Esther Schindler sifts through 25 highly anticipated open-source releases coming this year which will be of interest to people in various categories from IT Admins to programmers to mobile users: “These open-source browsers, dev tools, mobile apps and more promise that ‘Oooh, cool!’ sense of discovery.”

Royal Pingdom serves up 10 interesting open source software forks and why they happened. Some reasons better than others, of course. Interesting to note where the fork surpasses the original project in popularity, and where it doesn’t. Two of the listed forks were in pursuit of Mac support.

Steve Wozniak speaks out, predicting the death of the iPod and suggesting things he doesn’t like about the iPhone, comparing it with Google’s Android platform. Woz is quoted as saying that “the iPod has had a long time as the world’s most popular media player, and that it will fall from grace due to oversupply.” Hmmm. Is it a victim of its own success, then?

Mandriva’s latest release: Mandriva Linux 2009. Get it while it’s hot! Mandriva’s always been a bit of an overlooked distro, imo… but it continues to install easily and work very well. Reviews are appearing now for those who like to read before they download. Time to update my Mandriva systems…

This is amusing: apparently the roots of the iPod’s development are traced back to 1979, when “Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip.” He didn’t renew the patent in 1988, so he hasn’t seen a dime from it. “To be honest,” he said, “I was just so pleased that finally something that I had done which has been a huge success and changed the music industry was being acknowledged.”

The launch today of Canada’s new DNCL has the website flooded — earlier today it displayed an error page, and when I tried again just now (noon Central), the site displays and allows you to enter a number, but is still to flooded to generate the necessary captcha to complete the registration. I imagine that Michael Geist’s iOptOut site will probably be getting extra traffic today as well — it picks up where the DNCL leaves off, since the list presently has too many exemptions. Story at the Globe & Mail and CTV’s “What you need to know about the Do Not Call List.”

iTWire claims their list of Top 10 reasons why Steve Ballmer should be certified insane is offered tongue-in-cheek, but it is vaguely possible that some people might take it more seriously than that. The list counts down, clocking in #5 as: “Ballmer can get a little quirky when Linux is mentioned. ‘Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.’ Doesn’t sound completely sane to me.

PC Magazine names The Cyber Crime Hall of Fame by offering up a listing of their nine most significant “hacking” incidents — by which I think they mean to include cracking. The list begins with Cap’n Crunch and Kevin Mitnick and moves along the line from there, including entries who made the list inadvertently.

Mandriva today released 2009.0 RC 2, with Gnome 2.24 and KDE 4. The final release date is supposed to be released about a week into October, and include Firefox 3 and OpenOffice 3. I’ve been playing with and running Mandriva since version 5 or 6 or something, back when Linux-Mandrake was an enhanced Red Hat, before it came into its own. Despite the attention that Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SuSE get lately, it remains an excellent distro in my view.

I’m just hoping they’ve fixed the sound bug from 2008 that’s been bugging me. An updated NVidia driver would be nice too. But if we could just get Adobe to update their Flash player for x86/64…

Nice collection of the Top 50 Linux Quotes of All Time… loads of fun. #17. More in the comments, like “Microsoft isn’t evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.” and “Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.” — both from Linus Torvalds. I looked back at our most-linked piece in the archives to see what might be quotable: “Free review copies are provided by book publishers and software companies, and have been for aeons. I can’t say for sure, but Gutenburg probably gave away review copies of the Bible, so this is nothing new. …are good reviews ‘bought’ for Linux distributions? Hard to imagine when most of the product is free anyway.  …Did we received a free copy? Yes, it’s called a download”.