Former president of Novell's EMEA operations Volker Smid has taken over as head of operations at HP in Germany. Javier Colado assumes Smid's old role at Novell.

Google Performance Tools, part of Google's open source projects, is now available in version 1.0. Perf Tools is especially useful for optimizing multi-threaded programs.

Sun Microsystems has acquired Belgian company Q-Layer, which specializes in cloud computing.

Vietnamese ministry servers are to run exclusively on open source software in 2009 and the government is also urging dealers to install the free software.

Today the One Laptop per Child Project announced that they will be reducing their team by about 50 percent and the remaining 32 team members will have salary reductions.

The Ubuntu Eee Linux variant optimized for netbooks is now known as Easy Peasy. Version 1.0 is on the same level as Ubuntu 8.10.

The Apache Project announced the latest version of Commons Digester, which comes with less dependency and can validate XML code. Programmers use Digester to convert data from XML into Java objects.

Debian developers have determined the outcome: proprietary components are acceptable, paving the way for Lenny, the next free distro of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.

Acer has put the source RPM packages and a recovery DVD for its increasingly popular Aspire One Linux netbook online for free download. Sources for the kernel and further components are also available.

The web based groupware solution Simple Groupware is now available in version 0.500. New in this version is a module for rendering diagrams with another module implemented to allow offline viewing of folders and attachments.