Do you remember the feeling waiting the remaining few days until birthday or christmas eve? Everything is getting prepared, invitations are sent out, the christmas tree is beeing decorated. Similar feelings I’m having these days - although the presents that I’m waiting for are for everybody else, too: It’s Release Season!
Ubuntu: Next week on October 13th, the 5.10 release of Ubuntu, called Breezy Badger, is scheduled. And to all those who are afraid of the great popularity Ubuntu is enjoying the last few months, Mark Shuttleworth “sabdfl” space-cowboy wrote a FAQ essay about the explosive questions concerning this distribution.
GNOME: Fortunately, the release management of my favorite desktop environment (as the one of Ubuntu) is very transparent. Every six months, always short before the Ubuntu release, a new final candidate is published (so it’s like having christmas twice a year ;) . So the 2.12 came out last month, again with great, new usuability features.
OpenOffice.org: Also another, big FOSS project is finally getting into it’s last stages for the 2.0 release. Although initially announced in May (maybe by eager marketing guys of Sun??), the 2.0 final release is assumed to be available still this month.
Firefox: As I’d say the most successfull Open Source project at all time, get’s a next major version step soon. Beta 2 is since today available for download, the final release is hoped to be finished before the end of the year.
TYPO3: Because I recently also began to use this CMS for my own customers I read the information about the 4.0 release which is still planned for this year. The announced new features sound promising, especially a new default rich text editor is urgently needed.
GIMP: Known as the best bit map image editor, GIMP 2.4 final release is planned for this month. And for those how are used to Photoshop and too senile to learn new menu structures, a guy hacked the GIMPshop.
As one can see the Open Source movement never stops and goes on releasing new, great projects every day - one more reason to use Open Source Software: you’ll enjoy christmas and birthday all year long!