here are a number of newcomers who migrate to Linux and then find themselves at ends with the confusion regarding restricted formats and codecs in the US. The laws regarding usage are confusing and all over the map, thus leaving many Linux distributions forced to mark them as possibly illegal to use in some countries, despite no solid evidence to actually support this outside of MPAA and RIAA rhetoric, which is hardly a court's decision. And in a recent article, I took this whole idea to task and examine how it may not actually be illegal to use libdvdcss after all.

My first experience with Linux was 8 years ago, a few years after my Dad bought me my first ever computer. The first Linux OS that I tried was RedHat Linux. At that time the Internet in this country was still at its infancy so I didn't know much about other Linux distributions (distro).

We have seen the signs that changes are happening. Not just specifically in the Linux world, but in Open Source, Open Standards and in the proprietary world as well.

Observation of the trends in many HIT OSS projects leads me to believe that our niche in the OSS world prefers the Cathedral model (Eric S. Raymond's definition) rather than the Baazar model.

In the recent accusations that the GNOME Foundation has been supporting Microsoft's OOXML format at the expense of ODF, KDE has been presented as a counter-example. Based on a KDE News article, Richard Stallman suggested that "major KDE developers" had announced "their rejection of OOXML" and urged GNOME to do the same.

I really liked this InformationWeek article with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu. I liked it in part because I think Mark is an exceptional person. But I also liked it for its insight into why Ubuntu has done so well.

The first thing we can say about the Linux desktop in 2007 is that there are more users than ever. The Linux Foundation 2006 survey had fewer than 10,000 people signing in. This year more than 20,000 Linux desktop users reported in.

The E-Commerce Times posted an interview with Jim Zemlin yesterday. Not surprisingly, he was very optimistic about the future of Linux, but his argument about cloud computing was particularly interesting.