The Year of the Linux desktop may never come. Instead, there will continue to be significant encroachment into the territory that Microsoft believes to be its own. This will happen for all the reasons you might expect. Linux is cheaper and more versatile and secure than the alternatives, and most of the arguments for not installing Linux don't hold much water.

Two things piqued my interest recently. One was the iPlayer protests at the BBC, the other was the Wiki tracker project. More specifically, it was the reporting of these events. In the case of the former, it went virtually unreported and made me proud of our independent and open news sources and reporting network. The latter highlighted (again) the many issues of user-generated content.

I recently took a look at Microsoft's most active open-source projects and—there's no polite way to say this—they are all junk.

I was a bit amazed last week to note that someone who wrote that the continued piracy of Windows was affecting the spread of Linux on the desktop was described as raising an "unusual" argument. No guessing where this kind of non-logic gained its mileage - it appeared on the site that provides "news for nerds, stuff that matters."

Is Microsoft slowly winning the Web Server war? I say no!

This is far from scientific, but I can tell you that there were an OVERWHELMING number of MacBooks at Gnomedex this year - including two of ours (one sponsored by Lijit and the other sponsored by Blue Sky Factory). As predicted many moons ago, Windows is bleeding influencers like never before… and the bad news keeps getting worse.

Dell and Lenovo are the first two companies to recently offer pre-installed open source Linux distribution on PCs and notebooks, but I highly doubt they will be the last manufacturers to take the plunge...