ARM is a British company best known for designing chips for cellphones and licensing them to semiconductor companies. The company’s technology is the most widely used in cellphones, though any company implementing the technology modifies it however it deems best. But now a new effort is under way to exploit this chip technology by creating a standard layer of software.

"During the past decade the phenomenon of Free Software has become successful and well-known. It is still amazing how in the realm of software the creativity of so many volunteers leads to products which are useful for the whole mankind.

The European Union's top Internet official took aim at Microsoft Corp. on Thursday, warning that governments can accidentally lock themselves into one company's software for decades by setting it as a standard for their technology systems.

Many of us know that governments can threaten the human rights of software users through censorship and surveillance of the Internet. Many do not realize that the software they run on their home or work computers can be an even worse threat. Thinking of software as `just a tool', they suppose that it obeys them, when in fact it often obeys others instead.

OpenLogic provides the kind of support for open source software that many companies have come to expect with commercial software, as summed up by one of OpenLogic's bloggers:

"What we consistently hear is that companies need and want the same services for open source software that they get from proprietary software. Hence the rise of open source companies…."

Two recent events should give for-profit companies new reasons to re-evaluate the ways in which they use open source software as well as the extent to which they use it.

The free software community understands that free software gives the user more freedom than proprietary software. Proprietary software confines its users, prohibits them from making changes that would allow everyone to benefit, etc. Free software advocates (myself included) have a habit of claiming that using free (libre) software means the same thing as having freedom.

t amazes me that so many times people who are in charge of large and small software companies make dumb decisions. They get nice salaries but often make decisions that come back and bite them later on. One good strategy for any large or small company that is lagging behind on the Windows or Mac OS market is to create software for GNU/Linux.

It has long been the case that proprietary software companies regularly engage in FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) tactics against their opponents. This particularly seems to apply to Microsoft’s statements about free software in general and GNU/Linux in particular. Recently I’ve noticed a surge in the amount of FUD going the other way—from the FOSS community towards Microsoft and other proprietary software companies. Why do we feel it is necessary to fight FUD with FUD