The egalitarianism of Richard Stallman, the practicality of Eric Raymond, the engineering values of Linus Torvalds. So, too, the stories of Vint Cerf, of Tim Berners-Lee, and of early peering arrangements, in which moving money became secondary to moving bits.

Linus Torvalds seems to be trying very hard to make the latest Linux kernel update as boring as possible. Reading this release announcement, if we can even call it that, you'd never imagine that Torvalds was leading the evolution of software.

Every time Ballmer makes these increasingly vague claims—this makes the fourth go-around in the last four years by my count—open source and legal experts jump all over him. He ignores them and life continues. Ballmer is sending two other hidden messages though. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, Ubuntu's corporate Linux backer, pointed them out to me in a recent conversation.

Cristobal Palmer got very agitated when those "cannot read file" boxes popped up on his computer - until he found out they could make him thousands of dollars. The all-too-familiar messages helped spark Palmer's interest in open-source software, programs that are written to be shared with and modified by others.

What if we lived in a world where all hardware was open source, including CPU’s, memory, motherboards, and all peripherals? Would it be a better world, or would it be a rolling nightmare, plagued with problems, and rampant with show stopping bugs that would bring the world to a grinding halt? I honestly think the fore more than the latter.

A look through most department store catalogues reveals a bevy of alleged “deal” laptops; you know the type – cheap and cheerful, sub-$1,000 – but far from bleeding-edge specs. These may be naff at resource-hungry Windows apps but can be a great Linux machine for no extra cost.

It has always bothered me that this site and my experiences stay inside of Linux so much, when the whole site is about "free and open source software". I've only dabbled in non-Linux FOSS with live CDs and such, but I'm ready to install a real BSD and stick with it for awhile. So, the recently-acquired box with Windows-XP will now be sharing space with a daemon.

There is a long and somewhat heated argument taking place in the Ubuntu forums over a post by Ian Jackson in the Ubuntu Developers mail list, which is a wrapup of a discussion held on the irc #ubuntu-devel channel. The post advocates a change in the Ubuntu security policy by making it more difficult for new users to install untrusted 3rd party software.