Looking back at 2007, who could have predicted that, after all the posturing by open source advocates, that the new version of the GNU General Public License would have caused so little division? Or that Linspire and Xandros would have followed Novell and made their own deals with Microsoft? Or that virtualization, which was such a hot topic in 2006, would have settled down to just another technology?

well here i am again, and the characters are finally completed! as a peachy xmas holiday present we decided to publish some posters / wallpapers to decorate your desktop!

I was thinking about the future of Linux when it occurred to me that one path for its future can seen as a simple consequence of what we mean by “winning.” In other words, asking whether Linux will still be a winner in ten years leads first to the question of what we mean by “winner” and then to an answer about where Linux is going.

"...I am aware that I’m making a very long story short here. But I’m doing this on purpose: the conspiracy that Bruce refers could be summarized as Novell engineers hijacking Gnome to serve their own corporate needs, and the problem is, these needs are aligned with the ones of Microsoft. [...] The most important lesson of this is that what matters is the format, not the application. The format creates the network effect and captures users, unless it is open and standard. [...] Apparently some would still like us to believe OOXML is an open standard. Make no mistake, OOXML is not an open standard, just like Christmas is not Easter."

"At the end of day two of FOSS camp in Cambridge, I was able to grab some time with Benjamin Mako Hill. I had blogged about Mako's appointment to the board of the Free Software Foundation back in July but this was the first time that I really got to meet him. He's quite an amiable guy and very enthusiastic about what he's involved with (it definitely comes through in the interview). Check it out..."

Debian could use more manpower, but is it actually easy for new contributors who would like to help to do useful things, and get the impression that they actually improved Debian?

"What is the relationship between the GNU Project and the GNOME desktop suite? GNOME itself claims to be a part of the GNU Project. But its relationship with the organisation is not the same as that of other software projects which are part of GNU..."

"It's been a decade now that the very first version of the GNU Privacy Guard has been released. This very first version was not yet known under the name of GnuPG but dubbed "g10" as a reference on the German constitution article on freedom of telecommunication (Grundgesetz Artikel 10) and as a pun on the G-10 law which allows the secret services to bypass these constitutional guaranteed freedoms..."