The Empathy instant messaging client for Gnome is not yet ready to be the default client on your favourite Gnome-based distribution. In fact, I can’t even make it work!

Design and themes have been a key part of the Linux buy-in for as long as I can remember. In fact, once upon a time, the look and feel of application was actually used as its primary selling point to me.

The ranks of Linux users would certainly grow if a few go-to Windows apps could run natively on the OS. Jack Wallen lists the ones he thinks would turn the tide.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently appointed Jeff Jaffe as their new Chief Executive Officer. Jeff had most recently worked as Chief Technology Officer at Novell. W3C is an international community that sets standards for the web. Its work has had significant positive impact, and has helped free the web from proprietary standards.

Recently at OpenOffice.org we have decided to give more highlight to our many native-language communities, who are in charge not just of localization, but also QA, users support, documentation translation and marketing. This month, we start with the Irish native-language project, lead by Kevin Scannell.

Since it's almost Easter Sunday, I will be sharing with you several cool virtual Easter eggs hidden inside some of our favorite software applications. Today, we will take a look at some Easter eggs inside OpenOffice.org so get ready to have fun or be amused.

Each year, the Linux Foundation is responsible for putting on some of the biggest names of the conference season. LinuxCon, the Kernel and End-User Summits, the Linux Plumbers Conference — they all have the Foundation behind them. The next up on the schedule is the Collaboration Summit, and as of last week, attendees can now check the details on the Summit's who, what, where, and when.

If it were not for Mozilla and its numerous open source projects that saved us from the IE Dark Ages, the browser market today would definitely be very different.