"This isn't a list of impossible goals -- all of these things are attainable if the Linux industry and community were to decide that they are priorities. That's not to say that they'd be easy to accomplish, but the Linux community has proven good at working together when it's important."

I must confess to a certain disappointment with Red Hat. On the one hand, it is clearly the leader of the open source world – both historically and in terms of its size.

Today, Red Hat took a public stand challenging the standards for patenting software. In the Biliski case that is now before the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, this patent issue is ripe for consideration.

Though I have my doubts, PHEV (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles) may be on the same track towards open hardware we are seeing in some computer components and devices. Be warned, however, the effort is grounded in marketing and survival instincts that just might not suffice to become a success.

While KDE users get to boss KIO slaves for easier access to system and network resources, humble GNOME users can perform similar feats with its virtual file system, called GnomeVFS, which is an extension of the physical filesystem on a disk. Using GnomeVFS, users can work with non-local data that can come from unusual places, such as within compressed gzip archives.

It's always seemed to me one of the biggest problems for free software that it's not well known in schools. As Microsoft understands - and as Apple first learned - if you get them young, you've pretty much got them forever. So it's good to see efforts being made to spread the open source word in the educational world, like this new effort by the Portuguese Ministry of Eduction

Nine months following the heralded official release of the GPLv3 licenses, and with the more recent addition of the Affero GPLv3, adoption has surpassed 50% of my projections.

"I upload a new part of article about using Emacs with different version control systems (VCS). New part is about using Emacs for work with Mercurial" -- via http://alexott.blogspot.com/2008/04/new-part-of-article-about-emacs-vcs....