A LONE HOBBYIST programmer sitting at his home in France is responsible for adding 235 USB webcams to the list of those supported by Linux.

"You can help our campaign by buying AMD CPU chips and not buying Intel. AMD have been helpful but Intel needs to be persuaded. Likewise, buy motherboards that support free BIOS. Tyan Computer Corporation are very helpful to the LinuxBIOS project and employ a full-time LinuxBIOS developer..."

Following on the third beta release two weeks ago, we are ready to present Drupal 6.0 beta 4. Since the previous beta release, we have committed over 80 fixes to the Drupal 6.x code. This beta version includes some usability improvements and lots of bug fixes for issues which the testers and contributed module upgraders encountered. The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

"Interoperability" has become a weasel word. The word is regularly used to insinuate that two (or more) computer systems should work very well, but they usually work well for the wrong reasons. The method adopted to make these systems work is flawed. This approach monetizes something that should be free and something that typically requires no research and development whatsoever. It is an unfortunate case where the role of standards is being ignored and replaced.

Just as a brief summary for those not familiar with the topic: A vendor of proprietary software can store data in closed, proprietary data formats. Thus, if you are a customer of that vendor it becomes very difficult for you to move to a competitor's product, for example if you like the features or price/performance of that offering better. Instead, the cost of moving, the risk of loosing all your data may be too great. You are 'locked in' to the current vendor...

"The current look of this site hasn't changed much for the past two years, apart from a few additional CSS rules being used by default in article texts. Whilst the content here is hopefully of sufficient quality to allow the current design to be tolerated I'm sure we can do better. [...] So I've decided to see what the readers can do to help, and would like to see designs from people with better skills than myself..."

Sun Microsystems will soon unveil a cash prize program for a number of open-source communities.

DesktopBSD has moved into Vietnam when it was recently added to the Vietnam BSD/Linux Mirror by the Saigon Linux Group and GHP Far East, two companies promoting open source technology in Vietnam.