When edgy, risque, and retro all come together in a video game, smart people stay off the street. Off the streets of New Arcadia, circa 1922, that is, because that's where evil seems to thrive in Episode 1 of On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a newly released game from Hothead Games and Penny Arcade.

Any project can reach a crossroads. Sometimes this leads to forks. Although FOSS communities strive to prevent forks, they can be positive.

As the biggest open source company in the world, Red Hat stands at a significant crossroads between its open source roots and significant growth in enterprise demand for its products, as underlined by changes made to its management, discontent within its user community and a sharp rise in profits.

OpenOffice.org is a flagship for free and open source software and a success by most measurements, but there have long been murmurings of discontent among developers. In this feature Richard Hillesley discusses the issues with Michael Meeks who works as an OpenOffice.org developer at Novell

One thing is clear with new Linux distros such as Ubuntu's just-released "Gutsy Gibbon", or version 7.10, and openSUSE's 10.3, nipping at Windows' and Mac OS X's heels: The desktop OS is at a crossroads.

Jeff Haynie reached a crossroads last summer. Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, a firm that develops open source cross-platform application development software, made a decision filled with implications for his company's future.

Jono Bacon, Ubuntu's community manager, has been hard at work nailing gelatin to the wall. Okay, not literally, but he's putting a lot of thought into how he can best determine the vitality, growth, needs and wants of the Ubuntu community and how they best mesh with, and give back to, the wider Linux and open source communities.

Oracle suing Google over Java could be a good thing for MeeGo. If any good is to come out of Oracle suing Google over Android, the one to benefit could be MeeGo, the Intel-Nokia joint-venture mobile operating system.

Eben Moglen gives a talk titled "Patents at a Crossroads: Bilski and Beyond"