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The government of Iceland recently launched a one-year migration project for all its public institutions in what appears to be an acceleration of its movement toward free and open source software and away from proprietary systems, according to the European Commission blog Joinup. The project will ap...

"Bug #1 - Microsoft has a majority market share." - Ubuntu bug tracker. Much has changed since Canonical started on its quirky quest to "fix bug #1." Seven years ago Microsoft was seen as stagnant, ripe for plucking. Longhorn was still MIA, and Microsoft users were busy patching XP against the lat...

HP announced Friday it will contribute webOS to the open source community. The decision seals the fate of the operating system, which HP acquired when it purchased Palm for $1.2 billion in April 2010. Since then, the Pre smartphone line running webOS flickered out, and HP's TouchPad tablet, launched...

Open source and innovation are locked in a dynamic and symbiotic relationship. Open source, community-based development evolved to meet developer needs for access and openness. While early open source represented innovation in development processes -- and, of course, was enabled by the emergence of...

The blind hatred of Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman toward proprietary programs is such that he has given speeches in which he advocated for software piracy. Stallman wrote this the day after Steve Jobs died: "As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor D...

The passing of Steve Jobs earlier this month triggered reactions that spanned the gamut -- from expressions of appreciation and sober reflection to some tasteless extremes of zealotry from a subset of the open source community. We can learn a lot from Steve Jobs, even if we ultimately have different...

Amid continued traction for Android, there have been a number of other developments for mobile operating systems based on Linux. Given my support for and belief in Linux and open source software, you might expect me to be bullish on the prospects for all of this mobile and device Linux. However, bas...

The face of the Linux desktop is drastically evolving. While the Linux communities struggle to bring more business and home users to the Linux desktop, existing users face choices about adopting redesigned desktop shells or finding suitable replacements. The fallout might well be the start of a Grea...

Well, well, well, so Linux has turned 20 at last. While we were reading about the inroads Android is making into the mobile market and weeping over the news that Groklaw is about to pack its bags and move on, we began wondering: Just what would the world have been like if Linus Torvalds hadn't sat d...

Mobile device developers are in a holding pattern with plans to plug in the much-awaited Google Android 3.0 upgrade. The delay is causing some bad feelings in the FOSS community. But it is unlikely that Google will carry many scars from the dispute. Claiming it needs more time to solve technical gli...

Groklaw will stop publishing new articles May 16 -- exactly eight years to the day after it was launched. This is because its reason for existence is gone, according to founder Pamela Jones. "In a simple sentence, the reason is this: The crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over, and Linux won," Jones...

If anyone had doubts that Richard Stallman dislikes Google's new Chrome OS, he laid them to rest in an interview with the Guardian Tuesday. The Chrome OS will push people into careless computing by forcing them to store their data in the cloud, said Stallman, who's the founder and president of the F...

In protest over what it sees as excessive control over Java by Oracle, the Apache Software Foundation has resigned from the Java SE/EE Executive Committee on Thursday. Apache has served on the Java Executive Committee for more than 10 years. Apache's departure follows the EC's approval of the specif...