The next time the Romanian government needs to renew proprietary software licences, it will consider the benefits of open source, minister of Communications and ICT Gabriel Sandu says in an interview published by the Romanian financial newspaper Ziarul Financiar on 15 June.

This is a comparison of two PIM suits for Linux. The author compares several aspects of Kontact and Evolution. The interface, the applications for email, address books, calendars, tasks, memos, and other features -- he looked at them all closely. Is there any reason to prefer one over the other?

Gnote was started on April 2009 with the goal of providing a Free Software implementation of Tomboy that doesn't rely on Mono.For our testing purposes, I installed Gnote 0.5.1 on Ubuntu Jaunty through a personal PPA. I would love to see it packaged in Ubuntu officially in the near future.

Nokia today announced the release of updates to Qt: the cross-platform application and UI framework, and Qt Creator: the new cross-platform Qt Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Also released were updates to the Qt Visual Studio Add-in and the Qt Eclipse Integration.

An interesting real-world example of Microsoft's influence on the press

This is where an opportunity for Free software lies. Our strength is community. We understand it, we are driven by it, we eat and breath it. We don't need to find financial justifications for trying new things out and we have an entire stack of software (that goes waaaay beyond "stuff I used to do on paper") to play with.

On June 7, 2009, Swedish voters elected a member of the PiratPartiet (Pirate Party) to the European Parliament.
The Pirates made the copyright and patent concerns of the free software community part of public discourse for the first time anywhere, and did so using social media techniques that caught their opponents completely unaware.

KDE 4 includes many exciting new technologies, including Plasma, a feature that forms the desktop shell of KDE 4. See how to write simple Plasma applets (known as plasmoids) to greatly improve the desktop experience and how to turn a plasmoid into a simple memory monitor.