When Apollo 11's Lunar Module landed on the Moon 40 years ago today, the software that helped take humans to another celestial body was essentially built using paper-tape rolls and thick cardstock that was punched with special holes.

If thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number, why tempt the Fates and launch the beta of a thirteenth version of a product on the thirteenth of the month - and on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission to the Moon, which damned near killed its three astronauts?

Welcome to the world of project management software, a world started by the guys at Basecamp (proprietary) and then continued by free software projects like Fengoffice and then revolutionised by Apollo.

There are a number of simple games I like to play when waiting for a package to download or compile. Often the available themes don’t really suit me, and in any case I like to make themes or skins when I can. One of the easier packages to create an alternate theme for is KDE Mahjongg (kmahjongg), which I will demonstrate here using Inkscape and Gimp.

The OpenLuna Foundation was founded to return mankind to the moon through private enterprise. With Obama administration deciding to scrap NASA's moon mission once and for all, the role of private enterprise in future space endeavorers of humankind has grown ever larger.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, recently wrote a post detailing Ubuntu and Canonical’s contributions to the upstream projects that make up their distributions. There he mentioned a challenge he recently issued to the Linux and free software community: build a Linux-based UI and computing experience on par with Apple’s within two years.

He’s the man who brought open source to Silicon Graphics and NEC and advisor to Warburg Pincus on how to make money investing in open source. "At one point I got the title of open source's undercover agent," recalls Dave McAllister.

With the Obama Administration gutting NASA's return to the Moon program, we need to look to private industry to lead the way in returning humans to space. Open source could be the ticket to get us there better, faster and cheaper

"They've taken a community-developed kernel module and have modified it, and then released the result as a binary-only kernel module without including the source or at least posting an offer to obtain the source to the kernel module," wrote morgan_greywolf on Slashdot. "That's a direct letter violation of the GPL. Sounds like the author of asus_acpi has a lawsuit