"Web 2.0 software-as-a-service applications built on top of the LAMP stack now generate several orders of magnitude more revenue than any companies seeking to directly monetize open source. And most of the software used by those Web 2.0 companies above the commodity platform layer is proprietary. Not only that, Web 2.0 is siphoning developers and buzz away from open source."

"For all that a great deal of attention was given to the arrival of the GPLv3 (Gnu General Public License, version 3), few software developers announced plans to move their programs to this new license. Now, open-source programmers are beginning to give the new license a try."

I put together a scorecard, which shows that every single significant attempt at consumer-music DRM has been cracked. Here it is:

As a bit of a follow-up to my recent editorial about the different operating systems battling it out, a few readers made comments about Ubuntu and Windows and, essentially, that I was giving Windows a little too much credit. So, I thought I would write another one here specifically to address the issue of Linux actually replacing Windows. Can it?

There have been a lot of positive things going on in the Ubuntu space, but there has been at least one change where a Ubuntu consumer has returned to good old Debian - one of the first adopters, SimplyMEPIS. Warren Woodford found that the LTS version, 6.06 of Ubuntu, upon which SimplyMEPIS has been based since V6.0, receives security updates but otherwise few, if any, new packages.

Mozilla has patched a pair of security vulnerabilities in its Firefox Web browser just in time for its release of security tools at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week.

A thought struck me this morning: would you really want your database/application server/office productivity suite/etc. developer to also be the author of your operating system? On one level, the answer is an easy 'yes': tighter integration between the OS and the applications that run on it is a good thing.

In the race to be the first "iPhone killer," the most unlikely but perhaps most intriguing candidate is based on a new Linux platform with the peculiar name OpenMoko.