Leading Asterisk developer Digium Inc. has snagged a licensing deal with a subsidiary of Japanese telco giant NTT in what it sees as a major breakthrough for the open-source PBX system in that critical market.

The women's technical group LinuxChix has appointed a new international coordinator, Mary Gardiner, replacing previous coordinator Jenn Vesperman, who resigned after six years running the organization.

It's true. Hilariously true. An eagle-eyed Groklaw ninja, sk43, has spotted an ftp site where you can get binary copies of Linux libraries needed by SCO's OpenServer and UnixWare customers who use lxrun. But you can't get the source code from that sco.com ftp site. SCO directs their customers to .... sunsite.unc.edu. Why bless my stars, sunsite.unc.edu is the old name for what is now ibiblio! So here's a headline for you, and it's absolutely accurate:

Many years ago when this project was first started, it was called "GTK+ AOL Instant Messenger." AOL naturally complained, and Mark Spencer changed the name to "Gaim." AOL was appeased, and no one really ever heard of it because there were very few users back then.

After a long, and unfortunately secret debate, they settled on the name "Pidgin" for gaim itself, "libpurple" for libgaim (which, as of 2.0.0 beta6, exists), and "Finch" for gaim-text.

In preinstalling Linux on consumer PCs, Dell's biggest challenge will be finding a full set of open source drivers for the hardware that will run with the new machines, says Dell's software architect on the project.

There's less concern about which OS you're on and, in fact, we're not going to cap it, we're going to see what happens with our users. We don't have a target, but I expect Linux usage will go up," said Scott Handy, vice president for Linux and open source at IBM.

Kaspersky Lab has discovered the first virus designed to infect iPod portable media players. The virus, which has been named Podloso, is a proof of concept program which does not pose a real threat.

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1 of the LSB.