Open source and education are natural fits-- open source encourages experimentation and exploration, and the opportunity to learn computing, rather just how to be a little cog in a giant data-processing machine. Cynthia Harvey gives us a taste of the possibilities with this list of 55 open source educational applications.

KDE 4.3.0 is out, and it is a great release. It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0. The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish.

The achievements of free software are already extraordinary. As well as running most of the Internet's infrastructure, and powering many of its leading companies, free software is beginning to find wide use in the server rooms of enterprises and on the desktops of general users. It is also increasingly deployed in embedded systems, and for mobile phones. But that's just the start...

Let's get real, that's what it's all about. It's not because we all wear tin foil hats or that we're harmful to the community and should be expelled. It's because we don't like Mono. And we don't like Mono, because we don't trust Microsoft. And we don't trust Microsoft, because.. Well, do I really have to repeat the whole story again?

There has been a lot of talk about the Linux kernel and Open Source drivers this week. Most of it was about Microsoft that released drivers under the GPL V2 for inclusion in the Linux kernel. As pointed out by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols this was planned for a long time and will benefit Microsoft as much (if not more) than Linux.

There’s a lot of discussion today about a 0day Local Linux Root exploit. http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=6820 For readers who aren’t security-savvy, that means that a user logged into a Linux system, with shell access, can bypass system security mechanisms and elevate his access to be equivalent to the system administrator (or ‘root’ user).

Nokia and Intel have announced a new strategic partnership for mobile development. This is big news for open source, since both Intel and Nokia rely on Linux (and open source) for their respective mobile platforms.