The Linux Foundation has made some analyzation the past two years into just how much code is being added to the project and who is doing that contribution. This year's report is out, and the results are actually quite smile-worthy if you're a Linux advocate: the increase in code contributions is phenomenal, the rate at which these contributions are being submitted is faster, and there are more individual developers than previously.

"The many thousands of free games available for Linux has made it difficult to select which ones deserve a special mention. For this article, our objective is not to necessarily select games which have flawless graphics and sound, but instead to identify games which are highly addictive and have great playability. It has taken us weeks of heated discussions to whittle down the games into just 42 titles. We have tried to cover a wide range of game genres. Hopefully there will be something in this article which will be of interest to any type of gamer."

"The PySide project provides LGPL-licensed Python bindings for the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. PySide Qt bindings allow both free open source and proprietary software development and ultimately aim to support all of the platforms as Qt itself." Previously, the PyQt bindings were not licensed LGPL. If one wished to make a commercial application, then one previously had to purchase a commercial license for PyQt. Now it is possible to dynamically link to the LGPL-licensed PySide bindings instead. The PySide bindings are API compatible with PyQt.

"We've been doing some investigating, friends - making phone calls, demanding answers. And it was worth it. We can confirm something very few people get to confirm: British shoppers aren't going to be totally shafted over software pricing for once. Full versions of Windows 7 Home Premium are going to cost us half as much as they cost Americans."

Following the three-months release schedule, version 9.08 of the Genode Operating-System Framework has been released, bringing improvements all over the code base and introducing new features such as a dynamic linker, and long desired support for super pages and write-combined I/O access. As described in the release notes, the overall theme of this release had been refinement, resulting in much improved implementations for key parts of the framework. In particular, Genode's synchronization primitives such as locks and signals had received much attention, and the central timer service have been replaced by a much improved implementation.

Last week we talked about what Linux (well, okay, X) could learn from Windows Vista and Windows 7, focusing on the graphics stack. A short article over at TechWorld lists seven things Windows 7 should learn from the Linux world. Some of them are spot-on, a few are nonsensical, and of course, and I'm sure you have a few to add too.

It's been a long time, but Palm has finally announced it is accepting submissions for its App Catalog. It's still in beta, and the applications will be only available for US customers. The details are on Palm's developer network.

The MIT Technology Review, one of the world's first technology magazines still around, has named Adam Dunkels, author of the Contiki embedded open source OS, as one of this year's top 35 young innovators.

Scala looks like it is becoming the web 2.0 darling, popular with Twitter and LinkedIn developers but also heavily utilized in the corporate space. Martin Odersky speaks in detail about the language in this interview. He talks about why it could become the language of choice for social networking platforms, particularly after doing well in the acid test of being used by sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. "Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala," he said.

Even though Apple has been hyping up the 64bit nature of its ucpoming Snow Leopard operating system, stating it will be the first Mac OS X release to be 64bit top-to-bottom, reality turns out to be a little bit different so far. With the current Snow Leopard seed, only Xserve users get the 64bit kernel and drivers - all other Macs default to 32bit. By holding down the '6' and '4' keys during boot, you can to boot into full 64bit mode - that is, if your Mac supports it. As it turns out, some Macs with 64bit processors cannot use the 64bit kernel because the EFI is 32bit. Note: I should have included in the article that 64bit applications will run just fine (including benefits) on a 32bit kernel in Mac OS X. Since this was already possible in Leopard, I assumed people were well aware of that. Turns out some were not, so my apologies for that.

Apple doesn't have a particularly healthy relationship with the press; it has sued websites for publishing information it didn't like, and has tried to keep information under wraps that a journalist tried to uncover via the Freedom of Information Act. Now, however, it has tried to prevent The Times from publishing an article about Steve Jobs.

The F-Script project has announced the availability of F-Script 2.0, a set of open source tools for dynamic introspection and scripting of Cocoa objects on Mac OS X. The package provides Mac OS X developers and power users with graphical tools for exploration and interactive manipulation of objects. It also provides programmatic tools for scripting, in the form of a Smalltalk dialect directly hosted on top of the Objective-C runtime. This new version of F-Script introduces major new features including system-wide scripting, dynamic Cocoa class creation, 64-bit support and automatic garbage collection.

Rumors had been circulating for months about the mysterious Dell smartphone, and it seems that they've finally been realized-- at least for China. Little details about the smartphone have been released, but we do know that it'll be a 2G smartphone running Android, it's called the "Mini3i," and it "will offer a full complement of music, games and other downloadable content." The release date is still in the dark as is whether or not Dell will eventually spread its smartphone market outside of China. About Dell's Mini3i, an analyst said, "It makes sense for a company like Dell to enter the smartphone market, but what they need to do is find something that sets themselves apart." This is all too true as too many smartphones (and many other devices, for that matter) have the "Me Too" syndrome.

A fellow at CNET did a review of a beta version of another Linux distribution built specifically for netbooks. "One of those , called Jolicloud, is launching in beta in the next few months. Created by Tariq Krim, who founded and later left widget-based start page Netvibes, the alternate OS has been designed for Web workers, or people who do most of their work (or play) on Web applications and services. I've been giving it a thorough run-though over the past few days and have come away impressed at what it's trying to do. Some bits and pieces are definitely still beta, but the underlying approach of making Web sites and software applications feel the same, as well as introducing users to new ones to use is really innovative."