The open-source WebKit HTML rendering engine is rapidly gaining ground on the Linux platform where it is increasingly being adopted by conventional desktop applications for content display. Ongoing efforts to facilitate tighter WebKit integration are opening the door for developing rich Internet applications on Linux with the open-source GTK and Qt development toolkits.

You may think of Wal-Mart as a down-market PC seller, but as emails in the Vista "junk PC" case show, Wal-Mart was furious at Microsoft's Vista Capable scheme, and thought that Vista Home Basic never should have been developed, much less released. They're not alone. Other retailers, notably Office Depot, thought Vista Home Basic should have been killed. Here's all the dirt, including emails.

"Hi all, The nomination period is at an end, with three candidates standing forth to be counted. We are now in the campaigning period. The candidates are..."

How do two former Microsoft employees end up heading an open source company? In the case of Aaron Fulkerson and Steve Bjorg of MindTouch, the decision was based on the wish for independence and to work more closely with customers, according to Fulkerson. The two partners suffered some initial criticism because of their past employment, but have largely survived it by learning how to interact with the free software community.

Open-source pioneer and Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza Thursday for the first time publicly slammed his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft as he defended himself against lack of patent protection for third parties that distribute his company's Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux.

Spicebird is a cross-platform email and collaboration client derived from Mozilla Thunderbird. If you are a fan of Thunderbird, but need more from it than the standard build provides, you may want to give this new bird a try.

"WaveMaker has announced the release of its WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio version 3.1.1, a tool for building database-driven Ajax Web applications without having to write complex code. [...] It's interesting to see the new GNU AGPL – the Affero General Public Licence – being adopted here..."

If Microsoft invented Linux... what do you think tux would look like?