Open World Forum and Open Source Think Tank to bring together key players from the world of Free, Libre and Open Source Software in Paris, September 28th-2nd October 2009.

Yes this is a challenge, you know those extra nice pictures you took last time you went on a photo conquest that looks so sweet as your wallpaper? yes?
Well then please share them will the entire world in the great KDE 4.0 Wallpaper Contest.

Open source has taken the world by storm. Numerous open source applications are being used by satisfied users. The most prominent and widely used open source products are Firefox, Linux Distributions,Sugar CRM, GIMP, Wordpress, emacs etc. The latest to join this ever increasing bandwagon is Google Chrome.

If you're active in the open source world, Ohloh probably knows you. The Bellevue, Wash., software company has a database of some 70,000 developers working on nearly 11,000 of the world's major open source projects.

America is still the world’s leading technology power. But it’s not the whole world. For this open source should be grateful. I am often reminded that our software patent regime is not the law elsewhere, meaning any claims that patents may threaten the open source movement are bogus, and become more bogus as America’s portion of the buying market shrinks.

What if we lived in a world where all hardware was open source, including CPU’s, memory, motherboards, and all peripherals? Would it be a better world, or would it be a rolling nightmare, plagued with problems, and rampant with show stopping bugs that would bring the world to a grinding halt? I honestly think the fore more than the latter.

Though I am not going to advocate Laissez-faire economics, I do want to point out that the open source world is as close as you can get to a pure free market. The reason is because if you make a product in the open source world, anybody is able to study it, modify it, redistribute it and even sell it without many restrictions.

Much as we in the open-source world may not like it, progress doesn't necessarily look like a heavily customizable system. In fact, it might just be the opposite. At least, once a market matures.

There are more than a few of us who would be overjoyed to see Open Source take over the world. For the geeks at NASA, though, the world is not enough. Open Source is nothing new for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — Linux Journal looked at Linux use in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories way back in May 2000.