The main problem with "social networking" isn't just that your "social" life has corporate boundaries. It's that your personal choices do too.

I'm looking to compare how much money is made with Linux, vs. how much is made because of it. While I know it'll be hard to find the former and impossible to determine the latter, I think comparing the two will still be revealing.

The comments on the single distro story got me thinking about what I want/need/use. I have been using Linux since before Bill Gates heard of it and my uses, needs and interests have changed over time.

It turns out that hard infrastructure is softer than the name suggests. This is good, since I want to make the case that both LInux and the Net are forms of infrastructure no less legitimate than water, electricity, roads, sewers and waste collection.

Does it matter who pays the salaries of Linux kernel developers? If so, how much, and in what ways?

Ola Bini has written a couple of posts that touch on Rubinius and the other Ruby implementations. The first talks about the new weekly meeting of implementors, saying “[I]t’s a huge deal.

That's the question raised by Britt Blaser in “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…”. It's also one suggested indirectly by Phil Hughes in Our Internet.

Captain Charles Boycott was an unfortunate chap. Not only was he the object of prolonged social ostracism, but his name has passed into history as both a noun and a verb describing that action. At the moment, the idea is much on people's minds because of suggestions that the Beijing Olympic games should be boycotted, but here I want to discuss something quite different: whether the open source community should be boycotting Microsoft, and if that is even possible.

Is Linux infrastructure? Or is it just another operating system, like Windows, MacOS and various Unixes?

How about the Internet? Is the Net infrastructure? Or is it just the #3 "service" in the "triple play" sold by your local phone or cable company?

There are many ways of peering into the future. This page lists 163 of them, including cephalonomancy (divination by boiling an ass head), coscinomancy, (divination using a sieve and a pair of shears), ololygmancy (fortune-telling by the howling of dogs) and tiromancy (divination using cheese). Me, I prefer to stick with the tried-and-trusted method of reading between the lines of Microsoft press releases.

Tuesday was an insane amount of fun here at BeOS Linux Journal. If you missed the shenanigans, don't worry, most of the silliness is still here, just not on the front page. Here's a quick list of the stories. I think my personal favorite was the rumor about Sony buying BeOS. :) Enjoy:

What happens when it's as easy to run fiber optic cabling in your house as it is to run Ethernet? Or to bridge one into the other as easily as you plug two Ethernet cables together? For example, with one of these...

It's time to draw a distinction between blogging and flogging. Because the former has become so buried in the latter that we've lost track of what blogging was in the first place, and the promise it still holds.

I have been covering Microsoft for over 25 years - I've even written a few books about Windows. During that time, I've developed a certain respect for a company that just doesn't give up, and whose ability to spin surpasses even that of politicians. To be sure, Microsoft has crossed the line several times, but it has always worked within the system, however much it has attempted to use it for its own ends. No more: in the course of trying to force OOXML through the ISO fast-track process, it has finally gone further and attacked the system itself; in the process it has destroyed the credibility of the ISO, with serious knock-on consequences for the whole concept of open standards.

A little while ago, Gregory Brown announced his Ruby Mendicant Project. He’s trying to raise enough money to work for the Ruby community full time for 6 months (or on a time-share basis if he doesn’t raise the full amount, see the web site for the full details). With just 7 days left, he’s about 40% of the way there.

"Free" has been a founding concept in the Linux world since before there was Linux — or GNU/Linux, if you prefer. In his history of the GNU project, Richard M.

Almost exactly one year ago, I made the following suggestion in the wake of Dell's long-awaited decision to offer ready-configured GNU/Linux systems alongside the usual panoply of Windows systems:

we must vote with our wallets. Assuming the Dell GNU/Linux systems are not hopelessly flawed in some way, we must all try to buy as many of them as we can (within reason, of course).

What follows is a short report on my own experiences of putting my money where my mouth is.

It should concern us that most computer users -- ourselves included -- see themselves as dependent variables in respect to large companies' privacy policies, rather than as independent variables.

“Free Workshop; Free IceCore Tools; Free Pizza. Can life get any better???”

Not a bad lead in, eh? I sure thought so when the email showed up in my inbox. It turns out that Novell’s Open Source Technology Center is sponsoring a workshop on ICEcore, an open source collaboration toolkit (it’s written one way on their website and another in the email, I don’t know which one to believe.).

News that Microsoft is to be hit with yet another fine from the European Union has naturally attracted plenty of attention, but it has also raised the old questions of whether such interventions by governments are justified or even do any good.