The H Roundup for the week ending 4 February

Welcome to The H Roundup, your rapid review of the week with the most read news on The H, the security alerts and open source releases, and the essential feature articles – all in one quick-to-scan news item.

Top News

The next major update to the VLC Media Player, version 2.0, came one step closer to becoming a final release and it was announced that Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" will use the 3.2 Linux kernel. The open source behind the UK government's gov.uk web site was detailed and there was controversy around a proposal to create a non-GPL-licensed alternative to Busybox. The PHP developers released version 5.3.10 of their scripting language to close a critical vulnerability introduced in the previous security update.

• VLC 2.0 "Twoflower" getting ready to bloom
• The open source behind gov.uk revealed
• Debian 7.0 will use 3.2 kernel
• Controversy around Busybox alternative
• Critical PHP vulnerability being fixed
• Google posts comparison of JavaScript and Dart
• Release of Wayland 1.0 on the horizon
• Security hole in Sudo's debug option closed
• Hacker extracts RFID credit card details
• ownCloud reaches version 3.0

Featured Articles

This week, Glyn Moody took a look at what it takes to open up the code of proprietary applications and turn it into a successful open source project, while Thorsten Leemhuis discussed why Canonical should consider opening its custom Unity desktop interface to other distributions.

• Pandora's Box 2.0: Opening proprietary code
• Comment: Unity can't go it alone

Open Source Releases

• Samba update closes DoS hole
• Open source software powers EU petition initiative
• Git 1.7.9 offers more secure modification requests
• VLC 2.0 "Twoflower" getting ready to bloom
• Debian 6.0.4 brings updates together
• Pentaho opens its "Big Data" Kettle
• Security hole in Sudo's debug option closed
• BigCouch 0.4 moved in
• Open source AWS SDK for Windows Phone
• Firefox 10 arrives bringing CSS 3D transformations
• Mozilla's Thunderbird reaches version 10.0
• Mozilla closes critical holes in Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
• OpenShot Video Editor update adds new 3D text animation
• Clonezilla live clone system brings enhancements
• Mozilla's first Extended Support Release arrives
• VP8 decoding gets faster with SDK update
• Twitter's Bootstrap 2.0 tied up
• Qt SDK 1.2 now available
• Final GIMP 2.6 series update arrives
• Alfresco Enterprise 4 adds a free public cloud option
• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 arrives for testing

Security Alerts

• Samba update closes DoS hole
• Security hole in Sudo's debug option closed
• Mozilla closes critical holes in Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
• Critical PHP vulnerability being fixed
• Break-ins at domain registrar VeriSign in 2010

For everything The H has published in the last week, check out the last seven days of news. To keep up with The H, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow honlinenews on Twitter. You can follow The H's own tweeting on Twitter as honline.

(crve)