linux, so how are we going to show our appreciation?

Right before Christmas, KDE has published the first candidate for the upcoming release of KDE 4.6.0. The focus at this stage is on fixing bugs and completing translations and artwork. As such, the rework of the Oxygen icon set is nearing completion, many bugs reported by testers in the past weeks have been fixed and stabilization is still in full swing.

Firefox 3 developers are taking all the time that they need to accomplish their new Firefox. After the Beta 1 Mozilla has released Firefox 3 beta 2 to get more feedbacks about bugs from its testing community. Bugzilla was a little bit busy lately since the beta 1 thousands of bugs fortunately 900 of them are fixed. Firefox developers are trying to reveal more bugs to make their Firefox 3 better. The Beta 2 features are very promising and the Firefox 3 will definitely beat all competitors.

xTuple, creators of the leading open source ERP, accounting, and CRM system, is looking for a few good hackers. By "hackers," of course, we mean developers willing to get involved in source code. The classical use of the term.

The last two releases of Ubuntu, 9.04 and 9.10 seem to generate a lot of complaints of bugs. The good news is that this is all very natural, and even to be expected given the deep changes that are being made to the stack. Bugs cannot be fixed until they are found, and they cannot be found until users are running the code.

Make no mistake -- due to the energy that the Ubuntu community and Canonical, its corporate arm, have put into improving the desktop, this popularity is well-deserved. Yet, at the same time, I find myself wondering whether user-friendliness must inevitably mean discouraging users from exploring their systems or taking firm control over them.

One of the topics of ongoing interest in the kernel community is that of maintaining quality. It is trivially obvious that we need to maintain and even improve quality. It is less obvious how best to do so. One broad approach that has found some real success is to increase the visibility of various aspects of the kernel.

More bugs, and bug reports, are good. No really, at least that's what Karl Fogel says in trying to squash the idea that bugs are "technical debt that developers must repay. Fogel, who works for Canonical on the Launchpad platform, says that it's a fallacy that growths in bug reports is bad. On the contrary, more bug reports mean good news because it means more users are using the project.