Let me get right to the point: The time is now for open-source offerings to get their collective act together.

Not every proprietary program can drive a person crazy, right? Some, like Norton Ghost, are superb tools for anyone to use. But, the fact that these tools are proprietary can drive open source fanatics up a wall. It’s not the price of the software that makes the real difference (although it’s a reason to migrate from one software to another for many people); it’s the idea that proprietary software comes with boundaries that keeps the user experience confined to…well, being the user. That’s enough to drive any developer crazy.

You know what Ubuntu is, so we will not talk about it in this article. Instead, we'll talk about some or the most popular Ubuntu-based distributions. There are enough (or not) Linux distributions derived from Ubuntu, so we thought it will be a very good idea to make a list with all of them, or at least the popular ones.

One Laptop Per Child may have pilot projects in many schools worldwide, but the newest program has my rapt attention. Teaching Matters, an educational non-profit, is implementing a OLPC pilot in the Kappa IV school in New York City with a refreshing twist.

On February 9, 1998, I published the Open Source Definition and the public announcement of the Open Source Initiative that Eric Raymond and I were starting. This was the first time that the general public heard what Open Source was about. Friday, February 8 is the last day of Decade Zero of Open Source. Saturday, February 9 is the anniversary of Open Source and the start of Decade One. It's a computer scientist thing. We always start counting from zero :-)

Dwayne Bailey tells us that Translate.org.za was awarded the coveted Pan South African Language Board award for its contribution to multilingualism and nation building over the past decade. The award, ‘Multilingualism and Nation Building: eBusiness Institution of the Decade’, was awarded to the non-profit organisation for its long-running and ground breaking work in the area of multilingual software.

To say that there were some noise on the Web when Sun recently bought MySQL for $1 billion would be an understatement, to say the least. It’s the largest open source deal ever, and the latest in a series of large open source acquisitions.

What happened and why open formats matter! Tucked in with the many security updates (and the restoration of one’s ability to paste text from a web page into a Word document!), a very interesting modification to the Office 2003 software waits quietly for installation with Service Pack 3. These events with Office 2003 should act as a cautionary tale of proprietary product, vendor, and platform lock-in.