This week, the Linux Foundation has begun offering discounts on new hardware from Lenovo, Dell, and HP for individuals who have joined the group’s membership program.

For the price of $99 per year, membership provides a discount of up to 40% on Lenovo devices, and employee purchase prices on Dell and HP products. The new incentive is designed to help Linux users purchase new systems without being hit by the extra costs they often face for not choosing Windows.

Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, said that Linux users are central to the Foundation’s mission of promoting the open source OS.

“Our individual members are the heartbeat of the Linux Foundation and we will continue to find ways to extend special benefits to them,” he said. “Perks like the employee purchase discounts from Dell, HP and Lenovo and lifetime Linux.com email addresses are unique things we can offer to sustain support for Linux.”

“These benefits can translate into hundreds or thousands of dollars for those who purchase their devices as part of this program,” the Foundation said in a prepared statement. No doubt the group hopes that the promise of a good deal will garner new support for the Linux operating system.

//STORY UPDATE 10/16/2009:

Some users were complaining that they were unable to find out the discount information from Lenovo sales reps. A call to the Linux Foundation’s PR firm resolved the problem quickly; the particular Lenovo sales rep in question had been giving out bad information.

The user was contacted by Linux Foundation and directed to a website with discount information, which was valid. The happy ending? He saved $100 on a Lenovo laptop. -ed.

MySQL’s founder pontificates on the future of MySQL now that Sun has been bought by Oracle.

One-time Twitter competitor Jaiku has been open sourced.

Is the open source X.Org Radeon driver faster than AMD’s Catalyst drivers for 2D performance in Linux?

Icrontic is proud to introduce our brand new “Open Source Evangelism” series. This regular feature will pit commercial applications against free and open source software (FOSS) to see which one comes out on top.

Today we will be taking a look at Pidgin, a popular Open Source alternative to commercial instant messaging clients.

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Yesterday, the lads over at Phoronix began coverage of AMD’s release of the code and documentation necessary to write drivers for AMD 3000 and 4000-series GPUs on Linux.

The process has been arduous and technically-challenging for AMD. It has been difficult for the firm to release concise documentation that will let programmers do their task without revealing their hand for future GPUs.

“John Bridgman and Alex Deucher have been working on deciding what code or documentation is needed for programming, sanitize it of any information not relevant to bringing up the 3D engine, remove any details concerning future ATI hardware, and then getting all of this work cleared by AMD’s lead software and hardware architects so that it can be publicly released without any NDAs or other string attached,” writes Michael Larabel of Phoronix.

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The feisty guys at Phoronix are reporting that Creative has released its X-Fi sound driver under the GNU GPLv2 license.

On the eve of the T-Mobile G1’s official launch, the source code for the complete Android platform has been released in open source. The code offers an operating system, middleware, key mobile applications and an API for additional applications.

On the Android Open Source Project’s inaugural blog post, Dave Bort says that the fledgling code is “now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project.” Bort goes on to detail all the potential uses for Android beyond the phone, including virtual machines and embedded Linux.

Contributors are invited to add the code-base in an effort to make it the most ubiquitous and thorough platform for mobile phones in the world.