GNOME's Vala programming language lets you use the GLib2 object system at the heart of the GNOME desktop without having to do object-oriented programming in ANSI C. Unlike Mono or Java, a Vala program does not require any virtual machine or runtime libraries, so people who use your Vala objects don't even have to know they are not written in C.

My recent post about Mono was sincere, and Boycott Novell has the story about Debian wrong, but Gnome actually is pushing an alternative. Before I introduce you to the programming language Vala, let me give you some background on programming for Gnome as I understand it (note that I am not a programmer and haven't done anything real since the mid-80s).

Most free software projects produce applications for users. A minority, however, produce specifications or libraries for developers and other contributors.

The awn-core team released Awn & Awn-Extras 0.2.6 couple of weeks ago! These releases bring with them more stability, a lots of bugfixes, and some interesting new features which include Vala bindings, an updated UI for Awn Manager, new applets, more documentation and support for non-gnome desktop environments.

"Skype fought the GPL and the GPL won. The OLPC XO project abandons free software just as RMS switches to an XO; RMS not happy. New monthly newsletters from the FSF and FSFE. GNOME and KDE want to have a joint development conference in 2009. GNOME and GCC conferences coming up later this year. Plus all the usual news: more GPL v3 conversions, HURD news, GNOME news, GCC news, and more..."

The open source Maemo platform, which is used on Nokia's Internet Tablet devices, will soon support Trolltech's Qt development toolkit.

"The 64 Studio Platform Development Kit (PDK) is a Free Software tool that we use to automate the production and maintenance of several different projects. PDK is a kind of version control system for distributions, allowing us to create and manage many different custom products based on Debian and Ubuntu sources..."

Today Yahoo! officially introduced their "open strategy" platform, Y!OS. The Yahoo! Open Strategy platform consists of three development components, the Yahoo! Application Platform, the Yahoo! Social Platform, and the Yahoo! Query Language.

Earlier this year we shared that Valve's Source Engine is coming to Linux after receiving some information that pointed in this direction. In addition, a year ago Valve Software
was publicly looking for a senior software engineer to port Windows-based games to Linux platform.