Led, somewhat ironically, by Microsoft Windows, operating system vendors and some other software vendors have been making their products more secure by default. They also have been providing tools and best-practice guidelines for application developers to improve security.

Open source catalyses the free market and speeds up capitalism.

I was pretty happy in 2005 when IBM, in an obvious PR stunt to get buddy-buddy with the open source community, made its Statement of Non-Assertion of Named Patents Against OSS, ostensibly saying that it would permit open source projects to use any of the items covered by those patents without risk of penalty or lawsuit. Yay! Finally, a BigCo getting it and doing the right thing!

MySQL has an interesting architecture that sets it apart from some other enterprise database systems. It allows you to plug in different modules to handle storage. What that means to end users is that it is quite flexible, offering an interesting array of different storage engines with different features, strengths, and tradeoffs.

As you may have heard, Mark Shuttleworth announced his vision for Ubuntu 10.10 a few days ago.  Without prejudicing the more pressing release of Ubuntu 10.04 in a couple weeks, here are some thoughts on what Shuttleworth said, and what we can expect from Ubuntu 10.10 in October 2010.

If the recent debate about open core licensing has proven one thing, it is that the issue of combining proprietary and open source code continues to be a controversial one.

One of the annoyances I've had with Ubuntu is that adding the Kubuntu packages to the system also hijacks the startup splash to that of Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. Follow these simple instructions to change the startup splash screen on Ubuntu 10.04.