Latest Mozilla Sunbird is a well-connected calendar, Jul 20, 2007

Mozilla's Sunbird calendaring application lives perpetually in the shadow of its siblings Firefox and Thunderbird, garnering just a fraction of the developer effort and publicity lavished on the browser and email client. Nevertheless, it is slowing maturing into a reliable tool worthy of the Mozilla brand.

Adobe has released a new version of its Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) toolkit, and for the first time it is under an open source license that allows the code to be incorporated into free software. XMP is Adobe's XML-based specification for metadata geared toward digital images and multimedia.

Open source software's preeminent vector graphics package, Inkscape, made a new stable release last month. Inkscape 0.45 packs in new features, speed, and usability enhancements, and offers a tempting look at where the package is headed.

Adobe has finally unveiled a beta release of Flash Player 9 for Linux. Was it worth the wait? And should you install it now, or hold off a little longer for the official, stable product instead?

Fans of the online virtual world Second Life can now connect from Linux machines. Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, recently launched a public test of the Linux client, sporting the same feature set and interface as the Windows and Mac OS X versions.

Gnash is a free player for Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Shockwave/Flash (SWF) files. Developer Rob Savoye started the project last fall at the request of the Free Software Foundation.

Is Motorola's switch to Linux a hit for the company but a miss for end users?

Using the OEM installation option, computer resellers can pre-install and verify Ubuntu on machines slated for sale or redistribution, but leave select configuration details, locale and language preferences, and user account creation to the retail purchaser.

We give free Linux CDs to our friends, coworkers, even strangers, but in many cases we never find out what happens to them after they leave our hands. Recently I decided to look up several people I've given free Linux CDs to and ask them what happened, what they liked and didn't like, and whether they are using Linux.

Over the past couple of months, public opinion of Skype has shifted from "media darling" to "when will their 15 minutes of fame be up?" Judging from forum and blog chatter, it would appear that the novelty of the product is wearing off and early adopters are feeling restless. Luckily, Internet telephony aficionados have standards-based alternatives to choose from.

Two months ago I migrated all of my office paperwork over to PDF format designed with the open source Scribus, and I haven't looked back. It's universally readable, there is no sacrifice on quality, and as a bonus I get to do my work in Linux.

Obviously Apple has good PR people, for which there is no substitute. Whenever Apple launches a product, CEO Steve Jobs delivers a focused speech about what makes the new gizmos desirable and different. It is simple for buyers to understand and easy for journalists to write up. By contrast, few open source projects put much work into public relations at all.

Flickr, the online photo-sharing Web site, is a good case study on the benefits of open source. The technology that powers Flickr is a catalog of open source tools: Red Hat Linux, the Apache Web server, MySQL databases, PHP, Perl, Smarty templates, Postfix mail gateways, and even ImageMagick to handle the image manipulation.