In the wake of recent flareups over the inclusion of BSD licensed code in GPL licensed programs, a little extra vigilance can go a long way. Recently, Fedora package managers manually reviewing code licenses in a new version of Joop Stakenborg?s popular XLog program ? used by amateur radio enthusiasts around the globe to record their contacts ? discovered a change in the licensing of one of the included files which impacted the licensing of the program as a whole.

Zonbu has started shipping a laptop version of its Linux-based computing appliance for home users. The Zonbu Notebook or “Zonbook 1″ is based on a power-efficient Via processor, runs Gentoo Linux and 20 open source applications, and sells for $280 with a managed service plan.

The SIBsim4 project is based on sim4, which is a program designed to align an expressed DNA sequence with a genomic sequence, allowing for introns. SIBsim4 is an extensive rewrite of the sim4 program to improve execution speed and provide more informative output.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release fixes excessive run-time in some cases of partially repeated sequences. All users are encouraged to update.

VideoLAN Client (VLC) is a media player, streamer, and encoder for Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, QNX, and PocketPC. It can play most audio and video codecs (MPEG 1/2/4, DivX, WMV, Vorbis, AC3, AAC, etc.), has support for VCD, SVCD, and DVD (with menus), and can read or dump streams from a network source (HTTP, UDP, DVB, MMS, etc.). It can also act as a server and send streams through the network, with optional support for audio and video transcoding.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This version is aimed at fixing security vulnerabilities in the ActiveX plugin and the FLAC library that affect VLC media player 0.8.6c and lower. Improvements include better video output compatibility on Mac OS X, and Apple Remote support on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

pyAwale is a pure Python implementation of the Ivory Coast rules for Awale. Awale is a game of great antiquity, and has been played around the world in various forms for millenia. It is a member of the mancala family of board games.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release improves the user interface (use return key instead of a click on the end panel to restart a new party and display count of seeds when more than 8), and adds a script to replay a party from traces/logs.

Sylbi is a conversation system that is not a forum and not a blogging platform, but a combination of the two. It grew from the idea that a blog with comments and a forum only differ in their perspective of the conversation. Both provide a chronological set of postings, initiated by someone, and, (potentially) replied to by others. The main difference is the perspective they present: a blog presents the perspective of the blog owner(s), while a forum presents the perspective of the forum and a topic defined in the forum. Sylbi allows you to look at conversations either way.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release fixed a bug in conversation recategorization. It adds tracing via 'carp' that can be enabled/disabled by the user.

Even if you work only in Linux, you’ll likely have to use Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files at one time or another. Several open source projects use this common format, including Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, and PHP. Microsoft developed CHM as a proprietary format for Windows 98, leaving behind the previous WinHelp (HLP) format. CHM is still alive and kicking in XP and Vista, though some applications use the newer Microsoft Help 2 format.