Recently, Richard Stallman called cloud computing 'worse than stupidity' His argument for this view is that, by giving your data away to the host of the web application you are using, you are essentially giving up all rights to that data. After all, they own it and there is little you can do to stop them from doing whatever they want with that data.

Wednesday night in Wellington is a lot more exciting when the New Zealand Open Source Award ceremony is on!

If you saw Alex Brown's offensive suggestion that some think ODF should just "fade away" in News Picks, it no doubt made your blood boil. Here's where you can put some of that energy, if you are so inclined: Rob Weir has announced the new technical committee, ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, and he's asking for individuals and projects to please sign up to help out.

I’m writing this from Ubuntu 8.04 in a live session (booted from USB stick). This *nix distribution runs well, does what I want it to do and runs just fine without complaint.

Sean Daly, who does most of Groklaw's interviews, is himself interviewed, and you can read it on the Fellowship of FSFE site. It's the first in what will be a monthly series of interviews they plan on FSFE fellows.

Deishin Lee of Harvard Business School, and Professor Haim Mendelson of Stanford's Graduate School of Business, eloquently lay out a strategy in a recent paper for squashing open source competition. Ironically, it's also a road map for open source companies to use to defeat their entrenched and expensive rivals.

In theory, any computer running Linux can be custom-built and tweaked down to the very last bit. In reality, a first-time Linux user wants to grab an install CD, get a working desktop, and do their own thing from there.

Ubuntu Tweak, aims to make changes to Ubuntu very easy. Today we have TualatriX, the maker of UT. Lets ask him the secret of Ubuntu Tweak's phenomenal rise in the Linux world.