Strange how he speaks of "lifting Free Software to the forefront", whilst all he's _really_ doing is trying to lift Ubuntu to the forefront.

Mr. Shuttleworth apparently knows that "the internet doesn't forget", yet he (I assume it was him who heralded the changes made) chose to tone down the role of Free (as in freedom) Software in the "Ubuntu Promise" over the years in a very silent yet continuous manner, and led Ubuntu to act against some of the principles of the early (think 2004 to 2006 or so) days of the project; principles that I happen to value. Getting into bed with vendors of proprietary software in a way that doesn't benefit others in the Free Software eco-system is something I despise, for example: Canonical is actually getting proprietary AMD/ATI graphics drivers before anyone else gets them, probably under NDA or whatnot. I also don't like their "partner"-repository that contains nothing but proprietary software, and is advertised and presented as a Really Great Thing(tm), not as a sometimes (probably) necessary evil. I don't like how Ubuntu's more and more about doing "their thing" without contributing back to the upstream projects they base their product on, and how they actually try to differentiate themselves from their competitors by making technically bad decisions in the wake of all this (think client-side window decorations, and putting window controls to the left because of that - just doesn't make any sense to me). There were many other occasions on which Mr. Shuttleworth and Ubuntu chose to somehow, somewhat upset parts of the Free Software community, either by what they stated or what they did. I just don't think Mr. Shuttleworth is entitled to put Ubuntu under the banner of Free Software, at least not as it stands today. If someone on identi.ca, or whereever else, is arguing against Ubuntu, it's just that: someone arguing against Ubuntu. It's certainly not an attack on Free Software.

I'm not perfectly happy with the term "virtualization memory de-duplication". Linux 2.6.32 introduces what is called "KSM", an acronym that is not to be confused with "KMS (Kernel Mode Setting)" and expands to "Kernel Samepage Merging" (though other possibilities with similar meaning have already emerged). It does not target virtualization or hypervisors in general (and QEMU/KVM in particular) alone. KSM can help save memory for all workloads where many processes share a great lot of data in memory, as with KSM, you can just mark a region of memory as (potentially) shared between processes, and have redundant parts of that region collapse into a single one. KSM automagically branches out a distinct, exclusively modified copy if one of the processes sharing those pages decides to modify a certain part of the data on its own. From what I've seen until now, all that's needed to have an app benefit from KSM is a call to madvise(2) with some special magic, and you're good to go.

I really like how Linux is evolving in the 2.6 line. Now if LVM snapshot merging really makes it into 2.6.33, I'll be an even more happy gnu-penguin a few months down the road!

VLC is an OK media playback application. I, for one, never understood why someone would prefer it over using mplayer. It's got all the nice libavcodec improvements first, and is the perfect example of unintrusive UI design (note that I'm talking about the CLI-only `mplayer`, not `gmplayer` or any other graphical front-end).

Dirac isn't the only royality-free, patent-unencumbered video codec there is - Xiph's OGG Theora has been around a while already, yet failed to impress quality-wise up until recently. There's some really cool development going on however, and you may see some of the results achieved over there: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/35363.html

It's noteworthy that the changes made only affect the ENCODER, thus no changes to the DECODER (the part of a codec all applications used to play back files have included) are necessary. This bodes very well for HTML5, which will include some support for Theora on at least Mozilla (and iirc Opera) browsers.