This is the third in a series of interviews about open source multimedia, the previous interviews were about Jokosher and Totem. For this interview we check in with Sjoerd Simons who works on the Empathy client, an which combines instant messaging, video conferencing and voice over IP into one application. Sjoerd will talk to us about the current status of Empathy and where it is going.

"...The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing "Happy Birthday to GNU," a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry..."

I have become concerned about some actions and thoughts that people have started taking and expressing. The latest was some guy at a French sounding blog who wrote a rambling contradictory hissy fit trying to validate his reasons for leaving Linux.

"DEDHAM, MA - The Tor Project has published its three year development roadmap, focused on providing anti-censorship tools and services for the advancement of Internet freedom in closed societies..."

"There are only 2 weeks left in the first round of the "Ideas for Change in America" competition, and the "Idea for Change: Support the Free Software Movement" is in 9th place in the Technology Policy category.

The top 3 rated ideas for each category will make it to the second round, which will be held in early January... We need 135 votes to move up to third place in Technology Policy..."

Last year, when my youngest son was 5 ½, he was keeping me company in my home office and found my Linux box (this was before The Big Switch, and my main laptop was still in Windows full-time). The boys each have a Windows machine in their room, and he can start a game or a browser on his own, though he still needs help on the urls (“Daddy, can you get me on power rangers dot com?”).

"We've set up a francophone FSFE list [...] This breaks our tradition of setting up public lists based on country or regional borders. Europe is complex and the boundaries that history has drawn are not always ideal for community forming..." -- FSFE announces 4 weeks of translation sprint