Open-source project Fedora has launched Fedora Women, a forum and mailing list, in an effort to encourage more female developers to participate in its community."Women who are interested in working with the Fedora Project can work with Fedora Women to get started," explained a posting on the Fedora Web site.
Linux project lead Linus Torvalds has said it is not easy to become a major contributor to the Linux kernel.
Paris-based OW2 Consortium, whose members include Alcatel Lucent, France Telecom, Red Hat and Thales, will merge with California-based Open Solutions Alliance.
Microsoft and Novell have extended their interoperability agreement for server operating systems.
Brazil is to appeal the International Organisation for Standardisation decision to ratify Microsoft Office Open XML, now known as ISO/IEC DIS 29500.
A project funded by the US Department of Homeland Security has praised improvements in open source security, while outlining some common errors.
Critics have taken aim at a study published by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team that said more vulnerabilities were found in Linux/Unix than in Windows last year.The report, Cyber Security Bulletin 2005, was released last week.
/**/ The US government has reported that fewer vulnerabilities were found in Windows than in Linux/Unix operating systems in 2005. Linux/Unix-based operating systems -- a set that includes Mac OS X, as well as the various Linux distributions and flavours of Unix -- had more than twice as many vulnerabilities as Windows, according to the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which is part of the US Department of Homeland Security.
Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in many iterations and distributions of Linux.
Open source software project Samba has signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive protocol documentation for the software giant's Windows workgroup server products.
