It seems that the Debian team doesn’t like to release minor versions anymore. After Debian 4.0 (code name “Etch”) released last year, the next Debian release (code name “Lenny“) will be numbered as Debian 5.0 as announced yesterday by Marc Brockschmidt: “For reading this far, you receive the small reward of the knowledge that Lenny will be shipped as Debian 5.0.”

Also interesting enough he mentioned that Lenny might be released with KDE4:
“There may be a possibility to include KDE 4 in Lenny. The efforts on KDE 4.1 have been quite promising and seem to be leading to a desktop environment which can fully replace KDE 3. The KDE team will provide betas and release candidates of the 4.1 release in experimental. In the event that KDE 4.1 is on time, and there are no major issues, an upload to unstable in order to include it in Lenny is possible.”

The development of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 seems to be on track and the final release is still expected in September 2008.

Debian provides security updates for old stable releases for one year after a new distribution has been released. Yesterday, Debian announced that the support for Debian 3.1 (sarge) is coming to an end this month, as etch was released last year in April, sarge will be supported until March 2008.

Anyone still running Debian sarge, should really be thinking seriously to finally update to etch asap.

Debian’s Official Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20080229

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.”

Note: this is true . I’ve not even noticed this and seen it as a minor apt upgrade

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2008/20080217

A complete list of all accepted and rejected packages together with rationale is on the preparation page for this revision: http://release.debian.org/stable/4.0/4.0r3/

Here is an interesting article: “The seven largest Open Source deals ever” that summarizes the top open source deals. On top we have of course MySQL, with the $1 billion deal from earlier last month. From the top deals, 2 were finalized this year (and we are just in the first days of February), 2 in 2007, and 1 in 2006 with the other 2 in 2003 and 1999.
Looks like 2008 is a good year for open source ;-).

WordPress 2.3.3 was released today, and it is an urgent security release. If you have registration enabled a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog.

Anyone running the 2.3 branch is recommended to upgrade immediately to 2.3.3. Official wp announcement:
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/02/wordpress-233/

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Yesterday, at the Australian national Linux conference, senior developer Martin Krafft said during a miniconference that the next release of Debian GNU/Linux, Lenny, is expected to take place before the end of 2008… However, with a twinkle in his eye, Krafft indicated that the traditional delays which have generally been a part of Debian could eventuate - “last time we were only four months late so this time if it goes into February 2009, it would be an improvement“.

Krafft also said there would be better security hardening in Lenny with compiler/linker extensions to guard against the most common run-time problems such as buffer overflows.

Full story: http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/16309/1148/

Namesys, the company run by murder suspect Hans Reiser, has fallen off the face of the Internet, but the file-system software it was commercializing is still under development by volunteers.

“Commercial activity of Namesys has stopped,” said programmer and Namesys employee Edward Shishkin. But he and others continue to develop the Reiser4 file-system software.

“It is pretty active. Many people are interested in this project,” Shishkin said. “They help a lot,” he added, pointing to fixes needed to work with Linux’s virtual file system software and other changes.

From: http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9851703-39.html

“After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety.”

The deal is for approximately $1 billion in total consideration!

From: http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/sun-acquires-mysql.html/
also more at Sun’s announcement:
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080116.1.xml

MySQL announced that they plan to release by the end of the month a ‘release candidate’ of MySQL 5.1 a major new upgrade of the world’s most popular open source database server.

During the announcement that was made at the inaugural ‘Japanese MySQL Users Conference’ earlier last week, MySQL mentioned that several GPL-licensed products are scheduled to be available for download by the end of September: Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo! said on Monday it will pay $350 million in a cash and stock deal to acquire Zimbra, makers of “open source” e-mail and collaboration software that is an alternative to Microsoft Outlook. The deal puts Yahoo into more direct competition with both Microsoft and Google in the market for Web-based collaboration software used by both businesses and consumers.

Zimbra counts a variety of customers in higher education and among Fortune 1000 enterprises, particularly in the financial services, retail, and manufacturing sectors, according to its Web site. The deal largely consists of cash said Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications and communities at Yahoo.
Zimbra is a San Mateo, California-based company backed by Silicon Valley venture firms Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital.

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