"So, a few years ago all the cool kids were switching from CVS to Subversion. These days, all the cool kids are switching from Subversion to some form of distributed version control; git and Mercurial seem to be the ones with the largest market shares. This switch is being accompanied by a simply deafening amount of hype about DVCS and how it’s a revolutionary new paradigm and will completely change the way people work and… well, the usual stuff."

Good intro article to DVCS, particularly from a SVN perspective. Now, where are the GUI interfaces...

"Team SOAK (Smart Operational Agriculture Kit) from Australia have been announced as the winners of the 2008 Imagine Cup!!! This is simply an amazing achievement, SOAK members Long Zheng, David Burela, Ed Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya have all come together from different Universities across Australia to create and complete their fantastic project, SOAK ."

Awesome work guys!

"A group of Australian University students, including one of Australia’s most well-known technology bloggers, has progressed to the finals of the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup software development competition in Paris. Students David Burela, Long Zheng, Edward Hooper and Dimaz Pramudya, collectively called Team SOAK, showcased a solution that helps farmers moderate the use of water on their crops."

Pretty cool... all the best guys!

"They are systematic symptoms of a deeper wrong which most people don't recognise: proprietary software. Microsoft's software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don't have the source code that programmers can read and change."

Surprisingly reasonable, but there still isn't an particularly viable alternative business model. Support puts the focus in the wrong place, as do services often. Why is software different anyway; do we expect Coke to provide their recipe publically? Maybe our economic system is the issue...

"The free office suite OpenOffice is now offering a beta of version 3.0 for testing and it's easier than ever for Mac owners to start using it right away. "

And still just as ugly, particularly on OSX. I wish they'd acknowledge that 1 interface for all platforms just doesn't work for applications more complicated than a few buttons. Even if they get the looks right (which they haven't), there are still subtle differences in UI guidelines.

"While Perth will be the first Australian city with Google Transit, company officials said the search firm was in talks with other state transport authorities and expected the service eventually to be available Australia-wide."

Good luck Google if you're bringing this to Melbourne. Unless you cater for our broken system, all Google Transit will do is remind us what public transport should be.

"Why don't we have all the (applications) on the network - and by the way it's free," Mr Schmidt said in a dig at Microsoft."

Arrogant twat. Nice to see he conveniently forgets that we're actually giving Google all our data for free so they can effectively on-sell it and make more money at our expense. There's no such thing as a free lunch, people.

"So says Jeff Waugh of open source advocacy group Waugh Partners, fed up after a series of personal attacks directed at the heads of government agencies... [after] adoption of open source software had been stalled by security concerns... While Waugh believes the open source model holds better security outcomes than its proprietary equivalent, he equally describes the vitriolic reaction to Gibson's comments as being 'disgraceful' and says they achieve nothing for the industry."

Indeed level-heads are what's needed in open-source. Plus it's kinda ironic they say people don't know enough about open-source, when many of them know nearly nothing about closed-source software.

"As a software developer, there's no denying that open source software is a powerful and transformative force in modern software development. The console model, and Apple's de-facto first party development model, are about as far as you can get from Mark's freedom zero-- instead, you get zero freedom... So I'll ask again, since Mark brought it up: why doesn't anyone give a crap about freedom zero? "

Some good comments here about the problem with open-source, and it's place in the wider scheme of things, before it degenerates into an Apple fanboy battle.