Neil Gershenfeld has been known to make some bold predictions about the future. But even by his standards, this one was a doozy. "Twenty years from now," he told a 2006 conference in Berkeley, "we'll have Star Trek replicators that can make anything." You remember the replicator -- the one that provided Captain Picard with his cup of "tea, Earl Grey, hot," with a simple verbal prompt?

The Midgard Project has released maintenance release of Midgard2 9.09 "Mjolnir" - second release of the new generation of the Midgard content repository.

I’m kicking off my third year at Red Hat this month and would like to take a step back as we move into 2010 to reflect on the past year. In keeping with the U.S. presidential tradition of delivering a “State of the Union” address each January, I’d like to maintain a similar tradition at Red Hat and highlight some of our milestones from 2009.

Under Oracle's new stewardship, Java will be expanded to more application types while the public process for amending Java will be made more participatory, an Oracle official said Wednesday at a company briefing on Oracle's Sun integration plans.

We've been working on the GNOME Foundation's goals for 2010. We distributed them for comment on the Foundation list. I've also created a quick survey if you want to show which goals you like.

To date, Novell has had strong usage of its online SUSE Studio Linux appliance development service, with over 250,000 software appliances built. Even with that success, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) sees a need to expand the effort with a new SUSE Appliance Toolkit providing an on-premises version of SUSE Studio, as well as a new Lifecycle Management Server to manage appliance updates.

Response to Jeremy Allison's take on Microsoft .

On January 27, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will share his vision for the Oracle-Sun Microsystems business combination. But before the Oracle webcast kicks off, industry rivals and partners are offering a key piece of advice to Ellison: Don’t mess up Sun’s Java programming language. Here’s the scoop — including perspectives from Red Hat’s middleware team.