"One of the largest Free Software events in the world, the 10th edition of the International Free Software Forum called for papers. Proposals due on April 26th 2009..."

"I'm just writing up an article about the Libre.fm project which I hope can help to promote the idea and spread the word. I wondered if you could give me a quick outline of why you set it up and/or what you aim to achieve with it. Nothing epic just a couple of lines I could include would be really great.

Along with the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting, the Open Source Business Conference was one of the two best conferences I've been to recently (I generally hate conferences). I got my geek on at: FOSDEM and actually enjoyed and learned from the technical sessions. Where OSBC is at the other end of the spectrum with business sessions, so I got my suit on.

In this episode: We celebrate the release of Gnome 2.26 and talk about the Chromium browser. Could the Linux community have done more to capitalise on the weak take-up of Windows Vista, and how can we prepare ourselves for Windows 7? And is it a good thing to have two competing desktop environments?

Mark Shuttleworth joins us for a video podcast to discuss the upcoming 9.04 release, Ubuntu history, Linux on the desktop, impacts of cloud computing, Ayatana, the community and Ubuntu, Ubuntu and Canonical, Google Summer of Code, Ubunet, and much more!

When it comes to April Fool's day, even, or perhaps especially, the Ubuntu developers have a sense of humor. As a little thank you present to all their users, they've pushed out a little April Fools prank of their own. I don't want to spoil it for you, but you might not think of yourself as such a good casual gamer after this.

IBM still looking for the breakthrough deal with Big Red mond
"JAVA was just too powerful for us to have," confessed Bob Satire, "so we decided to pursue a once-in-a-lifetime contract opportunity with Microsoft by buying a poor-but-functional copy of its key technology - called Perro - along with its parent company.