After announcing its first event for “end users,” the Linux Foundation has begun to promote “individual memberships.” Available now for $50 a year, memberships include a T-shirt, quarterly newsletter, and the “ability to run for and vote for a Linux Foundation board seat,” says the organization.

I haven’t been enthusiastic about any office application for some time. They aren’t flashy. They shouldn’t be, really, as it gets in the way of their primary task. That’s why it seems that OpenOffice.org’s 3.0 release candidate is a winner. It doesn’t look radically different. Its new features are its strength, and its extensibility is its future.

CEO Mark Hurd is not running Carly Fiorina’s Hewlett-Packard, but he’s not running Bill & Dave’s old shop either. He is trying to do to HP what Lou Gerstner did to IBM a decade ago, transform his company into a services powerhouse, growing through acquisitions and lay-offs.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced Wednesday that his company, Canonical, will hire professional designers and interaction experts to improve the usability of the Linux desktop software ecosystem. They will work closely with upstream developers to bring a better experience to users of the open source operating system.

A few weeks ago, when I wrote that, “forced to choose, the average FOSS-based business is going to choose business interests over FOSS [free and open source software] every time,” many people, including Mathew Aslett and Matt Assay, politely accused me of being too cynical. Unhappily, you only have to look at the relations between Red Hat and Fedora, the distribution Red Hat sponsors, during the recent security crisis for evidence that I might be all too accurate.

As we all know, there are a vast amount of applications available for Ubuntu. People outside the Linux scene will probably have heard and used the most famous open source apps (such as Firefox), but there are a select few programs that are either insanely cool and innovative, or just extremely polished. They might not even be well known within the Linux community, but they make the overall experience that much better for everyone.

We asked the devoted Linux users, the dual-Windows-and-Linux-booters, and the newer converts to the open-source operating system last week why they made the switch to Linux, and received over 330 responses as of this posting. The answers were sometimes level-headed, often passionate in their embrace of open-source culture, and occasionally induced a laugh (or a cringe) with tales of the last straw before switching.

The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters. Google Chrome relies on Apple’s WebKit software for rendering web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community-developed browser Firefox from Mozilla.

Servers for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Linux were compromised in recent weeks by some kind of illegal access. Neither project however is currently admitting than any of their software or users were in any way directly affected by the illegal access.

The validity of open source software licenses won a major court victory when a federal judge ruled this week that copyright law allows programmers to control the modification of their software even though it’s free. The ruling makes legal sense, said copyright attorney Ross Dannenberg.