OStatic

The annual RailsConf just kicked off, and as usual for conferences, news of new releases is trickling out. This year's most significant changes include two new implementations of Ruby that can run Rails, a social performance-tuning application, and a new deployment scheme for larger applications.

All in all, these present a picture of a maturing Rails, readier than ever for serious use.

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project has released the first beta of KDE 4.1, which is targeted to fully replace KDE 3, when it goes final in July. Like other desktop open source projects focused on Linux and open source users, including GNOME and OpenOffice.org, KDE presents a graphical desktop interface designed for usability. The new version has many improvements to the desktop shell and is much more configurable than version 3, as described in the release notes. The KDE Personal Information Management suite is also now ported to the new version, along with quite a few other applications. Here's a look under the hood.

Novell has delivered its Q2 financial results. The company reported $30 million of product revenue from Open Platform Solutions of which $29 million was from Linux Platform Products--up a very healthy 31 percent year-over-year. As Matt Asay notes Novell still lags Red Hat, but enterprise Linux is a two-horse race again.....

Source Labs' Self-Support Suite now supports the open source Eclipse development environment.....

Can Rubinius, a Ruby virtual machine written in Ruby bring back excitement to the open source scripting language?.....

Recently, I got the opportunity to pose a few questions to key people involved with open source efforts at Microsoft, including Sam Ramji (the recently promoted head of Microsoft's open source and Linux efforts), Ori Amiga (Microsoft Group Product Manager, Live Developer Platform), and Susan Hauser (General Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Licensing). They offered up some thought-provoking input on what open source needs, Novell, China, Live Mesh, and other topics. I thank them for taking the time, and please read on for their comments.

As Google's I/O conference continues, developers are in the spotlight. Two new APIs have been released: an image manipulation API, and (more interesting to web app hosting in general), the memcache API. As our sister site GigaOm notes, with Yahoo in limbo and Microsoft missing in action on the Internet, Google is making a huge play for developer mindshare. In today's Google I/O recap on GigaOm, you'll find some good thoughts on Google Gears, HTML5, Javascript, AJAX. Android and Ruby on Rails. Take a gander.

Bryan Che, part of the project management team at Red Hat, started a new project at Fedora this week called Nightlife. Based on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Condor Project, Nightlife will give people the ability to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power.