A 3D printer has been prototyped which can create real copies of its own component parts, a self-replicating machine. The people behind it have kept costs down to less than a thousand bucks and are developing it under a GNU public license. They say you will be able to get the machine to copy itself and then give away the copies for free.

I've been hearing the phrase "This is the year of the Linux desktop" for 10 years. For me, it's been a true statement for each of those years, because GNU/Linux has been my primary desktop operating system since 1997. But for most people around the world, this is the year of the the Windows desktop, same as it was last year and the year before.

"...GNU Bucks are issued in one denomination—pi—and signed by Free Software Foundation president and "Chief GNUisance" Richard Stallman. We will also be maintaining a list of people who have received GNU Bucks. This is all just our way of saying thanks to people who have helped contribute to the goals of the free software movement..."

Linux user for a couple of years. Only Linux and I love it. Still, some things are wrong, they are wrong, and unfortunately, as I see it, they will always be wrong (yes I'm paid by Microsoft to say this; and yes I get the big bucks from them; and yes that's true, and unfortunately it seems like it's true for a long time now :(

The plan is that 60 thousand Russian teachers will be able to complete the training and testing procedure by the end of 2009 which means that as soon as next year all the schools in Russia will be able to switch to open-source software which definitely should be appreciated by the open-source community.

"Patents are short-term monopolies (20 years) designed to give inventors sufficient time in which to recoup their R&D costs and turn a profit. Open source turns the 20-year patent term into two years, if that. As a relentless, ever-growing competitor, open source keeps the proprietary world in check and on its toes to a degree that the industry has never before seen."

The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (Egat) has successfully bundled Open Office to run on 7,000 desktop PCs and reduced the cost of IT investment by around Bt40 million a year.

Ian Tree has written an open letter to IBM asking them to release Domino under an open source license. While I agree with him that open sourcing Domino could have lots of positive effects, he's ignoring the cost and time involved. All those good things might not happen given how hard it is to open source a large existing code base.

I saw an article the other day, repeating the mistaken view that there was Minix code in an early version of Linux. I knew that was not true, because for one thing Linus told us it was not true years ago. And Andrew Tanenbaum confirmed that Linus didn't use any Minix code, as did Eric Raymond.