A long, long time ago, you asked questions of Mark Shuttleworth -- astronaut, entrepreneur, activist, and now chief of Debian-and-GNOME based distribution Ubuntu Linux. Mark's been understandably busy running the world of Ubuntu, especially considering the imminent release of the group's newest version, Hoary Hedgehog. He's answered below questions on everything from what makes it worth paying for a trip to space to how software offered with source, for free, and under a liberal license (aka Free software) can sustain itself and its creators. Read on for his answers.

jonathan_ingram writes "After struggling for several months with a planned changeover from CVS to Subversion, the KDE team have abandoned the effort, and decided to move to BitKeeper instead. As KDE's press release states: "The KDE project had been using CVS for a number of years, but due to persistent and crippling limitations it was finally decided to convert the massive source repository to Subversion, a next-generation CVS clone with fewer limitations. Unfortunately, due to many unresolved issues and technical problems with Subversion, the move has proven impossible. After an intense internal debate, it was finally decided that BitKeeper would be the most appropriate choice for a new revision control system, given its proven superiority and track record in the Open Source community. BitKeeper has enjoyed wide-spread success and praise as the official source code repository for the GNU/Linux kernel."

Anonymous Coward writes "After long consideration, Pat Volkerding has removed GNOME from Slackware. Pat mentions in the -current ChangeLog that GNOME takes a lot of time to package, so this move should allow more time to be spent on the rest of Slackware." From the changelog: "Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent desktop choice."

arexx writes "Kubuntu, the new Linux flavour based on the fast-climbing Ubuntu but with a KDE desktop as standard has reached its first preview release, with the first full release due next month. ISOs and torrents are available for all major architectures from cdimage.ubuntu.com. Kubuntu is the first distribution to ship with the new KDE 3.4, released just two days ago. Existing Ubuntu users can grab KDE 3.4 with a quick and customarily painless 'sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop' in the nearest terminal window." Kubuntu isn't alone, though: as reader fixertechno puts it, "After 3 years of development, testing, and me waiting patiently, the first stable release of Ark Linux has been released; Bero's announcement is here. Ark Linux is a KDE based desktop version of Linux with similar goals of 'it just works' to Ubuntu Linux. If you've been waiting to try Ark Linux -- or any Linux distribution for that matter, now's the time!"

andy753421 links to today's announcement of the official release of KDE 3.4, and writes "Several KDE 3.4 based distributions such as ArkLinux and Kubuntu are soon to follow. Features in the release include built in Text to Speech, a revamped trash system, enhanced PDF support and PC to PC synchronization, as well as a new theme. KDE 3.4 weights in at 6,500+ bug fixes, 1,700+ enhancements, and a grand total of 80,000+ contributions." Reader gotr00t adds a link to the KDE download mirror page . Update: 03/16 20:58 GMT by T : mrevell points out an interview with KDE hacker Aaron Seigo in the latest LugRadio, in which Seigo "dispels various myths about KDE and talks about the desktop environment's future."

krunchyfrog writes "The first test release of Fedora Core 4 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. New features in Fedora Core 4 test 1 include previews of GCC 4.0, GNOME 2.10, and KDE 3.4, as well as support for the PowerPC architecture. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version fc4test1, so that they are noticed and appropriately classified. Discuss this release on fedora-test-list. -- The BitTorrent link is already there."

remember_beos writes "Sun created Project Looking Glass (LG3D) as a 'proof of concept' not long ago. It is an environment for Linux, like KDE or Gnome, but with some really great 3D functionality. More than just eye-candy, LG3D provides functional use of an extra spatial dimension on your desktop. Now there is a LiveCD for us all to try it out."

fluor2 writes "The CentOS team is pleased to announce availability of CentOS 4.0. Major new features include the Linux 2.6 Kernel, SELinux, udev replacing the /dev system, Xorg, MySQL4, CyrusIMAPD, Gnome 2.8 and KDE 3.3. These improvements along with many more are detailed in the release notes available online. We read recently about Red Hat & Centos On Name Usage, and the solution is now to link to a Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor (PNAELV).
Go ahead and download CentOs from one of their mirrors."

clsc writes "The German tech news site Heise Online reports that Knoppix 3.8 is being presented at CeBIT (Hall 9, Stand C39). Knoppix 3.8 has kernel 2.6 as default, KDE 3.3.2, OpenOffice 1.1.4, as well as... Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0. There's also a really neato new thing involving unionfs . It seems to imply that you can change most anything on the running system, even as it is running from CD - and changes can be stored too (even on NTFS)."

