Sam Varghese is a columnist for the IT Wire website who likes Ubuntu and apparently has great respect for Mark Shuttleworth. He writes opinion pieces that I often disagree with but he most certainly is entitled to his opinion. He has now, on three separate occasions this year, written pieces which are harshly critical of Ubuntu's detractors.

This is a devils advocate post in response to my original post "Reasons your parents should use Linux". Though my original post intended to explain 5 reasons you should switch your parents to Linux, this post will address what many people have commented on in the past few days. 5 reasons why you should NOT switch your parents to Linux.

It seems as though I completely failed to make the point I was trying to make. With the question “Is Canonical becoming the new Microsoft?”, I was trying to ask if the overall level of “bad-karma” that is being directed toward Ubuntu/Canonical was potentially making it into the next entity that the world loves to hate?

We’ve turned off comments on the original post; there were about 200 already and there’s only so much that can be said before people stop adding anything new. I wanted to let you know that I received a private response from Mark Shuttleworth, in which he says that he has no intention of apologising for his comment.

"The time will come when the folks at Microsoft who have a clear vision for the company as a participant in this community, rather than as a hostile antagonist, will win. At that point I’d love to work with Microsoft. It’s not an evil empire. It’s just a company that is efficiently grounded in the 1980s. New leadership and new thinking might make it a more effective partner for us."

There were some ruffled feathers due to a blog post of Mark Shuttleworth regarding upcoming changes to Ubuntu's development process. Muktware approached him for clarification. A lot of development that was done internally by Canonical employees will now be opened up to selected community members for review and contribution.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has once more claimed that Linux and open source violates Microsoft's intellectual property and patents. Canonical's CEO Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ballmer has it all wrong.

The "Is VMware violating the GPL" question is circulating again (Matt Asay follows up his own post here) so I thought it would be useful to dust off an Illuminata Perspectives that I wrote when this same thing cropped up about a year ago. I've excerpted the most salient points from the original post and added a little updated commentary.

During a phone briefing today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth described the Ubuntu 9.10 desktop, server and cloud strategy to members of the IT media. WorksWithU tuned in and posed some key questions to Shuttleworth. Here are 10 highlights from the call.