Five years after the debut of its popular open-source drawing program for children, New Breed Software announced the release of Tux Paint 0.9.17.

Tux Paint 0.9.18's color palette now includes a rainbow-colored button which brings up a color picker. The colors available for painting have expanded from less than twenty to over 50,000!

Just as Microsoft Paint is included with every Windows installation, so KolourPaint has been part of the kdegraphics package since KDE 3.3. This simple raster graphics editor works well not only in KDE, but also in Xfce, GNOME, and Fluxbox.

If you have kids and want to get them to do other things on the computer besides watching Drake and Josh or playing video games, institute an embargo and have them start drawing with a great free program Tux Paint.

When you think mono, you think tired. You think sleepy. You think shut-yourself-up-in-your-bedroom-for-two-weeks-and-snooze-like-Rip-Van-Winkle. You get the idea. But that is not how it should be. Mono isn’t boring. Mono should excite people!

Mono has a potentially fatal sting-in-the-tail for some, and leaves a rather nasty taste in the mouths of many others… So, I thought I’d see what happened if I removed Mono from Ubuntu.

We have received some mail recently from developers who are concerned about issues that are covered here, including OOXML and Mono. One person, for example, was concerned about pressure on KDE to implement support for OOXML (a big no-no). Coming from Debian, a concerned developer spoke about the problems surrounding Mono. Together, we ought to at least try to inform.

There has been a wide range of discussion on the subject of Mono and its inclusion in Ubuntu by default. Some people believe that Mono may infringe on Microsoft patents while others believe that it is useful to include. Personally, I have no idea about whether Mono does infringe on Microsoft patents, but I see other reasons why Ubuntu should remove it.

In short, we are in an adversarial situation. Microsoft does not want us to succeed. Thus we cannot trust Microsoft, even if we'd like to, and must consider Mono based upon the question "What is the worst thing MS can reasonably do?". We can only trust Mono if we are convinced Microsoft doesn't have weasel room. The current situation appears, to me, to have lots of weasel room.