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Q&A: Visa dips a toe into the Hadoop pool. The company's head of technology strategy weighs in on how it is using Hadoop's powerful data crunching capabilities.

London Stock Exchange platform acquisition ignites open source war of words. Its Microsoft-based tech infrastructure is being replaced by open source tools.

How GNOME and KDE spend their money. Here's a comparison of their quarterly reports.

Does Oracle matter to open source? Once it acquires Sun, Oracle will be the largest sponsor of open source projects that people use every day.

BonitaSoft gets funding. The provider of open source Business Process Management (BPM) software announced a first round of funding of $3 million from Ventech and Auriga Partners.

Typical Linux desktop options like KDE and GNOME? limit the way computer users interact with the applications and programs on their systems. There's not much to do beyond opening and closing an app, and moving or resizing a window. The development team behind ?toil? is building a desktop interface that aims to stand that idea on its head and let users create workflows that work best for them.

The GNUstep-based environment is built with lightweight and modular components that allow users to combine project- and document-oriented activities (or, services, as the ?toil? team calls them) more easily.

Kludgets lets you run OS X widgets on your Windows desktop. It's an open source project built on Webkit and Nokia's QT framework.

OpenOffice 3.1: The new features. Instant eye catchers are improved anti-aliasing for graphics, better chart functionality, and the new text highlighting in Writer.

12 of the best free Linux news aggregators. Tools for KDE, GNOME and more.

Education lessons for open source. If the school is running open source, that's what the students will learn.

Auto-update to the latest builds of Firefox Minefield. Daily builds have the latest bug-fixes, enhancements and test options for this speedy version of the browser.

I've noticed, as I get older, time seems to go exponentially faster. Unfortunately, this meant high school lasted an eternity, and I'm burning through my thirties at warp speed. Some events make me more aware of this than others -- it seems like it was only last week that Fedora 10 made its first mark upon the world.

But no, another release cycle has nearly come full circle, and today the Fedora Project announced the Preview Release of Fedora 11 (codenamed Leonidas). This preview will be followed by a release candidate (scheduled for a May 12 appearance), with the final version hitting the streets on May 26.

So what new features can we expect to see in Fedora 11?

Has Sun been holding Java back? Red Hat thinks so.

The Open Cloud Manifesto is nothing but a vapor tiger. IBM is the lead toward this purported push toward an open, interoperable cloud model.

GNOME vs. KDE: Which has the evolutionary advantage? Both are mature desktops, but Bruce Byfield sees KDE as the evolutionary leader.

21 of the best free Linux DVD tools. Good choices, from Xine to Handbrake.

Mark Cuban: Open-source your venture funding. Will startups post their business plans on his blog?

This week, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit began accepting proposals for its upcoming event. The event, aimed at encouraging interaction between KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC developer conference attendees, gives prospective speakers the opportunity to bring their passion to a more diverse audience.

One of the goals put forth for Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope at the last Developer Summit, the development of a unified, hands-off notification display, has finally made an appearance in the testing release, according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.

The new notification display is designed to behave similarly regardless of desktop environment, and deliver notifications in an non-intrusive manner. An overview of what Shuttleworth calls attention-management guidelines is outlined on the Ubuntu wiki, describing how to design notifications that get the user's attention, inform, and then effortlessly get out of the way.

The development team working in this area is aware of at least 35 applications that need extra attention to work well with the new system, and its current focus is to address these issues and identify other applications with similar quirks.

Google's Summer of Code (SoC) Program has united students interested in open source with projects and mentors for several years now. The intiative's goal is to foster interest in open source software while exposing students to real-world software development processes. It's easy to see, based on how enthusiastically some projects embrace the annual event, that the students aren't the only ones who benefit from the program.

This week, both KDE and GNOME announced that development teams under their respective umbrellas wishing to submit project ideas and mentor students this summer were able to do so.

This also means interested students can get a sneak peek at potential projects and mentors. The list of projects (and mentors) won't be finalized until mid-March, but seeing as students only have two weeks to submit their applications, an advance project screening might prove helpful.

If you were unable to attend (or follow along with) the events at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, the highlights and more controversial proposals are now being discussed in the wider community.

One proposal for Ubuntu's Jaunty release was to unify notification display and interaction between GNOME and KDE. It's an idea that's been met with nearly every reaction imaginable, but Mark Shuttleworth has a very reassuring post on his blog that explains some of the reasoning behind this proposal.

The GNOME and KDE projects recently decided that their upcoming developer events -- GUADEC and Akademy, respectively -- will be held simultaneously in the same location. Both projects hope this will foster communication and collaboration between their developer pools, and ultimately strengthen open source desktops.

The joint event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009, will be held July 3-11, 2009, in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), and will be hosted by Cabildo, Gran Canaria's local government.