Does Microsoft really want to be open source's friend?
Is Microsoft offering an olive branch to open source and Linux? Or is Microsoft just putting the best possible face on its defeat by the EU justice system, and its recent statements are really just business as usual? more... and more... and more... and more...

For GNOME CD burning, viva Brasero.
Brasero will replace Serpentine as the CD-writing utility in the upcoming April release of Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named Hardy Heron). Brasero extends the functionality of Serpentine to include data CD and DVD projects, file integrity checking, and multisession support. more...

Top 50 Proprietary Programs And Their Open Source Alternatives.
The following fifty proprietary programs are listed in no particular order within broad categories along with their open source alternatives. In some cases you could probably write your own book on frustrations with the proprietary programs shown here. In other cases, you’ll discover that the open source alternative isn’t quite up to snuff yet. more...

Free/Open-source Astronomy Software.
Astronomy, considered as one of the oldest sciences, is the scientific study of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere (such as the cosmic background radiation). more...

MonoDevelop 1.0 RC1.
Last week we released MonoDevelop 1.0 RC1, the (hopefully) last release before 1.0. This is a bug fix release, with no real new features, so the release notes are a bit boring this time. more...

Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated?
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not all there is to it! more...

Using MySQL as a filesystem.
With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. more...

Applications.
HTML Basix contains webmaster tools for the beginner through to the advanced webmaster looking for a snippet of HTML code to place in their page.
Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists.
mlmmj (Mailing List Managing Made Joyful) is a mail server-independent reimplementation of the ezmlm mailing list manager.
phpBB the most widely used opensource bulletin board system in the world.
CGI:IRC is a Perl/CGI program that lets you access IRC from a web browser.
PPF is a Java IRC bot. It uses a plugin system to add functionality.

Misc.
List of Ubuntu Keyboard Shortcuts.
Open Clip Art Library is user contributed clip art that can be freely used.
Dell Ubuntu Systems Launching in Canada and Latin America.
This is release 0.9.56 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.
Hardy Heron Alpha 5 Released and Screenshots and Wobi arrives.
Mark Shuttleworth Reveals Definitive List of Ubuntu Code Names.
Google Summer of Code 2008.

How To Tips.

See you next Thursday 7 P.M. at 420 Cafe, 420 Washington Ave, Eau Claire, WI.

EC_LUG