There's plenty of money to be made in Open Source software — something that, despite recent events, Novell, Red Hat, and a laundry-list of other OSS-loving firms can attest to. Where there often isn't much money, however, is in the hands of individual developers who donate their time to hack Open Source apps into enterprise-class offerings. That may be changing, however — at least in New York — where a pair of state assemblymen are sponsoring a bill to provide tax breaks for Open Source developers.

Yes, it's that time again: time for the root of all Debian-based distributions — that'd be Debian, of course — to pick a fresh face from its ranks to take on the mantle of the powers-that-be.

Last week, Breaking News brought LinuxJournal.com readers the sad and sordid news of Flash-memory manufacturer Spansion's decision to drop 35% of their workforce, while simultaneously rescinding a 10% pay cut on top executives, and granting the company's new CEO a massive pay package including non-refundable advances. Apparently, however, cutting more than a third of the workforce wasn't enough to cover the costs of retaining top executives, forcing the company to file for protection under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code.

Following up on Friday's look at the Linux Foundation's plans for the 2009 Collaboration Summit, Breaking News has now learned that one of the events taking place during the third-annual summit will be the kick start of a new Linux Foundation program aimed at training developers to meet the continuing need for Linux-capable talent.

The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit that keeps Linus in keyboards, and most recently, has been looking to glam things up a bit — earlier this month provided a first glimpse into its plans for the 2009 Collaboration Summit, to be held April 8-10 in San Francisco.

Exciting news from the LinuxDNA project, which earlier this month successfully compiled a recent Linux kernel with the Intel C/C++ compiler (ICC).

It seems as though layoffs and cutbacks are omnipresent these days, as more and more companies make the difficult decision to scale down in order to better compete in the recessed economy. Such decisions are not easy or popular, but are nonetheless necessary — one is left to accept with great sadness that such things should come to pass. That is until the rustling of countless cardboard boxes is muffled by the unmistakable sound of slot machines paying out the jackpot.

Taiwanese computer maker ASUS — which ostensibly launched the netbook craze in 2007 with its EeePC — appears to be looking to hop on another craze with the low-cost lightweight laptop. According to reports, the company is in high gear developing a new netbook which will run on, of all things, the Android mobile phone platform.

Social networking seems all-encompassing these days, as we find ourselves tweeting madly from smartphones, joining the group of the moment on Facebook, and leaving little bits of our lives recorded on the pages of Flickr. With the volume of socialization that issues forth from the myriad of social networks now available, one can easily begin to wonder if someday we'll all be swept to our deaths by the never-ending flow. If one psychologist is to be believed, however, while we won't drown in a flood a tweets, our social networking habits just might be what kills us.

File sharing, file sharing, file sharing. Whether it's college students by BitTorrent, schoolkids copying tracks off their friends during study hall — do they even still have study hall? — or grandmas making Glenn Miller mix tapes, file sharing seems to be everywhere. At least, that's the story the record industry is telling — to anyone who will listen — and the one they'll be telling a Swedish court starting this week, as the four founders of the Tracker di tutti Trackers, The Pirate Bay, go on trial in Stockholm.

For anyone interested in politics — and for more than a few interested in technology — the talk of the weekend has been the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Tax Act of 2009, which cleared Congress late Friday night and is due to be signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday. The bill, which runs to more than 1,000 pages, provides for everything from increased airport security to electric cars for government use, including several billion dollars in appropriations for various technology-related programs. Nestled in with the tax breaks, economic incentives, and direct spending, though, is a brief but exciting provision, setting the stage for Open Source to be the word of the day.

Valentines Day. That one day a year when geeks everywhere find themselves whisked away from their terminals for a night filled with flowers, chocolate, and — dare we say it? — romance. This year, however, significant others of the Debian set may find it more difficult to drag their beloved beyond the box, as, barring a lovers quarrel, the Debian community and the long-awaited Debian 5, better known as Lenny, will finally tie the knot.

The President of the United States is a busy man, and more than a few minutes of his day are spent reviewing information that arrived via the U. S. Mail — in fact, the only "person" we imagine gets more mail than the president is Santa Claus. While it perhaps did not make its way down Pennsylvania Avenue nestled with the electric bill and this month's TV Guide, an interesting piece of correspondence did appear early this morning, addressed to none other than the 44th President of the United States. The subject? Making Open Source an integral part of the country's economic recovery.

One of the distinctive — and perhaps, most successful — aspects of the One Laptop Per Child Program is the level to which individuals have been able to effect change on a global scale. The project's Open Source offerings are, of course, a prime example of this, but so too are the financial offerings that have put the program's product in the hands of some half-million users. The era of individual-based change is coming to an end, however, as an email leaked last week has revealed the end of the program's small-scale giving, known — ironically enough — as "Change the World."

When MySQL co-founder David Axmark said his goodbyes in October, he cited the constraints of corporate life as the reason for making his break. At the same time, a Sun spokesman described the relationship between the computing giant and remaining MySQL co-founder Michael Widenius as "hard to predict." The clouds have cleared from the company's crystal ball, however, as Widenius officially announced his departure yesterday — only to be followed this morning by a similar announcement from former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos.

Compiz — the compositing window manager responsible for more than a few dropped-jaws — has a long history of ins and outs, not the least of which includes more forks than at a garden club lunch. It seems, however, that things always come back together, and such was the case on Tuesday, as the Compiz community announced the imminent re-merger of several well known forks.

Facing malware is a way of life in the digital world, and the pressure on everyone from home users to corporate giants to do all they can to minimize its damaging effects is immense. Just how much pressure there is was made quite clear on Saturday morning, as a routine update to Google's list of malware sites went horribly wrong, labeling every site in the company's database as dangerous and rendering the service unusable.

Figuring out how your customers use your products — and by extension, how to improve user experience — can be a tricky process to navigate. Focus groups have their flaws, surveys suffer from selective memory, and peeping over shoulders could plant one in the penitentiary. The browser-makers at Mozilla, though, are hoping to put an Open Source spin on the process, expecting to release within the next few weeks a plugin to gather usage data from volunteers.

"What's in a name?" asks Shakespeare's Juliet, and by all accounts, it expresses a sentiment that has been on the minds of the Australasian Linux community assembled in Hobart, Tasmania this week for linux.conf.au. In a Romeoesque move, conference organizers have vowed the annual event will deny its TLD and surmount its name, announcing that the 2010 conference will trade koalas for kiwis as it convenes in Wellington, New Zealand.

We've all seen them: on comes a commercial with a young, casually dressed,if somewhat unkempt, young man, and an older, portly man in a very middle-management-esque suit. The younger man announces "I'm a Mac" while the older responds "And I'm a PC," and the two go on to lament some critical design failure facing the PC to which the Mac is impervious. As Linux users, we know the basic premise of the commercial — that "I'm a PC" means "I run Windows" — is a fallacy, and what is really needed is a third cast member declaring "I'm Linux." If such a thought has ever crossed your mind, then fire up your camera, because the time to act is now.