For an open source company, nurturing a community around the software is as important as picking the right licence. Although developer communities tend to be more self-starting with a reasonably open development process, user communities, which are a source of valuable feedback, need more encouragement.

This month the KDE Community announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The KDE Community proudly announces the latest releases of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. With the 4.10 release, the premier collection of Free Software for home and professional use makes incremental improvements to a large number of applications, and offers the latest technologies.

Development distributions play a crucial role in the free software ecosystem. They are the proving ground where much new software is first exposed to a wider user community; they are also the place where this software demonstrates how well it plays with other packages.

There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions?

In the month since the second beta the KDE community has fixed hundreds of bugs. Development of features has been frozen for a while now and the Software Compilation is at the point where it needs a good testing to shake out the last issues. The final release of KDE SC 4.5 is expected for August 4th.

The MeeGo Project released the baseline source code for the handset version of the Linux-based mobile OS to the development community. This code is being developed as MeeGo 1.1, which is slated for an October release. The MeeGo team also released the MeeGo UI design principles and interaction guidelines.

I've been a fan of SimplyMEPIS for years. The distribution was one of the early pioneers in the field of user-friendly Linux development, and to this day offers a system that usually "just works." Earlier this month the MEPIS site announced a community variation for older computers based on SimplyMEPIS.

Any release of a GNU/Linux distribution marks a milestone in a continuous cycle of software development. However, Fedora 10 promises to be a larger milestone than most, both for its development community and users, according to Paul W. Frields, the Fedora leader and chair.