MSNBC (via ZDNet) has a report on the Linux-powered Simputer, being developed in India as a cheap alternative to other computers.

LinuxGram has a followup to reports of the management shakeup at MandrakeSoft. “MandrakeSoft hired Poole, a seasoned young American business exec, last August after financial
house ABN-AMRO asked him to look it over for them and try to figure out a business plan that might
work.

Mandrake co-founder, chairman and now CEO Jacques Le Marois said the plan was Poole’s
downfall.”

From LWN.net: A problem exists with the kdesu component of kdelibs. It created a
world-readable temporary file to exchange authentication information
and delete it shortly after. This can be abused by a local user to
gain access to the X server and could result in a compromise of the
account that kdesu would access.

Joshua Marshall writes, “Devshed.com has a review of ZendIDE and Zend Debugger that’s pretty nice (but then I work for them). Look at it here.”

LinuxGram reports that Compaq plans to open up the source for its Single System Image Clustering technology and make it available on Linux.

A new version of wxDesigner has seen the light of the
day, version 2.5 to be exact.
wxDesigner is a commercial RAD tool for the Open Source
cross-platform C++ library wxWindows (and its Python and
Perl bindings). It lets you create dialogs, application
skeletons, event, getters and classes quickly and includes
a syntax-highlighting text editor, a bitmap editor and
some other goodies.

New in version 2.5 is support for menus and menu events
as well as many dozens of smaller enhancements and bug
fixes. wxDesigner is now also available for IRIX, in
addition to Windows, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD with
work being done to get wxDesigner working on the Mac
as well.

wxDesigner 2.5 is available from http://www.roebling.de.

LinuxGram reports that OpenCola, “a start-up founded by the former Canadian brand manager for Ivory Snow soap flakes and a sci-fi writer,” released the beta version of Swarmcast, a high-speed open source distribution system for large files.

LinuxGram notes that the Gnome 2.0 desktop is now “not supposed to
be done until the middle of next year, which, depending on when you picked up the saga, makes it
getting on to two years late.”

From an article at Advogato.org: “… I find it necessary to criticize those who would stretch the power of copyright to
restrict the use of a copylefted software library. I am 100% behind the right of the copyright holder to control the
creation and dissemination of clearly derivative works. But simply using a library as is, and abiding to the terms for
that piece of an aggregrate work should in no way impact the larger work. We would boycott such behavior from
Microsoft, why encourage it for anyone else?”

From LinuxGram: “On the theory that the proof is in the pudding, Linux International (LI) has set up a Case Study
Repository project on Source-Forge to prove that open source works …

The SourceForge site, at http://casestudy.sf.net, is a place where the open source community can
submit successful case studies. Besides sticking out its tongue at Microsoft by highlighting open
source successes, Linux International figures the case studies will be useful to anyone.”