Just who is the bad apple at the ACTA negotiations, excluding the public and forcing discussions between the parties to be held in secret?

Compiz may be the prime suite of effects on the desktop, but it can't go too far beyond decorating the windows themselves. What if you could give GTK+ widgets effects themselves? Depending on your theme, you may be able to.

The European Commission gave a guarded welcome to Microsoft's pledge on Thursday for "greater transparency" in its development and business practices.

GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop. Cimitan used RGBA colormaps to implement the feature and says that, with only 10 or 20 extra lines of code, translucency can easily be added to other theme engines that support RGBA.

Values are important, in a business sense. When your values and those of your customers are in sync, you have a great opportunity for growth. They’re also important politically. They define the boundaries for internal debate, and establish markers for debate with opponents. Transparency may be the most important open source value. Transparency is inherent in every release of open source code.