Canonical, the company best known for its Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has decided to pull funding for Kubuntu, the version that has KDE as its desktop environment instead of GNOME.

The Spark, an open tablet which will be available for purchase by May this year, will run the Mer operating system, the community continuation of the Linux-based MeeGo project which is hosted by the Linux Foundation.

The French GNU/Linux distribution Mandriva has been reprieved again - but only for two weeks, according to a post at the company's blog.

The first open tablet, running free and open source software, has been announced by senior KDE developer Aaron Seigo.

Rather fittingly, given that it will celebrate its 100th birthday next year, the Australian capital, Canberra, will host the 14th national Linux conference in January 2013.

The French GNU/Linux company Mandriva has earned a stay of execution with an "external entity" expressing an interest in acquiring the company, according to the company blog

There has been nearly a 25 per cent rise in the number of registrations for the Drupal Downunder conference this year as compared to 2011, according to one of the main organisers, Donna Benjamin.

One of the major plus points about free and open source software is that it adheres to widely accepted standards. Rarely does any software of this genre seek to create its own standard in order to do what proprietary systems do - grab marketshare.

The French GNU/Linux company, Mandriva, may be forced to shut its doors as soon as January 16, following the refusal of one of its main shareholders to accept a recapitalisation scheme.

The weekend of January 14-15 promises to be quite a busy one for free and open source software enthusiasts in Australia with a second conference to run on those days.

A leading ICT lawyer in New Zealand says the Horowhenua Library Trust, which is getting ready to lodge an objection to the registration of the Koha trademark for software by an American defence contractor, has a stronger case than its opponent.

The Horowhenua Library Trust, birthplace of the Koha integrated library system, says it will hope for the best but prepare for the worst as it continues to try and regain the rights to its own trademark in New Zealand.

An American company, which registered the name Koha as a trademark for software in New Zealand, has offered to hand ownership of the name to a non-profit representing the Koha community.

The original developer of the Koha open source integrated library system (ILS) says he feels a mixture of sadness and anger over the attempt by an American defence contractor to trademark the name Koha in New Zealand.

The Horowhenua Library Trust, the birthplace of the Koha integrated library system, the first such open source project, finds itself in a peculiar position today, that of having to fight to regain rights to its own name.

Exactly one year ago, a group of former employees of what was once the company with the most popular open source database, MySQL, came together to form SkySQL, a fork of the project.

The Samba project has decided to allow corporate contributions of code, according to a message posted to its mailing lists by senior developer Jeremy Allison.

The rapid release tempo recently adopted for Firefox is causing angst for enterprise users. A proposed 'slow track' may soothe those furrowed brows.

The Apache Software Foundation has issued a new version of its server software to fix a serious denial of service vulnerability.

The Debian GNU/Linux project has issued a patch so its users can fix the denial of service vulnerability in the open source Apache httpd server that was announced by the Apache Software Foundation last week.