Novell distinguished engineer James Bottomley believes Linux desktop environments need a dose of open source ingenuity rather than ape ideas from Windows and OS X. Bottomley, who also wears the hat of Director of the Linux Foundation and chair of its technical advisory board, says the next challenge for Linux as a whole is to take the lead in interface advancements.

This is a follow-up guest post by software and system engineer, and former maintainer of freeDOS, about Free and OpenSource software. Here, James talks about the pragmatics of running an OpenSource software project, based on his experience with freeDOS.

This is the third of four guest posts by software and system engineer, and former maintainer of freeDOS, James Hall.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel maintainer, and head of the Linux Drivers Project. He is a Novell Fellow, and works on the SUSE distribution for that company. At the Linux Foundation, Kroah-Hartman has helped to compile the “Who Writes Linux?” survey for the past few years.

In the 1990's Novell's NetWare dominated the networking industry with over 70% of the global market share. Their technical certifications were the industry's gold standard and offered titles such as Certified Novell Engineer, Master Certified Novell Engineer, Certified Novell Directory Engineer, and Novell Administrator.

The final talk on Saturday at Akademy 2007 was from Patrick Harvie, a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Green Party. While not a technical wizard like most of the other talks of the day, Patrick was able to describe to us the attitudes to free software from the Government he is elected to keep an eye on, and how the work of KDE developers applies to more than just software.

There are many faces behind what goes on at the Linux Foundation: the officers and employees who run the day to day show, the Board of Directors who keep the ship on course, and of course, the volunteers who support, promote, and participate in the Foundation's activities. Among that number are those that act as the voice of the people themselves. The Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board...

James Hall is a very experienced software and system engineer who is probably best known for creating and maintaining the freeDOS project for several years. James is eminently qualified to provide an oriention to FOSS and to discuss its sometimes obvious and sometimes rather nuanced significance.

Novell markets Microsoft software along with its own and Novell's CMO talks about experimentation with viral marketing