A distribution occupies a very specific niche in the free software ecosystem. Among other things, we need to accept some responsibility for ALL the software defects (”bugs”) that users actually experience across the entire stack. Most users don’t install their apps from upstream source tarballs, they install them from the packages provided by their distribution.

Over the past few months I've been quietly tracking our upstream and downstream interactions. The motivation for this has been my experience with the KDE 4 series, in which we have both been on more people's radar (when was the last time NVidia mentioned KDE 3 in a driver release?) and seen more train-wrecks both up- and down-stream from us.

Elastix is a complete GNU/Linux distribution with Asterisk, Zaptel, Openfire, Postfix and many other free software packages. It has a user-friendly interface that integrates the best tools available for Asterisk-based PBXs, as well as its own set of utilities which allows the creation of third party modules.

Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository. These three attributes are unique to each Linux distribution. But at the same time, each Linux distribution is at liberty to take and mix whatever it wants from any other.

One of the things that many people buying new computer or other hardware consider is the hardware compatibility with GNU/Linux. Actually many people do not even think about that. They just go to the shop, buy something that they liked and after that go home and install some distribution.

theregister.co.uk: Novell, a collection of mostly legacy software businesses, has announced that it will be devoured by another collection of legacy software businesses, Attachmate.
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Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought. Rather than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for chromium to use.

[Dell] could hardly do better than to buy Red Hat, or possibly Sun or Novell, for two reasons. The first is that buying Red Hat might be the least painful option for Dell getting into software in earnest, as it would offer Dell a close analog to what it has done to hardware: a commoditized software business that depends heavily on low-cost assembly and distribution.

Smolt, the distribution independent hardware data collection tool reached another mile stone: it passed the 200.000 entries mark.