"Dave Harding made an excellent speech last year about Software Freedom, and makes a first rate job of explaining the early Bill Gates «letter to hobbyists» incident. He also does a nice job of presenting «Apple II and VisiCalc» as similar to «Windows and Office» today; and that Symbolics, with its focus on elegant superior technology and design chic but anti social policies, is similar to Apple today. Here's his transcription of the first 10 minutes, download the Ogg Vorbis speech directly for the full thing..."

The $250 million Vonage burned through as a result of the patent lawsuit brought by Verizon et al provides yet another example of why patents for business processes implemented on computers (a.k.a. software patents) deserve to die. Verizon’s two successful “name translation” patents negate an open standard assembled by Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Intel and Vocaltec via the VoIP Forum during 1996.

As a (relatively) long time Ubuntu user, occasional bug reporter and support analyst, I often deal with bug reporting and I feel your pain about bug reporting, Matt. This happens in many other free software projects, but I think Ubuntu’s popularity gives its problems more exposure, an opportunity to refine the process and maybe inspire others to learn from its mistakes and success.

Sun is set to open-source everything related to SPOT, from hardware to software, but a user questions Sun's commitment to the technology

Great companies, like great national powers, compete aggressively — not for territory and resources, but for customers and cash. Just as countries fall into hierarchies of power and alliances for long periods of time based upon their respective advantages at the beginning of such periods, or the outcome of wars, multinational corporations often succeed in establishing themselves in power positions that must be jealously defended.

"...LyX is the first WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) document processor. The basic idea of LyX is that you do not need to handle style, or actually, you use a set of predefined styles and concentrate on your document content, This makes sure that your resulting document will be typographically correct and good looking visually. […] LyX uses Latex as its back end typesetting mechanism..."

The past year saw its fair share of hype bubbles and news that dominated the headlines.

Who doesn't like patent litigation? I know I do. What could be more fun than reading newspapers articles about companies suing the pants out of each other for infringing on ideas the suing party are theirs. It doesn't matter that the defendant might never even have heard of the patent in question, as patent law nevertheless applies and gives the claimant a chance to make a windfall in damages for patent infringement.