So, the last two days I’ve been hard at work coding on the 0.2 structure and user interface, the application layout is a lot simpler and I’ve completely decoupled the user interface from the core functionality, so you’ll be able to use wine-doors on the command line or qt or whatever, osx is being looked into and if you’d like to help out please get in touch. So this is a first look at 0.2, and it wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory screen shot. So here you go…

Why do I use Linux? I get that question quite a bit. Depending on who I'm talking to my response varies. Some of the more technical reasons leave many users with a blank stare. If you're reading this I assume you are either already running Linux or are about too. Well...... why are you doing it? Lets take a look at some of the reasons.

"We're thinking of having a contest where we have Vista and OS X and Linux ... and see which one goes first," said Dragos Ruiu, the principal organizer of CanSecWest.

"1st European Lisp Symposium, Bordeaux, France, May 22-23, 2008, LaBRI, Université Bordeaux 1 [...] We also encourage submissions about past approaches that have been largely forgotten about, as long as they are presented in a new setting. We invite submissions in two categories: original contributions and work-in-progress papers..."

"Most regular readers of this blog are familiar with the Mozilla Manifesto and with the work that the Mozilla Corporation undertakes to advance the manifesto. It is good work. Actually, it is great work from a great community of people. However, the corporation focuses most on Firefox and the related software and communities. The manifesto is much broader in scope than a small set of products and communities, no matter how important these things are..."

Linus Torvalds, Linux creator, came out in a Q&A podcast with the Linux Foundation attacking patent trolls, SUN Microsystems, Microsoft, and More. "[P]atents on software should not be allowed," Torvalds said, "...it just does not work in software....[software] contains so many pieces that nobody could even know whether...different things might be under some completely trivial patent."

Last week, Mary Jo Foley offered commentary on Microsoft's open source software strategy with respect to independent software vendors based on an interview with Microsoft's Sam Ramji. Matt Asay provides good colour commentary on his blog. Each post focuses on the trustworthiness and competitive history of the company. Let's look at things from a different perspective.

A Canadian firm will soon announce a phone whose plaid case spells "Debian" in Morse Code. Developed by Koolu, whose CTO is Jon "maddog" Hall, the touchphone-based "W.E. Phone" runs Google Apps on top of the Android Java stack on top of Debian.