Today Wine-doors 0.1.1 got released, the site provides packages for debian/ubuntu systems. Greatly recommended for people using wine to run a selection of windows programs.

Next there is a Beta 1 release of the IBM Lotus Symphony Office Suite for Linux (also available for Windows). It is based on Open Office, but the UI has been reworked. Because of its roots, there are no problems opening Open Document files. Probably this is the result of the recent announcement of IBM and OOo sharing code. This is not a final release, you can play around with it, but it is rather slow.

QNX has opened up the source for their QNX Neutrino OS, it is not using the GPL or any other official OSS license though. Still, access to source code is mostly always good. Amazing, how many well known, widely used operating systems are still closed?

A lot of things are happening in OSS-land. Hot of the needle is the announcement of IBM that will be joining OpenOffice.org development efforts. They will bring new technology into the product, mainly from Lotus Notes and in return they will also be adding OOo stuff into their products.

The last few days there was also a lot of talk about AMD/ATI, who will be opening the specs for their gfx-cards. They will not open up the source of the current closed drivers, but that should not be a problem as long as the details of the inner workings of the cards are know. We can only hope NVidia will make a similar move, I fully understand that it is impossible to open source the drivers (containing 3rd party code etc), but specs should never be a problem! Common NVidia, if you want to stay the fastest Linux 3D card, you better make a move.

People complaining about Firefox memory footprint, might be happy to hear that there is a patch available from Federica Mena Quintero. By some smart image management he was able to reduce the memory usage by significant amounts.