This article is about writing a book with the help of the free software community. The book in question is Sakai Courseware Management with the main authors being Alan Berg (Me myself and I) and Michael Korcuska, the executive director of the Sakai Foundation.

Most firewall systems contain a Web-based component that allows you to configure the firewall. This holds true for most entry-level firewall systems (Linksys, D-Link, etc.) and also open source firewall systems such as pfSense. These systems tend to provide ways to access the Web interface remotely via the Internet; however, this should not be considered secure at all.

So hats off to Red Hat, whose chairman Matthew Szulik is the subject of this week’s Global Business. Red Hat is built on the computer operating system software system Linux, devised 19 years ago by the Finnish developer Linus Torvalds, and then worked on by thousands of collaborators all over the world, to become a plausible free-to-use option instead of the big brands of proprietary software.

KDE 4.3.0 is out, and it is a great release. It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0. The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish.

We are in the final steps toward releasing KMyMoney 1.0. It has been over 2 years since the last stable release and over that time the development team has been busy building a lot of features, while maintaining and even improving stability and performance.

I have sort of a love-hate relationship with Dell. On one hand, I appreciate that they occasionally sell Ubuntu machines, but I am really sick of their avaliability games. The number of avaliable computers, and the options that go with them, changes randomly from day to day. For new readers, I am not a fan of these variations. Today, the selection has moved from annoying to almost comical.

Amazon's recent remote deletion of 1984 and Animal Farm struck a nerve. There was something so undeniably creepy about a company entering hundreds of virtual bookshelves in the middle of the night and deleting "1984" (of all books!).

Whenever Microsoft starts to look like a company that is ready to play fair with open source, along comes its CEO, Steve Ballmer, to ruin all the goodwill the rest of the company has created.