Torvalds has been to Linux.conf.au and Torvalds has spoken. During a wide-ranging interview the Linux founder speculated on the future of hardware and the control that open source offers vendors. The ramifications of this are remarkable. Come hear the word of Torvalds.

"...You can download this one-minute audio clip (ogg-vorbis) of our interview with him where he talks about the OLPC laptop."

Newsflash people. There is no “Year of the Linux Desktop”. There will never be one. Before you start looking for sharp rocks to throw at me, let me start by saying I am a Linux user. I worked with all major distributions, roamed in Slackware land for about two years, tried to get accustomed to Red Hat’s RPM hell in a time when Linux was a wasteland and there were only a bunch of people that were using it.

Ubuntu seems to be the latest, greatest thing in the world of operating systems. The creators of Ubuntu have done some good things in terms of making Linux easier to use and in providing guidance for Linux newbs. But with newbs you bring ignorance, and there are a couple things I’ve been seeing that are kind of ridiculous.

Last year, Dell began offering Ubuntu on non-corporate desktops and laptops... With this offering came a lot of discussion over what Dell should include with each computer sold... comments ran the gamut from FOSS purity to legal questions to even questioning Dell's motives. Clearly the FOSS community is pulled in all directions trying to satisfy users. Is there any happy medium? Can the community balance the requests of purists and pragmatists and still release usable products?

Microsoft’s proposed $45 billion buy of Yahoo would give the Redmond, Wash company control over a top open source e-mail company, open source projects and an open source infrastructure. On September 17 of 2007, Yahoo bought Zimbra for $350 million. Yahoo’s infrastructure is built on BSD. Yahoo has released a myriad of software to the open source community and even sponsors some open source projects. So this deal would put Microsoft directly into the open source software business.

For Jonathan Oxer, the president of Linux Australia, today, the final day of the 2008 Australian national Linux conference is a day of fulfilment and also some sadness.

With the recent release of version 4.0, the KDE open source project has garnered a lot of international attention. One of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality, Aaron J Seigo is in Australia to speak at this year's Linux.conf.au on his vision for better desktop computing. Computerworld spoke with Seigo, a native of Calgary, Canada, about his view of the world and how a little bit of innovation will permanently change how people interact with software.