On Friday, KDE officially launched its version of Dell's IdeaStorm - KDE Brainstorm. In less than 24 hours, over 100 new ideas were proposed. "Getting the non-developer and developer communities really communicating is often a challenge, and KDE's approach is a great start. Developers now have an opportunity to hear what end-users want."

A Test Day is planned tomorrow (Thursday 26th) for the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. This is a Fedora test day due to the inclusion of nouveau as the default driver in Fedora 11, but will be of interest to users of all distributions, as most are likely to switch to nouveau as their default driver in future, and all the work done by Fedora will be contributed to the upstream development of the driver. i586 and x86-64 live CD images are available, so anyone can easily help out with the testing without any kind of permanent changes to your machine.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC.

InfoWorld's Tom Yager writes in favor of Unix in IT, which has been increasingly losing ground to Linux. "Unix matters for a reason that escapes analysts' notice," Yager writes. "It's that little circle with the R in it." Asking whether IT would rather have a vendor's promise to interoperate with competitors' systems, or a contract obliging them to, Yager stresses the importance of The Open Group's registered trademark of the Unix 03 spec. "The trademark provides IT organizations that need to be sure, without need for digging, that Unix means something, and it does. It means that Unix enterprise solutions work and work together, without regard for the brand on the hardware" -- a guarantee of interoperability that is the "product of cooperation among Unix vendors, IT operations, universities, and professional organizations."

Recently, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, which boasted much better standards compliance than previous iterations of the browser. While it passed the Acid2 test, IE8 failed miserably in the Acid3 test, and many people criticised Microsoft for it. Microsoft Australia's Nick Hodge has stated that Microsoft purposefully decided not to support Acid3, because the test tests against draft standards.

Eric S. Raymond is one of the three big figures in open source, together with Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman. During a talk for the Long Island Linux User Group, he made some interesting statements about the GPL, namely that the GPL is no longer needed due to the way the open source movement works.

We always try to avoid politics like the plague here on OSNews, but sometimes, it's hard to avoid it. Take the case of Joel Tenenbaum, who could be liable for over 1 million USD if the Recording Industry Association of America gets its way. While many hoped for a change of pace when it comes to these matters, Barack Obama's Department of Justice has squarely sided with the RIAA.

Richard Stallman, frontman of the Free Software Foundation, has shifted his attention towards web applications. "In the free software community, the idea that non-free programs mistreat their users is familiar. Some of us refuse entirely to install proprietary software, and many others consider non-freedom a strike against the program. Many users are aware that this issue applies to the plug-ins that browsers offer to install, since they can be free or non-free. But browsers run other non-free programs which they don't ask you about or even tell you about—programs that web pages contain or link to. These programs are most often written in Javascript, though other languages are also used."

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.29. The new features include the inclusion of kernel graphics modesetting, WiMAX and AP wifi support, inclusion of squashfs and a preliminary version of btrfs, a more scalable version of RCU, ecryptfs filename encryption, ext4 no journal mode, support for filesystem freeze and other improvements. Here's a full list of changes.

After the iPhone's success with the easy installation of applications using the iPhone App Store, more and more companies have tried to implement similar application delivery models in other markets. The most recent example is Microsoft, who has launched a sot of app store for... Open source server software. Yes, you read that right.

Apple has apologized for breaking Perl with its latest Mac OS X security update, saying it will distribute a solution to the problem with a future update. In a note to The Reg and a post to the Apple support forums, Senior Apple programmer Edward Moy apologized for "the unforeseen problems that the 2009-001 security update has caused" with Perl.

Rumour after rumour and story after story talk of Google wanting a piece of the netbook pie, the only pie in the computer hardware business that still tastes any good. They are supposed to bring Android, the phone operating system based on Linux and a modified version of Java, to netbooks in order to compete with Windows. Analysts are torn about whether or not Android would have a chance.

TomTom has become a licensee of the Open Invention Network. The OIN was initially formed by Red Hat, IBM and others to protect Linux by being a clearing house for over 275 patents and patent applications. These are available, on a royalty free basis, to any member licensee. Members must agree not to use their own patent portfolio against Linux. Companies can also contribute their patents to the OIN to make them generally available. OIN is also one of the backers of Linux Defenders. It appears the recent Microsoft patent agitation against Tom Tom is the reason behind this move.

Go on, go around these gadget sites and read all that talk about netbooks and what not. Acer Aspire One this, MSI that, Dell Mini 9 this, Asus that. It feels like the second coming of laptops in this netbook revolution. But truth is, even back in 1999 you could find super-lightweight laptops in the market (for the right price). This 2005-released IBM Thinkpad X41 laptop that Geeks.com sent us, a well-known shop for computer parts, is one of the best Linux-compatible laptops you can buy today for cheap.