"Brazil’s Tribunal Superior Eleitoral will use 430,000 GNU/Linux machines for this year’s election, according to a press release (pt) published on the TSE website (h/t Ada Lemos). Giuseppe Janino, the Tribunal’s secretary of IT, promises that this migration will make the elections more secure and transparent, reducing the potential for ballot rigging and tampering..."

"Any organization reaching a major anniversary would be proud of this fact, with press releases, interviews and celebration. The IFPI hasn’t said anything about reaching its 75th birthday. Instead, one of their staff has edited their Wikipedia page to keep their roots a secret. So what exactly do they want to hide? ..."

When I first tell people about open source software, one of the most common questions I get is this: "I just don't understand why people would create software if they don't get paid for it!

"A few days ago Google announced its App Engine, which lets folks build applications that run in Google’s cloud. Amazon has for a while had a number of services to let folks run applications in Amazon’s cloud. But in both of these cases, one must use their proprietary APIs. [...] I think most would prefer not to be locked-in, that cloud providers instead sold commodity services.

One of the favorite arguments for free software is that it avoids lock-in to a particular manufacturer’s products. Something similar happens due to choice of programming language, though, which accounts for the sometimes-baffling project rivalries in the free software world.

Free Software developers fall into two main categories: those that stand by the principles behind free software - patent-free, license-free and unrestricted distribution and those that are simply happy to compromise to some extent, for example to download libdvdcss to watch DVDs, or to install proprietary software such as Skype, on the basis that there is simply no (or no better) alternative

I came across a post today in one of the mailing lists I frequent where the user asked "Why would anyone pay for something at is based on Open Source". This question comes up many many times in various projects and in various forms. I did post a reply to the message, hopefully helping to educate, but thought the question was worthy of deeper exploration.

Part 3 of Penguin Pete's analogical fairy tale about Windows, Apple and Unix, elaborating on how each republic is run and developed - telling the history of each development.