Stories by: Dahna McConnachie

We hear from SourceForge and SourceForge.net Marketplace Vice President Mike Rudolph about the world's largest Open Source software development web site, which, as of today, claims 162,855 registered projects and 1,732,552 registered users.

GeoNames is a free and open source geographical database. Primarily for developers wanting to integrate the project into web services and applications, it integrates world-wide geographical data including names of places in various languages, elevation, population, and all latitude / longitude coordinates. Users are able to manually edit, correct and add new names with a user-friendly wiki interface. The data is accessible through a number of webservices and a daily database export.

In the second part of this series, we talk to another one of NASA's Mars Rover Drivers, Ashley Stroupe.

Behind every robot is a driver. While NASA's twin robot geologists, Spirit and Opportunity, have gained plenty of media attention since they first landed on Mars at the start of 2004, little attention has been given to the team of dedicated IT workers behind the robots, plotting their every move.

A forum later this month seeks to shed some light on the increasingly complex area of rights protection in the digital music age.

Web 2.0 combined with increased broadband presence has the power to re-fuel e-commerce, according to a recent Paul Budde report.

Email sender remorse is a thing of the past, if Bigstring.com CEO and founder Darin Myman has his way. The start up has developed a service that allows emails to be edited, recalled, or made to self-destruct. Emails, videos and pictures can also be rendered non printable, non-save-able or and / or non-forward-able.

Autodesk recently announced plans to donate its coordinate system (CS) and map projection technology to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). The software, acquired from Mentor Software will help users to more easily support geographic coordinate conversions and allow accurate and precise geospatial analysis. This planned donation joins several previous Open Source donations by the company, including the web mapping MapGuide and the geospatial data access technology (FDO) software, both donated last year.

Country Energy's Broadband over Power Line (BPL) trial is being extended by a month, due to a lack of experienced field technicians and staff.

IPv4 address space is likely to be fully depleted within two to four years, warned a Regional Internet Registry (RIR) organisation last week.

SourceForge has forged a name for itself as the one-stop shop for downloading open source software. Now it looks like it is heading to mega market status, adding services to its suite, with the recent Beta launch of Source.Forge.net Marketplace.