"This news got me thinking about the potential child abuse risks inherent in the One Laptop Per Child initiative and other "$100 laptop" projects. These well-intentioned efforts plan to give computers to poor children throughout the world, to facilitate their education and fuel economic development."

Open source software leaders said Wednesday they were unfazed by suggestions that Microsoft is attempting to divide the community and threaten it with lawsuits.

Chipzilla is doing everything it can to undercut MIT's One Laptop Per Child project not, sadly, in the name of helping disadvantaged kids in Africa and elsewhere, but instead to pander to the God of the Bottom Line. But it's not the only game in town and another cheap system is quietly trundling along in the background.

KDE launched Plasma in 2005 to revitalize the desktop interface, which the project said had remained "essentially the same" as it was in 1984. The initiative sought to renovate the KDE desktop codebase for the upcoming KDE 4 release, as well as to make innovations to KDE 3's conservative interface.

Development plans for Ubuntu 7.10 (codenamed Gutsy Gibbon) were announced last night on the Ubuntu development mailing list. Scheduled for official release in late October, Gutsy Gibbon will include version 2.6.22 of the Linux kernel, GNOME 2.20, and Xorg 7.3. Kubuntu 7.10 will feature KDE 3.5.7 and offer optional packages for KDE 4.0 RC2.

THERE ARE SIGNS of desperation at Redmond as Microsoft tries desperately to get punters to buy its latest operating system Vista.

A free Flash viewer is one of the last major gaps in GNU/Linux desktop functionality, so last week's news that Gnash, the free Flash player, had reached the stage where it could play YouTube and Lulu.tv videos seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was.

"SCO has filed a Memorandum in Opposition to Novell's Evidentiary Objections with exhibits. It's all under seal, but it will help us understand a couple of things."