Recently, the free/open source community saw many interesting news, I am going to comment on some of them:
* Microsoft will release the EMCA under the Community Promise license, which means good news to Mono. Mono is an open source EMCA + Microsoft APIs implementation. There’s a lot of friction inside the community generated by Mono, lots of people are strongly against it fearing some misterious lawsuit that MS could move against the creators of open source implementations. I, for one, think it’s a good thing to have more high quality open source development tools, I am very happy that all the alledged fears would be dissipated after this announcement.
* Nokia announced that future versions of Maemo will use Qt instead of GTK. Slightly less controversial, seems like an interesting move for Nokia, and the tablet community in general. Nokia LGPLed the library, that has a strong and very professional team of developers, is widely used for companies to do their products and is cross platform. The other underlying technologies (such as DBUS, telepathy, avahi), result of freedesktop.org efforts, will still be used. We should put ego fights aside and choose whatever makes sense for the greater good of the user community.
I am sure there are lots of things I just forgot to mention. Good enough for a quick blog post