Oracle and now IBM seem to have strange ideas about creating a business around open source software for the enterprise. First it was Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sans its proprietary bits and supported for peanuts to beat RHEL and similar community projects such as CentOS.

Phil Hagelberg: «rails.el is much more featureful, but in my daily experience most of its features go unused. Rinari is only the stuff that I use day to day. Because of this it's much lighter and easier to maintain, but some people may find that they miss the features that it leaves out. I won't say which is better overall since they are really targeted at different audiences.»

Tim Ansell, founder of the Thousand Parsec project, explores the universe of Free and Open Source computer games, drawing on his personal experience as a case study for successfully building and contributing to an Open Source game project.

"...Emacs is a text editor. And it’s a lot more — sometimes too much. I know of a number of Emacs users who practically live in the editor. As I pointed out in a previous post, some users go a little overboard with the way in which they use Emacs — as a personal information manager, as a mail client, and even as a Web browser.

"Three documents have been published for HTML 5 by the HTML Working Group..."

Linux is the first truly free Unix-like operating system. The underlying GNU Project was launched in 1983 by Richard Stallman originally to develop a Unix-compatible operating system called GNU, intended to be entirely free software. Many programs and utilities were contributed by developers around the world, and by 1991 most of the components of the system were ready.

In fact, my relatively newfound interest in Linux has been influenced just as much by my concern for social justice. As Linux becomes more usable for a broader range of people, it is important to recognize the wide range of reasons why “common folks” (i.e. not “geeks”) might be using it and the social implications that entails.

I love Twitter but when I use my Linux laptop (Ubuntu running Hardy Heron) I don't have many native options for Twitter clients. The preferred native client appears to be Twitux. Though the nascent client is a little primitive for me. Another popular choice is gTwitter though in my experience it's only been marginally better.