I've never done a follow up post on a topic before, but I think this is a topic worth further discussion. Yesterday I posted a rather pointed article focused on Intel and what I consider to be a very poor business decision regarding the GMA500 GPU.

It is official! As of the 16th of October 2009, the United States Department of Defense recognizes Open Source software at Commodity, Off the Shelf (COTS) software, eligible for purchase, read implementation, under the purchasing rules of the Department.

One of the striking aspects of the free software community is its obsession with licences. It's as if within every hacker there's a lawyer struggling to get out. But maybe it's not so surprising; as Larry Lessig reminded us, “code is law”, and the reverse is also true in the sense that the licence adopted has a big impact on how the software is produced. That explains, in part, why recent discussions of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun – and hence MySQL – have once more put free software licences under the microscope.

Cloud computing: you may have heard of it. It seems to be everywhere these days, and if you believe the hype, there's a near-unanimous consensus that it's the future. Actually, a few of us have our doubts, but leaving that aside, I think it's important to ask where does open source stand if the cloud computing vision *does* come to fruition? Would that be a good or bad thing for free software?

Yesterday, I had a good friend ask me What is the best Linux distribution to familiarize myself with Linux? This was not someone who is unfamiliar with technology, or UNIX for that matter, but someone who is one of us, which made the question difficult to answer.

Are you tired of being hunted down by marketers following your digital crumb-trail?

I'm a big fan of Matt Asay's writings about free software. He combines a keen analytical intelligence with that rare thing: long-term hands-on experience in the world of open source business. But even though I generally look forward to reading his posts, I have been rather dreading the appearance of one that I knew, one day, he would write...because it would be wrong. And now he has written it, with the self-explanatory headline: “Free software is dead. Long live open source.”

I have just finished up three days at LinuxCon in Portland, put on by the Linux Foundation. As you might expect from such an event, there were discussions on a wide range of topics, some to get you thinking, some to excite you and some to challenge your notions.

Why is it that Linux distros divide and multiply? And do we have a better name for how and why that's done than, say, "forking"?

If you have not stopped by the #linuxjournal IRC channel yet, I would encourage you to do so. You never know who you will meet or what sort of new ideas will germinate.

Whenever I write about Microsoft here I usually get a few comments asking me, with varying degrees of politeness, why I am wasting electrons on this subject on a site devoted to GNU/Linux. The reason I do this – and why I am about to do it again – is that whether we like it or not, Microsoft remains probably the single most important external factor in the free software world. It's useful, therefore, to try to understand what exactly the company's open source strategy is, in order to head off some of its worst aspects, and to build on any positive elements. The trouble is, I don't think Microsoft has an open source strategy any more.

If you have been following my postings over the last year, you will have read about my attempts to migrate to Linux. Some have been partially successful, others have been unmitigated disasters. I have heard comments from Linux is for smart people to You are right when I comment that the installation process should not be as hard as it sometimes is.

Tristan Louis gives weight to new term that I like a lot: fauxpen. Faux in French means "false" or "fake". So fauxpen means fake open. There has always been a lot of that going around, but since the world of tech inevitably contains more of everything, there's more fauxpen stuff than ever.

People contribute to free software in many ways. Some write the stuff; some write *about* the stuff, spreading the word; and some actually spread open source directly by giving away systems to those who need them. We hear a lot about the stars of first group, and the second group make a lot of noise on their own. But too often we take the third group for granted. I want to talk about one of the unsung heroes of open source – someone who has helped many, and now needs a little help from us.

Computerworld’s Preston Gralla blogged the other day that Microsoft, in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, admitted that Microsoft is afraid of Linux, specifically Ubuntu maker, Canonical, and one of the grand daddies of Linux distributions, Red Hat. And with Windows 7 now released to the large volume customers, the debate of the desktop is again back in the cross hairs.

You may have noticed the odd bit of celebration around the magic billion downloads milestone for Firefox. Of course, as Mozillans themselves point out, that figure doesn't tell us very much; more useful, perhaps, are stats like 300 million users, but that too is only an estimate. And in any case, I think looking backwards is precisely the wrong thing to do at this point: what we need to ask is how do we get the *next* billion downloads – and why do we want them?

Now that I live off-grid, having one laptop (plus a low-powered server) rather than four desktops running all the time is clearly the right thing for me. My current "fleet" of laptops includes some IBM ThinkPads (from T20 to T23) and my ASUS Z3300.

What sounds like DRM is really a cool open source journalism tool.

I am a Linux geek. There I said it. Actually, I am kind of proud of being a Linux geek. I slogged through the bad old days to get here. It seems like every day something new shows up that makes me glad that I chose Linux as my tool of choice.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh and others destroyed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was, to date, the worst case of terrorism in the United States since the Civil War. On that day a number of things changed, but the biggest lessons were not well learned.