Putting out new releases of OS software isn't always about adding major new features -- sometimes it's just about making existing features usable and stable. In the case of the open source software FreeBSD, that's certainly the case with the newly hatched 8.1 release.

The Wine development release 1.3.0 is now available.

Whats new in this release:

* Beginnings of a user interface for the builtin Internet Explorer.
* Support for cross-process OLE drag & drop.
* New builtin wscript.exe (Windows Script Host) program.
* Open/save dialogs remember the last used directory.
* Translation updates.
* Various bug fixes.

Chalk this one up as a victory for the free software movement: Thesis, the wildly popular proprietary WordPress theme from developer/designer Chris Pearson, is now available under a split GPL

A graphical handler of the nautilus file manager python extensions, including some useful pyextensions.

While thinking of the next article for the Open Sound Series, I was listening to some music via Ampache. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ampache, it is simply a piece of software that allows you to upload, download, and stream music (and now videos) from a collection of media residing on a server.

The GitHub developers have announced that their project repository service has reached a major milestone: the one millionth git repository was created over the weekend

As you may know, in July 2000, Borland Software Corp. (formerly known as Inprise) released the beta version of InterBase 6.0 as open source. The community of waiting developers and users preferred to establish itself as an independent, self-regulating team rather than submit to the risks, conditions and restrictions that the company proposed for community participation in open source development.

KDE SC 4.0 was released in January of 2008 and KDE SC 4.5 will be released shortly (August 4th, 2010), roughly two and a half years later, and it is time to reflect on what KDE SC 4 seeks to accomplish and how well it is doing in its goals. The critical shift KDE SC took in this series is abstracting the desktop from the underlying system through three pillars, Phonon, Plasma and Solid making the desktop some sort of a virtual platform environment and easily portable to other operating systems.