The Macworld Conference & Expo has always been a prime venue for Apple to make startling announcements, and — despite being Apple's final visit to the show — this year was no different. The surprise revelation emanating from San Francisco yesterday was one few if anyone expected to hear: Apple's iTunes store will eliminate Digital Rights Management restrictions from all tracks by the end of the first quarter of 2009.

SourceLabs — the company behind a series of "self-support" tool suites for Linux and Open Source software — has apparently attracted the attention of information systems heavyweight EMC and their Atmos line of cloud-storage software, resulting in the acquisition of a portion of SourceLabs's assets and employees by EMC.

The revelation that the political structures of the United Kingdom and the United States have deep and distinct differences should come as no surprise to even the most casual observer. Despite these differences, though, the US and UK are close allies, and can perpetually be found engaged in joint activities. With the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama just days away, the UK's Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport has an idea for a new joint undertaking — one that may well reveal just what kind of change the President-to-be believes in.

Sun Microsystems — the tech giant behind everything from SPARC servers to Solaris — is well known for having a solid portfolio of Open Source offerings under its belt, among others the OpenSolaris operating system, OpenOffice.org suite, and the Java software platform. Now details have emerged about the roadmap for one of Sun's latest Open Source endeavours, JavaFX.

Playing off the success of the One Laptop Per Child program, EMTEC, makers of the soon to be released Gdium netbook, have unveiled a One Laptop Per Hacker program intended to jump-start community development by putting pre-release machines into the hands of developers at an easy-to-afford price.

Fifty years ago, if you asked the average person to rate the imminence of nuclear Armageddon on a scale of one to ten, it's likely the response would have been quite high. If you posed the same question to the average person today, you'd probably be more likely to get a strange look — or a psychiatric hold — than a 9.5. And yet, the world would be a much less exciting place without the ever-present possibility of nuclear annihilation — or at least the Royal Navy seems to think so.

Though it has been nearly two months, it seems as though it was just a few days ago that we reported the beginning of the Fedora Project's election season. Seemingly as soon as it began it has concluded, and the newly elected to the Fedora Project Board, as well as the Ambassadors and Engineering Steering Committees, have been announced.

Adobe releases AIR 1.5 for Linux today, December 18, 2008. This is great news for Linux users that have been stuck with 1.1 Beta. AIR applications that have been unable to install should install and run without problems.

For the past twenty years, one of the jewels of the Novell calendar has been the annual BrainShare conference. Highlights have included, among many others, 2004's surprise appearance by Linux-creator Linus Torvalds — reportedly also attended by SCO arch-villan Darl McBride — and the 2008 revelation that Big Bird was switching to SUSE. It seems those memories are all that will remain of the conference, however, as Novell announced this morning that the conference has been canceled.

An unplanned outage struck the Fedora Project early this morning, taking down elements of the project's infrastructure including the package buildsystem, a number of infrastructure-related databases, and the websites for several of the services maintained by the Fedora Infrastructure team, among others.

The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit organization that keeps Linus Torvalds behind the keyboard and provides services like the Linux Standards Base and Linux Legal Defense Fund — made the results of the Foundation's annual Technical Advisory Board election official on Tuesday, announcing the election of six new members from the Linux kernel developer community.

The Recording Industry Association of America has done a number of distressing, disgusting, and disgraceful things in its never-ending quest to fill its coffers with ill-gotten gains from every American with an internet connection. The news out of Pittsburgh, however, carries what we have to class as the most depraved stunt we've seen them pull so far.

The much-anticipated next incarnation of the popular Python programming language — voted favorite scripting language in the 2008 Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards — slithered onto the scene on Wednesday with the release of Python 3.0. Known popularly as Python 3000 or Py3k, Python 3.0 bears the distinction of being the first release in the language's history to deliberately break compatibility with previous versions.

The naming conventions for Linux distributions are a many-splendored thing: Ubuntu's names are perhaps most well-known, owing to their ear-pleasing alliteration and the sheer number necessitated by the frequency of releases. Debian, too, is well known for naming the versions inhabiting the multi-tiered release system after characters from the Toy Story franchise — even down-to-business Gentoo is in on the games, with the 2008.0 release bearing the codename "It's got what plants crave." Now it's Fedora's turn at bat, with entries open on the nom de plume for Fedora 11.

Just as those of us in the U.S. were preparing to pop our turkeys in the oven, the hard-working fellows at the openSUSE Project — the community organization behind the openSUSE Linux distribution — were lifting the lid on their own creation: a brand new license for openSUSE 11.1 — that doesn't involve a EULA.