Recently I’ve been involving myself with the task of marketing Ubuntu, which lead me to wonder why it is that Ubuntu isn’t marketed very well in the first place.

I think that the reality is that for 99 percent of the people who buy and use products, it doesn’t. If you can’t read code, why would you care if you can? There is this central message of “freedom,” but it doesn’t really apply to a freedom that the average person identifies with. For instance, you are free to flap your arms and fly to the moon too, but if you can’t do it, so what?

When I first met Travis, our new CEO and Windows System Admin, he was telling me that he really liked Windows and was very good at administration of the Windows OS.

"When a project sets out not only to change the world but also to change the future of computing, it's sure to be at the center of lots of attention and not a little bit of controversy"

Linux is not hard to use. Really. It's different to an extent. But not "hard" in the sense of not being user friendly. Linux is being made out to look hard, not only by those who never have used it yet seem to despise it, but also by those who use it on a daily basis and wouldn't use anything else.

Robert Kaiser wrote in to inform us of the release of SeaMonkey 1.1.3, which contains fixes for several security vulnerabilities and several smaller problems found in previous versions.

For sometime there, I generally figured that once the next revision of the GPL came about, all of these deals that are being made with Microsoft will eventually be put to bed. I was also delighted to see Mandriva standing against the alleged patent violations that Microsoft brought up time and again.

Last month, Novell decided to push the limits of developer empowerment and perform an elaborate experiment in innovation by liberating the company's entire Linux engineering team for one full week of free hacking.