When asked what would happen if he decided to step away from coordinating kernel development, Torvalds said it certainly would not be the death of Linux.

To save money, I cobbled together a computer for my mother out of cast-offs left over from my own upgrades. She doesn't need a cutting-edge computer because she's not a power user, but she does need a reliable machine to run a few basic applications and to access the Internet. I moved my mother from Windows to Ubuntu Linux, and the experience was a surprisingly smooth one.

They are four applications designed to serve different purposes: A web browser, a music player and organizer, another that does the same for video, and a word processor for screenwriters. Yet they share one thing in common: All were built with a Mozilla-based toolkit, either the Gecko Runtime Environment or its successor, XULRunner. Both toolkits use the same codebase which runs Firefox.

It’s one of the more popular culture wars in the free software community: GUI versus CLI (graphics versus the command-line). Programmers, by selection, inclination, and long experience, understandably are attracted to textual interactions with the computer, but the text interface was imposed originally by technological limitations. The GUI was introduced as a reply to those problems, but has undergone very little evolution from 1973 (when it was invented at Xerox PARC) to today. So why can’t we do better than either of these tired old systems?

I live in a small town on the sparse side of Oregon... hardly any computer geeks, and no recycling of any kind, let alone finding a use for older computer gear. But thanks to some cool folks at Linuxchix.org, I learned of two excellent resources for recycling or adopting out old stuff.

"Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide. This speech will be accessible to all audiences and the public is encouraged to attend..."

Last month, the Copyright Office held a closed-door session on the issue of statutory damages. A small affair, the roundtable was a response to the PRO-IP Act introduced in Congress late last year. In the wake of the meeting, eight public interest and industry groups have published a white paper (PDF) arguing against any changes to the "one work" rule and the increases in statutory damages that would result from such changes.

"...You can download this one-minute audio clip (ogg-vorbis) of our interview with him where he talks about the OLPC laptop."