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.”