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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

"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.

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.

Open Source has won. We've moved into Gandhicon 4. Now what? That's the question that occurred to me yesterday, while sitting in the audience of a tech session at Public Media 2008 in Los Angeles — the big annual conference for what most of us still call public broadcasting.

How much are Yahoo's volunteers worth? And how much less will Yahoo be worth if Microsoft scares them away? That's the question that should be at the center of talk about Yahoo's value — both as an acquisition for Microsoft and as good company to work for with.

What if Yahoo's main value isn't its search engine or its advertising business, but the openness that makes it more Net-native and hacker-friendly than Microsoft? Does Microsoft understand that this same kind of openness plays a large role in Google's success as well?

One's head spins thinking about Microsoft's unsolicited bid of $44.6 billion for Yahoo.

Yahoo has been a major figure in the open source world for a long time. It sponsors events, participates in countless development projects, and encourages its own engineers to do open source work. And, of course, it uses countless open source code bases as well.

Free thinking and free code have two things in common: a lot of the best work has already been done, and we can re-use it.

That's my second challenge to Social Graph Foo Campers. The first is getting some clarity about what the "social graph" means in the first place.

Think about the differences between stories and facts. Between generating interest and pursuing knowledge. Between grabbing attention and building out what we know. Then think about the connections between the freedom to build code and the freedom to inform one's self and others. Because the former is a model for the latter.

Is the real challenge for PR just "influence"? Or is it something bigger thatn that? If so, are there ways we can help PR move past its history of spinnage and into a future of usefulness?

Linux wasn't everywhere at CES, but it was close, making it impossible to see Everything with Linux in it. But we tried.

So I've decided to make my next post a kind of running commentary, with lots of links and tags, in a Linux Journal Flickr set. Flickr runs on Linux, so that's one more excuse.

So I'm sitting in the rather vast "press" corner of a CES keynote audience, waiting to see Paul Otellini, President & CEO of Intel, give a keynote. Two years ago I sat at an Otellini keynote here. As I reported in What's Intel up to with VIIV?, it was disappointing. Will this be different? Sure hope so.