Android (and Palm's new WebOS) phones seem fairly cool but I'd rather use a phone that had more of the normal Linux userland. The FreeRunner still has lots of very rough edges but the new Nokia N900 with Maemo 5 looks really mouth-watering

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As a Brit, this appointment won't affect me directly. But indirectly US Government policy has an important global effect. I'll be watching closely to see whether ODF becomes widely used as a document format by the US Federal Government.

The ODF Alliance have welcomed the appointment, as have Tim O'Reilly and a host of other people so I'm hopeful that it will turn out to be a good thing

I disagree with the whole underlying point of the article. I think Mozilla should be able to stop someone taking their source, adding a whole bunch of unstable "improvements" as patches and calling it Firefox. It would damage a brand that is one of the best brands that FOSS currently has. It doesn't stop people getting the browser, if they don't Mozilla's restrictions they could call it, say, EarthHorse.

The article throws around terms like "restricted distribution" and "severely limiting all activity" but gives examples like CentOS where CentOS and Red Hat exist happily together but with Red Hat still able to build up a brand with some protections.

The article ends "just like patents and traditional copyright, it's totally incompatible with the spirit and ethos of open source software.". People here may not like the length that copyright lasts for but the GPL relies on the fundamental idea of copyright. Similarly there may be some issues with trademarks but if so they need patching not a whole sale revolution as this article seems to suggest.

This Guardian article argues that the story is complete hot air, the two sources (Tech Crunch and ValleyWag) are both unconvinced themselves and the Twitter execs seem to be in the wrong part of the US to be locked into negotiations with Apple.

Leaving aside whether it is true or not, it seems a very strange fit. Apple doesn't seem to gain very much in its core business from the acquisition

A pair of rabbits will produce offspring fairly regularly. This does not mean that the number of rabbits grows at a linear rate.

You want us to out breed Windows users? We need to make contraception contravene the GPL!

I can't wait! At this rate, 2024 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop!

If it increases at 1 percentage point per year (which is what is has increased in the whole of its life so far), we'll reach 100% a lot later than 2024

Given the pandemic of meaning obscuring, "politically correct" names, I'm surprised that swine flu hasn't been renamed to "porcine repressing influenza" or some such.

I think I'll stick to using my repositories for my OpenMoko and opkg.org. The software for the Freerunner has improved a lot recently (admittedly from a very low base).

When OM cancelled ("postponed") the GTA03 and laid off a number of clever, hard-working hackers I figured that it was the end of the company but despite my pessimism, the latest revision of the phone comes with the hardware fixes and the newest release of the operating system (OM2009) is shaping up to be pretty good.

It makes no sense to spin off OpenOffice before knowing what Oracle does to it. What I think most of us really care about is some reinvigoration in the OpenOffice project, which this change may help bring about.

It may reinvigorate OO, who knows, but I did like Solveig Haugland's open letter to Larry Elison explaining what he'd like to see happen. (Hat tip to http://www.groklaw.net)

At the moment the carrot-based material "curran" used to make the steering wheel contains some carbon fibre. Fly-fishing rods made out of the material are 50% carbon fibre at the moment.

The inventors are working to increase the percentage of carrot based material

> >Beware if you have an older ATI card you might run into problems.
> "Older," in this case, defined as anything prior to the HD3x00 series. My experience with 9.04 and a 2600XT is less than ideal.

One of Fedora's recent test days (in preparation for Fedora 11 which is due out soon) found a number of problems with ATI cards. Hopefully by the time F11 ships (in about a month) a number of the issues will be sorted.

Fixes made for Fedora will eventually benefit Ubuntu users using the OSS ATI drivers too

I have no issue upgrading to a 'new and better' operating system, on the condition that I see some worth in what's new and better.

Once XP isn't supported and security flaws continue to be discovered, staying on XP will be unappealing.

Not all Linux software is OSS. If Flash (for example) wasn't available to ARM, I think it would make them less attractive - my wife spends a lot of time watching the BBC iPlayer on our Asus EEE.

This article claims the ARM version of Flash will be out in May. I hope it is. I like our EEE but an 8hour battery life for the price they are talking about would be enough to make me buy one.