Mark Stone writes with a thoughtful look back at the year 2004 in open source, pointing out both major gains and inevitable uncertainties. He writes "2004 stands out as a year in which open source consolidated its position as a valuable and accepted approach to business and technology policy. A less obvious but significant trend underlies all of this: even as open source business models join the mainstream, the open source development model remains a mysterious process on which large technology companies struggle to capitalize. Key issues and developments have played out in four areas: legal, policy, business, and technology." Read on for the rest.

twener writes "The KDE project has announced the first release candidate of KDE 3.4 which brings many new features targeted for release at 16th March. Sources (requirements list, build script), an i486 GNU/Linux Live-CD (375MB) and SUSE 9.2 binary packages are available currently. OSdir.com and tuxmachines.org have screenshots of this release. Source Code and a Live CD are available."

essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."

IGnatius T Foobar writes "There are lots of open source groupware products out there, but the perpetual problem has always been that we don't have a single, unified standard protocol to connect open source groupware clients to open source groupware servers. GroupDAV changes all that. Support for GroupDAV now exists in Citadel, OpenGroupware.org, KDE Kontact, and connectors are currently in beta for Evolution and Mozilla Sunbird. Unlike CAP and CalDAV, the GroupDAV effort is backed by real code that works today. "

FOSDEM writes "The first FOSDEM speakers' interviews are available on the FOSDEM website. The FOSDEM folks have produced 3 great interviews of Alexander Larsson from Nautilus (Gnome), Matthias Ettrich from KDE and Olivier Fourdan from XFCE."

Carewolf writes "Finally the KDE 3.4 beta 2 has been released (codename "Keinstein"). Besides being the latest and greatest, it also marks the KDE 3.4 feature freeze and will provide a good demonstration of the splendors that will be KDE 3.4. Feature and release plans can be found here, and the news is also covered on the dot. Download now and help hunt the last bugs for the next major release of KDE."

jbltgz writes "Zen Linux 1.0 was just released today. Zen Linux is a bootable LiveCD distribution. More than that it is a 100% compatible Debian installer. It boasts easy remastering for creating your own personalized versions. Most configuration is done automatically upon boot and requires no user interaction, things 'just work.' Zen Linux currently comes in three flavors Core, Gnome, and KDE. Zen Linux is built on the latest Debian unstable repositories and is 100% Debian compatible. You can expect frequent up to date maintenence releases for all supported flavors."

sebFlyte writes "The KDE Cygwin team are reportedly closing in on a native port for QT to allow said graphical framework to run over Windows. This has upset a few people, who think that porting open source apps to Windows is strengthening MS's near monopoly and damaging Linux." (Of course, KDE also runs on OSes besides Linux.)

HulkProtector1 writes "NewsForge has published an interview Tom Chance conducted with Andreas Brand, a sociologist who is studying the free software world. Read the full interview to learn more about Andreas' views on KDE's development model, volunteer recruitment and retention, motivation, work distribution and more. "

Anonymous Coward writes "The first beta of Mandrakelinux 10.2 has been released. New package versions and features include some changes to the installation program, kernel 2.6.10, glibc 2.3.4 and gcc 3.4.3. You also get KDE 3.3.2, Gnome, 2.8.1, and GTK 2.6.1. Mozilla-firefox replaces Mozilla, and you will also find gimp 2.2, cdrecord 2.01.01a21 with DVD+R Dual Layers support, OpenOffice.org 1.1.4, Postgresql 8.0, and MySQL 4.1.9. Improvements are also seen in the Mandrakelinux Control Center ergonomy, to ease the network configuration with a better integration of the firewall tool. OSDir tours Mandrakelinux 10.2 Beta 1 with GNOME and KDE in their Screenshot Tours."

Michael Clark writes "Seen those funky remote scripting techniques employed by Orkut, Gmail and Google Suggests that avoid that oh so 80's page reloading (think IBM 3270 only slower). A fledgling standard is developing to allow this new breed of fast and highly dynamic web applications to flourish. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format with language bindings for C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, TCL and others. It is derived from JavaScript and it has similar expresive capabilities to XML. Perfect for the web as doesn't suffer from XML's bloat and is custom made for our defacto browser language. JSON-RPC is a simple remote procedure call protocol similar to XML-RPC although it uses the lightweight JSON format instead of XML (so it is much faster). The XMLHttpRequest object (or MSXML ActiveX in the case of Internet Explorer) is used in the browser to call remote methods on the server without the need for reloading the page. JSON-RPC-Java is a Java implementation of the JSON-RPC protocol. JSON-RPC-Java combines these all together to create an amazingly and simple way of developing these highly interactive type of enterprise java applications with JavaScript DHTML web front-ends. " Click below to read more about it.