So now that the Alpha release for Fedora 15 has been declared gold, all the features are in, only polish and bug fixing are to be applied until final, is the time for previews are reviews, it was also the time for me to look at the new default desktop and understand what is coming.

The Wall Street Journal reports MPEG-LA's statement to try to prevent Google's VP8 codec from spreading is the reason of the interest of the US Department of Justice.

Red Hat is making things harder for downstream by shipping its RHEL 6 kernel source as one big tarball, instead of breaking out the patches, like the upstream does. This is not a simple mistake but a policy and the company will not comment on this change.

GNU Radio had a pretty good year in 2010, and we are already on track for an even more productive year in 2011. While we only produced one release in 2010, a large amount of work went into our source repository to improve the quality and stability of the project, and we are on track for a new release soon that incorporates many of these fixes into a new stable release.

This month we're focusing our attention on Sony. Sony has been in the news a lot recently: suing developers for figuring out how to run free software on their PlayStation 3 consoles. Both George Hotz (geohot) and more recently, Graf Chokolo -- operator of the PS3 Hypervisor Reverse Engineering blog have been harrassed by Sony, with Graf Chokolo having his home raided on Feb 23rd.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Debian Squeeze server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

There’s at least someone there [who] would wants to avoid Sony spending its last days sending DMCAs to anyone who tweets “46DCEAD317FE45D80923EB97E4956410D4CDB2C2″. The talented artists, designers, and engineers who work at Sony deserve better, and their customers deserve better. [Here is] a top 7 list [of Sony's abuse of its customers].

When it comes to Free Software and Open Standards, the UK has long lagged way behind other countries. There were a few policies that sounded good on paper, but that’s exactly where they stayed. This may be finally changing. The UK Cabinet Office has issued a "procurement policy notice" (.pdf) that is, well, surprising. In a good way.