Given the dangers inherent in manned space flight, NASA has been pretty lucky. Today, that luck runs out. Compiled by Tony Long.

A sad day in history and one that will never be forgotten, Baldy

Source: Jan. 28, 1986: Challenger

It’s important to understand volunteer motivation to encourage further altruistic and mutually beneficial behavior. O’Reilly Editor Andy Oram has created a short survey for people to contribute to community documentation: “Do you answer questions on mailing lists about how to use a software tool or language? Do you write documentation, put up web pages, or contribute to wikis about software? If so, please take the following survey to help O’Reilly do research that will help us understand why people contribute to documentation (versus software projects themselves.) The results will be published on the O’Reilly web site, and may help software projects and communities get more such contributions. We’re only interested in hearing from people who do this for non-monetary reasons.

Source: Why Do You Contribute to Community Documentation?

The long-awaited next version of the Debian open-source operating system is most likely to be released in February, according to members of the Debian community.

Source: Debian tipped for February release

We all benefit from Open Source and/or Free Software. Everyone. Even if you’re reading this blog from Internet Explorer on a Windows XP box, you benefit in some way from Open Source. There’s probably at least one open source program that you use on a regular basis on your system, and if not then somewhere down the line your ISP, your coworker, or some other point in the process is relying on open source. While many would argue that fame is more important than money to open source volunteers, I’ve yet to meet one that didn’t like money as well as fame. The goal of Project of the Month is to provide a little of each to open source developers, whether they’re already getting revenue from their work or not.

Source: Open Source Project of the Month Announced

KDevelop 3.4 has been released, bringing many new features to KDE’s Integrated Development Environment. The first major release in over a year closes more than 500 bugs. There is an impressive list of additional features including improved Qt 4 support, new debugging abilities, more attractive default user interface layout and improvements for C++, Ruby and PHP support. Packages are available for Kubuntu and openSUSE with unofficial builds for several others on the download page.

Source: KDevelop 3.4 Brings Many New Features