Adam Jackson has just announced the release of the much anticipated X Server 1.5.0. This is the key component that will make up X.Org 7.4, which we expect to see released (hopefully) this week during the X Developer Summit. The X Server 1.5.0 release announcement can be read on the mailing list, while we'll have a full run-down on X.Org 7.4 as soon as it's released.

Earlier this month we had shared the progress of X.Org 7.4 with the features slated to be included in this next X release, what features have been postponed, and the repeated delays that always seem to plague the X.Org development community. Since then there still has yet to be any official update on its status, but the Wiki continues to claim a May 2008 release.

The GNOME team is out with the road-map for GNOME 2.22, 2.24, and future releases. There's quite a few changes planned, but a few in particular had caught our attention.

Back in November we started sharing some of the exciting features planned for the GNOME 2.22 and 2.24 releases, and now that the first GNOME 2.22.0 Beta release is planned for later this week, we have taken another look at the packages set for inclusion and the changes that have actually been made.

Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The beginning of August is traditionally a month when many Linux distributions launch new development drives and outline some of the planned features for their upcoming releases.

After internal consideration in the Samba Team we have decided to adopt the GPLv3 and LGPLv3 licences for all future releases of Samba.

DJB (Daniel J. Bernstein), author of qmail, djbdns has announced in a conference Sage Days 6, declared all of his past and future code will be released to public domain.

If you ask me who's the proudest hacker in the world, I would say that it's Eric S. Raymond. ESR, as he is often called, is a computer programmer and open source software evangelist. He is also a well-known author and has been very influential in giving the term 'hacker' a positive image.

Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton and eighty other important kernel developers are now debating how they plan to proceed with the future development of Linux at the Kernel Summit 2008 in Portland, Oregon.