Mandriva began life in July 1998 as Linux Mandrake in France in Gael Duval's bedroom after he ported a KDE 1.0 desktop onto Red Hat Linux 5.1, uploaded the result onto two FTP servers, went away on holiday, and came back to find that he had a popular and successful Linux distribution on his hands...

Here is an account of my experience receiving training from Verizon on my Droid phone. Generally speaking, the training session went very well, but scheduling the training was a real annoyance.

If you’re a Linux user, you’ve likely come across Git at some point, perhaps while trying to download a new program or looking into version control systems like CVS or Subversion. Git is the revision control system created by the Linux kernel’s famous Linus Torvalds due to a lack of satisfaction with existing solutions. The main emphasis in the design was on speed, or more specifically, efficiency. Git addresses many of the shortcomings of previous systems, and does it all in a lot less time.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has elected Simon Phipps to the board of directors; Phipps recently left Oracle after serving as Sun's Chief Open Source Officer. He will take up his new position on the OSI board from April 1st. In a blog posting confirming the appointment, Phipps says he is "honoured and delighted" to take up the position on the board of an organisation which "still plays a very important and relevant role in the world of software freedom".

By a remarkable vote of 633 to 13, the Parliament rebuked European negotiators who have been drafting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in a series of confidential meetings around the globe. No version of the document has been disclosed by the participants, which include the United States, the European Commission, Japan, and Canada. Parliament's resolution demands that the European Commission--the EU's executive branch--grant "public access" to the ACTA documents. If the negotiations are not sufficiently transparent, the resolution says, Parliament "reserves its right" to take legal action.

[Three cheers for openness! - Sander]

PC World - $200 tablet PCs have been something of a pipe dream. There was the Crunchpad, which was supposed to be $200, but that didn’t last very long, coming out as the $400 Joo Joo. If what Freescale showed off at Mobile World Congress becomes reality, though, the dream may finally come true.

PC World - A number of former Sun Microsystems employees who worked on Drizzle, an offshoot of the MySQL open-source database, have ended up at cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace, where they will continue their efforts, developer Jay Pipes wrote in a blog post Monday.

PC World - Long popular with bloggers, the open-source WordPress blogging software is also starting to find a niche as a low-cost corporate CMS (content management system), at least for managing relatively simple Web sites.