5 Newest Updates for Open Source Community

With the increase in availability and deployment of open source software in personal and commercial environments, the Software libre initiative seems to succeed in its aim of putting an end to the predatory vendor lock-in. Especially, during this  period of economic recession the when IT products development costs are rising, open source software are fast becoming viable alternatives. This crisis has adversely affected the corporate budget’s allotted for enterprise software and opened the gates for open source software to handle the contingency. The new IT-projects are inclined on customized open source software as favorable decision that allows to develop more with limited budgets. This has supported the cause of open source community that is striving for better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility and lower cost.

There have been several grand events surrounding the open source community this year. We decided to discuss on 5 newest updates for open source community.

Thunderbird 3 beta

Keeping up with the evolution of Mozilla platform, Thunderbird 3 Beta 2 was released a few months ago with a number of cool features and massive bug fixes. Mozilla’s desktop email client includes archiving like Gmail and a new Activity Manager that helps you get a clearer idea about what Thunderbird is doing. Further, Thunderbird 3 beta includes new Add-ons Manager, improved address book and more.  For Mac users they’ll be able to see better Growl notification and have more keyboard  shortcuts.

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Firefox 3.5.1

Shortly after releasing its Fireforx 3.5, Mozilla introduced the updated version 3.5.1 with major bug fixes, covering up the security concerns. Firefox 3.5 was released in a hope to build a better foundation for Web applications with the inclusion of new TraceMonkey Javascript engine, private browsing mode, speculative parsing, HTML5 video and audio element support, location aware browsing and more. Firefox continues to rule with its unparalleled feature-set.

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NetBeans IDE 6.7

Sun released its new NetBeans 6.7 integrated development environment(IDE ) for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. The new IDE  included integrated support for Sun’s Project Kenai. Kenai is a collaborative hosting site for free and open source projects. NetBeans 6.7 offers improved support for PHP and Apache Maven, which will enable both Java and PHP developers to utilize the new IDE.

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GNome 2.26.3

It’s the latest maintenance of GNome 2.26 dektop environment.  GNome 2.26.3 underwent major bug fixes, documentation updates and large number of updated translations. Some of its latest highlighted features include

• Improved performance for GNome menus
• Nomalizing tracks in Brasero
• Improved seeking in AVI and Matroska video files for GStreamer Plugins
• Fixed 7zip issues in File Roller,
• Totem has been upgraded to auto-load cached subtitles that have spaces in their names.
• Support for Exchange/Outlook mail
• Improved support for multiple monitors

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Xfce 4.6.0

Xfce is an open source platform for improved desktop experience. The latest version of Xfce has been released after two years  of development. Xfce 4.6 comes with a new configuration backend, a new settings manager, a brand new sound mixer, and huge improvements to the session manager as well as the rest of Xfce’s core components.

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