It's DrupalCon season once again, which means Drupalers from all over the world will converge next week on Denver, Colorado, to educate each other about their favorite CMS and platform, and this eternal debate about CMS vs. platform seems to be at the heart of this year's event.

LiMux, a project to convert local government institutions to Linux and open source software in Munich, has exceeded initial expectations. The project has done slightly better than projections of 8,500 and now boasts 9,000 Linux migrated workstations. The progress and evolution of this project that began in 2003 is well worth examination.

Canonical and Red Hat have issued a joint statement regarding Microsoft’s plan to make UEFI Secure Boot a requirement of Windows 8. Simultaneously, The Linux Foundation has issued a similar statement.

Very cool news from the organizers of SCaLE:

From the SCALE organizers (you might recognize one of them from our August cover): 

Florian Effenberger recently posted statistics of the number of developers contributing to the LibreOffice project. Several months ago, Cedric Bosdonnat offered data on the number of contribution and contributors from the various sources.

 Can't make it to OSCON this year?  You can still catch keynotes, interviews and news via live streaming video.   Check back right here during the conference July 25-29, 2011 to enjoy some great content virtually. Keynotes are Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 9am Pacific.

After an extensive discussion with the community on the Mageia developmental mailing list, Anne Nicolas revealed the results concerning Mageia release and support cycles as well as the release schedule for Mageia 2. The consensus was to use basically the same cycle used in Mageia 1.

I first heard of Bitcoin when the Free Software Foundation announced they would start accepting it for donations. Before long another story about Bitcoin appeared in my news feeds. Then another. And another.

The world of LibreOffice and OpenOffice(.org) has been heating up recently with several exciting and, at times, bewildering developments. The Document Foundation remains very active as is LibreOffice development, but Oracle has given up on OpenOffice and slapped LibreOffice in the face by giving it to Apache. Perhaps the most important announcement was the release of LibreOffice 3.4.0.

Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 28 with a brand new interface and a couple default application changes. But all the talk is about Unity, that brand new interface. As one might predict, reactions are all over the spectrum.

After five years, a new stable release of FVWM has finally been announced. FVWM is a lightweight and fast window manager still used by a few distributions and offered as an option on several. This landmark release brings several new and improved features. Some of the new features include:

April 15 brought some interesting developments in the office suite front.

Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and hero to many Open Source users, might not be the first person one might think would be honored by an organization of lawyers, but that's exactly what's happening. The International Technology Law Association will award Torvalds its ITechLaw Achievement Award at their upcoming 40th anniversary celebration.

After five years of planning and design, GNOME 3.0 has been officially released.

Linux is usually exciting, but this past week brought several nice developments. Slackware announced another developmental milestone for their next version. Bodhi Linux reached 1.0. Foresight announced their first release in two years. Zenwalk developers released version 7.0. And SimplyMepis gets a release candidate. Slackware 13.37

Unlike OpenOffice.org of yore, LibreOffice developers have been pumping out the updates at a rapid pace. Since the inaugural release two months ago, LibreOffice has seen two minor version updates as well as associated developmental releases. The latest, LibreOffice 3.3.2, was released just a couple of days ago.

Google has released the list of organisations that are accepted into this year's Google Summer of Code.

The ever-inventive openSUSE gang have come up with another cool service to enhance user experience and promote good will. This time it is a little less technical and a little more social. Connect with other openSUSE users, developers, and groups. You can make friends, find out the latest news, and get involved.

Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu CTO, has found a way to bridge the ever-widening crevasse between Debian and its derivatives. The Debian Front Desktop was formed last summer in order to bring together these camps, but Zimmerman wants to go a step or two further.