The Hurd doesn't fully deliver on the everyday usability goal yet, but it is seeing continuous improvement---and 2010 has been no exception. Let's take a look at the progress throughout the year.

Dell Ubuntu Linux buyers were recently outraged when a price comparison between identical Inspiron 1420 laptops showed that instead of the Ubuntu system being cheaper, it actually ended up costing $225 more than the same laptop with Vista Home Basic Edition.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere!

RoboCup, an international joint project to promote artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and related fields, has set a goal for fully autonomous, humanoid robots to win the world soccer championship by 2050. With the use of Fedora, one RoboCup team, the AllemaniACs, is already winning international acclaim with world champion titles in 2006 and 2007 in the RoboCup@Home service robotics league.

Fonality has become the first open-source-based VoIP provider to strike a deal with a Tier 1 computer vendor. Starting this February, customers will be able to purchase fully provisioned Fonality VoIP Phone System servers from computer maker Dell. The Fonality VoIP Phone System will come installed on Optiplex 330 PCs, according to Fonality CEO Chris Lyman. Mr. Lyman thinks this is a big moment for open-source-based technologies:

"Dear all, this is with a lot of struggles that we have finally managed to open the SFD 2010 registration! As you can see there is still a lot of ongoing work on the site, and this includes a New Wiki where you can create your team page, a new home page for all the information about Software Freedom International and other generic and important stuff and much more to come..."

With last Saturday's "Squeeze" release, Debian took an important step towards being a fully free distribution and ensuring freedom for its users. Most GNU/Linux distributions directly or virtually include proprietary software. To promote development and use of totally free distros, the FSF publishes precise criteria for GNU/Linux distributions to fully respect users' freedom.

It's been a pretty incredible year for open source on the desktop. Dell has started selling some of its PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, which means that even non-technical users can acquire a low-cost, powerful open source system without needing to worry about installation and handling drivers and suchlike.

Dear Respected Video Game Maker;