So why is everyone suddenly so interested in me? It’s because my friend Danijel put a link in an article on nuxified.org that could be read as if I was planning to fork the kernel, although there was only some discussion about that in blog comments.

Two weeks ago today, the folks from Joyent open sourced under the GPLv2 two of their core software assets: Connector and Slingshot. A nice announcement, certainly. What was really interesting, however, was why they did it.

This week we have some details about the Linspire-MS deal, a great article by Danijel Orsolic, Open Source in Outer Space, my Interview with Dave Wreski, a short list of good command line tools and much more.

"CNews found out a pilot open source software project was to be launched in the educational institutions in Tomsk Region and Tatarstan. According to the Ministry of Communication plans, in case of its successful implementation up to the 2009 year end an alternative software package is to be installed in all the Russian schools."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to mature, with improvements to the Twitter applet (and the creation of a complementary data engine), and the adoption of a common visual style for Plasmoids, and the integration of support for SuperKaramba applets through the creation of the SuperKaramba Plasmoid.

CentOS, a derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was started back in 2002 with its first beta versions appearing in 2003.

"The news over the past few years in open source establish it as the natural way to release software. If there’s anything else you can do to earn money–whether setting up a social environment like Second Life, putting up ads like Google, or selling hardware like Intel–you really need to search hard for a reason to keep software proprietary."

Straightaway, I would like to apologize if the title of this piece feels a little strange, but I'm going to be exploring what most of us would do if all of the different flavors of Linux were to suddenly "vanish" into thin air.