"I received an email recently from a young man in Brazil who wanted me to come to his university and talk to the students and faculty about using Free Software. I am normally happy to advise universities to use Free Software, but usually this is done in conjunction with some large conference held at the university or some other venue. I just do not have the time to visit each and every school.

Enjoy the third installment in our series of video-taped talks with the iconic Alan Cox. Afterwards, in case you need a catch-up, you can hear Alan talk about community and the enterprise or the state of free software in our video archives.

Most people in the hacking community are well aware that patents represent one of the most serious threats to free software. But the situation is actually even worse than it seems, thanks to the proliferation of what are called patent thickets. To understand why these are so bad, and why they represent a particular problem for software, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of patent law.

"HAVANA, May 17 (IPS) - After years of deliberation, the University of Havana has finally decided to switch over to free software on its network of computers, virtually all of which are running the Windows operating system, produced by United States software giant Microsoft..."

Alan Cox emailed me this morning to note a presentation he gave way back in 2000 called "Dear Mr Brooks, or: Software engineering in the free software world." It's no surprise to me that my recent blog post (on the topic of optimally sized development teams) was better articulated by Alan many years ago.

"Shortly before the holidays I made donations to three organizations: the Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, and Creative Commons. If you'll kindly indulge me for a minute, I'll explain why I think the work of these organizations is so important to an open internet and a free and properous society. Consider giving whatever you can spare (whenever you can spare it) to one of these groups..."

This week we interviewed Alan Irwin, the current developer of the Time Ephemerides project, a software and data bundle used to make time corrections in astronomical observations from the Earth’s view point. This is hardcore Astronomy friends! Enjoy the interview!

The European Union funded FLOSSCom research project is investigating Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities as learning environments. The project aims to identify principles of FLOSS communities that could be transferred to educational settings, e.g. how the community model could help to improve education.

Anna Morris is co-founder of FLOSSIE conference for women in Free Software, Manchester Fellowship Group Deputy Coordinator, and Co-Director of ethical-pets.co.uk. She is currently writing a book on video editing with Free Software, and volunteering with Document Freedom Day 2013 in her spare time.

She talks about running her e-commerce company with Free Software tools.