"Over the last few years, I’ve come to accept the fact that regardless of my attempts to quit this job, I am fundamentally a programmer. I wrote a book about security, I am the Editor In Chief of Free Software Magazine, but in the end I am still just a programmer. A lucky one, I must admit. Until last month, I had been blessed by the fact that either the software I wrote was owned by somebody else after a short contract (and therefore it didn’t matter to me once I had completed it: somebody else eventually took it over), or that what I programmed had been created just for myself (I was the only user of the software… bliss!). This changed when I became a free software programmer. I have recently released what I consider an important project: Drigg.

In this issue of Free Software Magazine Terry Hancock interviews the amazing engineers involved in the OpenHardware project. Gavin Baker casts doubts on the effectiveness of the GPL In today's web-oriented world where applications are less and less "desktop". Scott Nesbitt's article on Prism, which helps people to bring web applications to the desktop couldn't be more timely.

One of the more common suggestions from readers following the article on my personal must-have apps for Ubuntu last week was that I install some sort of virtual machine on my computer and test software that way. So, I decided to do exactly that and found that VirtualBox is not only easy to install on Ubuntu (or other platforms) but is also easy to use.

In my ongoing quest to take over the world with Linux as my OS of choice, I've noticed that simply handing someone an install CD doesn't really do the trick. I've also noticed that formatting their Windows 95 install with a fresh version of Linux tends to make angry faces as well. The more tech savvy the user is, the more resistant to change they tend to be.

"People are ignorant, but we already know that. As usual, I’ve read something really stupid on Twitter this morning. It said: I hope Apple will develop for everyone [every OS]. I think it would be one of the worst things to ever happen. Why do people want to install non-free software on free systems?

In order to make your application appear in the Add/Remove tool (gnome-app-install), there are two steps to make: * add a “X-AppInstall-Package” line to your .desktop * and run “update-app-install” to update the database

First of all why do this?

Recently, in this column, I spoke about how we can lose our free software choices if we don’t use them. Sticking with that choice is not always easy so how do we get others to make it, particularly in a world where the choice is often made for them. How can we advocate free software in a world where others don’t seem to care?

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, recently wrote a post detailing Ubuntu and Canonical’s contributions to the upstream projects that make up their distributions. There he mentioned a challenge he recently issued to the Linux and free software community: build a Linux-based UI and computing experience on par with Apple’s within two years.