An interesting concept about how users and developers of open source projects can collaborate on openversion.com.

The open source community risks leaving Asian users and developers behind, thanks to cultural differences and western business's tendency to treat programmers there as code monkeys rather than software designers, a senior Novell staffer has warned.

Nominations are open for the third annual Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards, with winners to be announced at OSCON 2008 in July. Nominations are accepted for all open source projects, not just SourceForge.net-based projects, and the categories include the intriguing "Most likely to get users sued."

Much of the reaction from FOSS folks to news that Microsoft is joining the Open Source Census centers on concern that Microsoft is out to find open source users and what open source software they’re using. I think that may be exactly right.

"Many open source projects have been licensed under GPLv2, and while the open source world at large is on-board with free software and the ideal of free distribution, it is less concerned with the FSF's social movement to provide software freedom to all users. Consequently, most new features of GPLv3 address issues geared first toward protecting the rights of end users."

As I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, Open Source and open technology trends continue to swing in one direction (up and to the right). Along this ever-growing open technology spectrum lie various projects and companies who hope to gain a competitive advantage through some type of open collaboration initiative.

"Consider this: in just a few short years, the open-source
encyclopedia Wikipedia has made closed-source encyclopedias obsolete —
both the hard-bound kind and the CD-ROM or commercial online kind.
Goodbye World Book and Brittanica...

Linux users in the UK could face a greater threat from Microsoft than previously thought, but experts agree that British open-source users are in far less danger than US users from Microsoft's claim that open-source software infringes its patents.

This weekend I was reminded of another reason that I love open source software: A transparent development process. Only in open source software will you be able to talk directly to the developers of a software project and give them your input. This is one of the reasons that open source projects tend to focus specifically on the requirements of the users. Let me tell you my story...