Wolfram Research has released the seventh version of Mathematica, and it does a lot more than symbolic algebra.

Some mathematicians work with four-dimensional objects all the time, and they've developed some clever tricks to get a feeling of four-dimensional objects.

Matthew Paul Thomas published a document titled Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, And How To Improve It.

A technical blog reports that very large system are more and more based on really concurrent programming languages and systems, like Erlang.

The Mozilla team has released Firefox 3, a major update to its popular and acclaimed free, open source Web browser.

The Freenet Project has announced the release of Freenet 0.7.

Wireshark 1.0 has been released. Wireshark is the award-winning protocol analyzer, formerly known as Ethereal.

The Software Freedom Law Center published A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects. The primer, written for developers, has sections on copyrights, trademarks, patents, and organizational structure.

Since its foundation, the United Nations system has been collecting statistical information from member states on a variety of topics. The information thus collected constitutes a considerable information asset of the organization. However, these statistical data are often stored in proprietary databases, each with unique dissemination and access policies. UNdata addresses this problem by datapooling major UN databases and those of several other international organizations into one single Internet environment.

GNU Octave is a free numerical computing environment highly compatible with the MATLAB language. After 11 years of development since version 2.0, the stable version 3.0 has been released.

Sun Microsystems has announced they they will be creating a reward program in order to compensate open source programmers for their work in a hope to boost open source efforts. The program will involve communities like OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans, and OpenOffice.org according to Simon Phipps, Sun's open source officer

Computerworld has posted some horror stories from a disaster recovery company.

Ruby on Rails 2.0 has been released and is ready to be downloaded.

Microsoft has just announced the release of the IIS FastCGI module for IIS from 5.1 to 7. This FastCGI module was built with collaboration from Zend, the creators of PHP, and is intended to solve the CGI on Windows problem.

Calvin College professor Joel Adams and student Tim Brom built a portable cluster with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming [1]the most cost-efficient supercomputer

Frank Wiles published an article, "A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality", answering questions as: Why is it so hard to find good programmers? And why should companies favor hiring fewer more senior developers rather than many junior ones?

An internet-draft published recently calls for an IPv6 transition plan which would require all Internet-facing servers to have IPv6 connectivity on or before January 1, 2011.

Linus Torvalds has included patches into the mainline tree which implement a stable userspace driver API into the Linux kernel.

The PHP development team has announced that development for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After the end of 2007 there will be no more releases of PHP 4, while critical security fixes will be made available until 8/2008. To ease migration, a guide have been buplished

There is an enlightening article by Richard Stallman on the reasons for moving to GPLv3.

The EU report titled "Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU" is available on the net.

Sun has changed the key Java implementations—Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME), and Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) source code licence to the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

Firefox 2.0 has officially been released on Mozilla.com. Here are the release notes.

As noted by a FreeSoftwareMagazine article and by a GNU page, all patents on GIF image format have been expired, at or before Oct 1^st 2006.

InfoWorld carries an article of Peter Wayner which reviews six of the most popular "open source" Ajax toolkits.