But that only leads us to a different mystery: what did all the software programmers do before there was software to program?...He gave me a pitying look, and stated what to him was obvious: "They were car mechanics and jazz musicians."

In news that will be of interest to both open- and closed-source developers, Canonical is about to open a new revenue stream by offering a suite of commercial services for deploying and managing Bazaar, the open-source version-control system.  Here's the scoop, with some thoughts.

Linus Torvalds, lead developer of the Linux kernel community, has merged DRBD, an open source data replication solution, into Linux as a fully supported component.

Red Hat held the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 today and it was awesome. What was it? It was a completely online conference that offered everything you'd find at a traditional face-to-face show like the annual Red Hat Summit. I was hoping Red Hat would use this event to introduce / announce RHEV for Desktops but no such luck. I guess we'll have to continue to wait until January.

DRBD is a Linux project to provide a real-time distributed filesystem. Although it has some clustering support, it's not really a true clustered filesystem like OCFS2 or GFS2. What it provides is a mirrored copy of a block device across a network

Several Linux distributors are releasing updated kernel packages to close security holes in the kernel.

Not all distros are made equal, particularly if you're a KDE user. So, we took eight of the top KDE-focused distros and pitched them head-to-head to find which ones really rock, and which ones just limp along with a vanilla set of packages.

I am a big believer in that people are defined not by what they say but by what they do. If a person talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk then what they say, according to me, holds as much water as a vegetable strainer. I also feel the same way about companies.