Claudio Prado, digital policy coordinator for the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, put it succinctly when he expressed the view that intellectual property law is a 20th-century idea and "most of the blossoming of world civilisation has happened perfectly well without it - The 20th century is a cul-de-sac," he says.

I got a kick out of reading AshPringle's series about his New Year's resolution to switch from Windows and the Mac to Linux for a week.

For years now, the little blue "E" has been gracing the desktops of Windows users around the world (though many might say it's doing just the opposite!). Internet Explorer, notorious for its many security holes and being slow to patch them, continues to be one of the top choices for web browsing.

Every now and then, some blogger working for a big website will write a story about how company Abc should make radical move Xyz in order to better, eh, well, that's usually left in the dark. These are generally more akin to said bloggers hoping for radical move Xyz rather than there being a well-argumented reasoning.

“Free software” or “open source”? It's a perennial question that has provoked a thousand flame wars. Normally, the factions supporting each label and its assocated theoretical baggage manage to work alongside each other for the collective good with only a minimal amount of friction. But occasionally, the sparks begin to fly, and tempers rise.

I've been using Linux since 1995, and while that doesn't quite elevate me to grizzled geekbeard status, it's long enough to have observed a whole lot of growth and changes. Most of them are good; but some of them are rather alarming. The changes that bother me the most are the ones that make it harder to understand and control your own system by adding needless complexity and layers of obscurity.

Abbie Schubert paid more than $1,100 for a Dell laptop hoping to enroll in online classes at Madison Area Technical College, or MATC. But something stopped her: she bought an operating system for her computer she never heard of, Ubuntu.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #125 for the week January 11th - January 17th, 2009.