Marc Fribush, a former "Microsoft guy," is a telecommunications industry entrepreneur who discovered the benefits of open source when he launched a turnkey SAAS telephony business based on Asterisk. "It's really powerful stuff," Fribush says.

"As I promised after the Avi Bryant interview, here’s a great conversation with Adrian Holovaty, well known creator of the Django web framework written in Python..."

"...Arturo di Corinto, a sharp and ebullient Italian media activist, writer and film-maker, set out a bold vision of free software as a common resource: ‘Thanks to its characteristics, the free software is a distributed property that is capable of evolving into a common good’, he declared. [...] Can ideas, both inspirational metaphors and actual experiences, from the free software movement provide any guide for turning public services into commons?

So I decided to try an experiment, and participated in the G1G1 (Give 1, Get 1) program from the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project.

More hardware support and better communication from Microsoft are just two of the things the open-source community must get in 2008 to continue its momentum.

This is the year I kiss Windows good-bye. Well, maybe not entirely, but the writing is on the wall for Microsoft's flagship operating system, and all other desktop bloatware: The future of PC software is open source. (I'll add that the future of PC applications is on the Web, which I'll cover once we've got Ubuntu in place.)

Ever had something you wanted to leave running on your system, but needed to have it automatically shutdown at a certain time, yet it has no ability to do that on its own? Enter the "auto kill" trick. I've done this on several of my machines over the years, and it works quite well.

I am compiling a list of "specialized software". What we need is listings or url's pointing us to places where we can gather info on apps for fields such as: