Over a year ago we reported on the promising gaim-vv which was supposed to bring MSN/Y! webcam and voice support to Gaim, a feature sorely missed by many IM users today when running Linux. The lead developer of the gaim-vv project now says that the Gaim project leader (now employed by Google) has killed off most of his pending CVS patches and has instead replaced them with voice-only patches, patches coming from Google which are only to be used with the Google IM protocol, leaving all other voice and all video protocols in dissarray. Update: The other side has spoken explaining the situation, but unfortunately it says nothing about webcam support for now or in the future, but only about voice.

As part of a larger article about C++'s evolution, DevSource reports on a minor war in the C++ standards community. Don't get excited: the fighting is already over. At issue is whether Microsoft's compiler can say that std::copy is "deprecated" (which usually means "this feature will not be in the next version of the language") when they really mean "our compiler suggests you do not use it." Is this a silly semantic dispute or another sign that Microsoft is trying to hijaack the language?

"One of the often cited reasons for not switching away from MS Windows is it's breadth of commodity hardware support. The argument often goes something like this: 'Since Windows supports all the hardware I have why would I want to risk it not working under Linux? It's better to continue to use what I know will work.' While that may be true in and of itself, I'm finding this argument to involve a limited outlook."

Big guns in the software industry are massing behind OpenDocument as government customers show more interest in open-source alternatives to Microsoft's desktop software. IBM and Sun convened a meeting on Friday to discuss how to boost adoption of the standardized document format for office applications. The ODF Summit brought together representatives from a handful of industry groups and from at least 13 technology companies, including Oracle, Google and Novell.

Popular blogger and Yahoo! manager Russell Beattie reveals some astounding networking numbers for Japanese mobile phone users in his blog: about 95% of these users are using their cellphones to connect to the web and retrieve information or just surf. We don't have numbers for the Europeans, but in USA the number went down to 10.9% from 12.7% in April this year. We guess that charging 10 USD per 1 MB is just too much too handle for most US customers who don't have special unlimited data plans (which can cost between 30-80 USD per month, additionally to the voice plan).

Suse co-founder and kernel team member Hubert Mantel has resigned from Novell, the server software company that acquired the German Linux company in 2004. Mantel announced the move on a Suse Linux mailing list Tuesday, and Novell confirmed the move Wednesday. "I just decided to leave Suse/Novell. This is not (any) longer the company I founded 13 years ago," Mantel said in the e-mail. "I have been the maintainer of the Suse kernel for more than a decade now. I'm very confident the Novell management will find a competent successor very quickly."