Two years after Google kicked off project hosting on its Google Code site, Google is reporting that it now hosts over 80,000 projects. The actual number of active projects registered at Sourceforge may be as low as 15,000. It may well be that Google now has more active projects hosted on its Google Code site than Sourceforge – suggests Matt Asay from CNET Blogs.

The real question, of course, is how important or relevant these projects are. I’ve not heard of many (any?) high-profile open-source projects moving to Google Code, though there certainly are some making the move.

Read the whole article.

Creative Commons Blog writes about Manybooks.net – a very useful website which contains over 19,000 ebooks, available for free:

With the advent of more ebook reading devices, sites like Manybooks.net are providing a useful service in transforming digital materials into a variety of electronic formats that can be read by several different ebook readers and mobile devices. All of the 19,000+ ebooks on Manybooks are available for free. Many works are originally sourced from Project Gutenberg, a longstanding project to release books in the public domain as digital texts.

At the moment, Manybooks.net hosts about 130 Creative Commons works in multiple formats.

“The Future of Ideas” – Lawrence Lessig’s book – is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. With this news, all of Lessig’s books are now freely licensed.

Lawrence Lessig writes about “The Future of Ideas” on his blog:

I am particularly glad that The Future of Ideas is now freely licensed. That book hit the stores 2 weeks after September 11. I’m glad it now has a chance to flow a bit more freely. Thanks to Random House (and Basic Books, and Penguin) for being open to this experiment. I hope we’ll have some useful data to report about its effect.

You can download the book here.

KStumble is a service-menu for using StumbleUpon with Konqueror. It currently allows you to:

• Stumble!
• Rate pages
• Submit new pages
• Remove ratings on pages

KStumble is available here.

How to use KStumble: Login to StumbleUpon by opening Konqueror, right clicking on a page (any page, including blank pages and the welcome page), going to Actions>Stumble Upon>Login to Stumble Upon, and following the prompts.

To Stumble!, open a new tab in Konqueror, right click on the page, and go to Actions>Stumble Upon>Stumble!

An article on using multiple clipboard on KDE and GNOME (Linux), found on Linux.com website:

You might imagine that a utility as simple as a multiple clipboard would have become standard on the GNU/Linux desktop. All it needs is the ability to copy and paste text and some popular graphics formats, plus some basic controls to set the number of stored items and to clear the memory. Yet, although at least six multiple clipboards are available, choosing which to use is a matter of trade-offs that depends partly on your desktop environment and partly on which features you want.

Read the article.

As you probably noticed, Jamendo turned orange last month. If you still see the old, blue version, then click the Test the new version of Jamendo link at the upper corner of the website.

Here’s a screenshot of the new Jamendo:

Jamendo offers free access and free download of music tracks, published with Creative Commons licences. On Jamendo, the Artists choose to give access to their music for free to the users.

Markus Mauder shows some pieces of the final look of KDE 4.0.0 and mentions some of the most anticipated features of this great step forward for the Free software desktop. His First look at the unreleased KDE 4.0.0 (with screenshots) is available here.

Take a look at this album for screenshots included by Markus in his post.

This is the list of the very best online listings of open source applications for Windows. Websites are described and links are provided. If you want to find open source software alternatives to well-known commercial software, this is a good place to begin your search.

Read more.

Linux.com writes about online library (Universal Library Project) which has made 1.5 million books freely available in digitized format. According to the researchers’ estimates, the Universal Library collection currently represents one percent of the approximately 100 million books to ever have been published.

An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. […] One and a half million books in more than 20 languages, including Chinese, English, Arabic, and various Indian languages, are now accessible via a single Web portal. The online library includes rare and out-of-print books from private and public collections around the world.

There are plenty of books that are no longer in copyright, and that have long been forgotten, but which would be useful to scholars, students, and just the general population – says Michael Shamos, co-director of the project at the Carnegie Mellon University in the US. However, don’t be too excited. You won’t find books newer than 1920 there – at least I couldn’t find them. No doubt Amazon is still the best. Of course, only when you want to pay for your books.

Here’s another article about KDE 4.0. It was published last week, by The Inquirer.

According to this article, KDE 4 uses less memory than the older versions:

According to the German Pro-Linux News, KDE 4 tests showed that it is a substantial improvement on KDE 3.5. The old version needed 348MB to work comfortably while the new one sail through the same tests using only 228MB. In comparison the rival Open Sauce interface GNOME run needs 256MB just for the basics.

Read the whole article.