A friend directed me to a comment thread over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog I occasionally read and considerably respect. The response I ended up writing is substantial enough that I think it’s worth posting here. I am the person who promulgated the term “open source”, and the senior founder of the OSI. As it happens, I’m also a semi-regular Volokh Conspiracy reader.

There are a list of other operating systems beyond the ones that rule the market. And those of you who love open source operating systems, if you like experimenting or trying out new things, here are some cool alternatives for you.

In the last two articles (part 1, part 2), I looked at getting started with Kate, and then at some of the more advanced features and configuration options. This final article covers features that you may find useful if you regularly write code or markup.

Lots of people love Gnome Do. Why is that? It gives them power at their fingertips. More importantly, it takes the filesystem out of the picture.

Take a screenshot tour of Novell’s latest release of SLED. Get the scoop on what’s new and what works (and what doesn’t). By Me!

There are a number of CD burning utilities available for Mac OS X (cough -- Toast -- cough), but did you know that Mac OS X has built-in disc burning support? This functionality was added in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). It's a very handy feature that allows you to quickly and effortlessly burn data CDs! We'll show you how.

The open-source and cross-platform e-mail client Postbox rolls out another beta and has been quickly adding muscle to its abilities.

During the Autotask Community Live conference - which attracted roughly 300 managed service providers - Ubuntu Server Edition made a surprise appearance and a surprise encore. Twice during the event, managed service providers (MSPs) told me how they were building their businesses on top of Ubuntu Server Edition. The two prime examples involve Rezitech and Network Depot. Here’s the scoop.