PCLinuxOS Magazine, October 2007 (Issue 14) is available to download. We apologize for the delay in this release; final touches on the new PCLinuxOS Magazine website helped prevent us from releasing yesterday. If you'd like to be informed immediately about our releases, please signup for the Magazine-Announce mailing list.

"With this article I want to point out how Free Software provides a secure environment and how important the community is. Security is not only limited to "technology to keep crackers away from your data", but it also is about secured freedom. Just as laws in many countries secure that you have the right to voice out your opinion, Free Software secures its own freedom through its licenses."

I ran across a business website that refers to Amanda and Bacula as freeware. While I realize the average user may not recognize the difference, those of us who know better should distinguish clearly between the terms freeware and Free Software.

"we could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is. Good standards just don't need that kind of pressure.

I use Windows and Linux every day. They’re both competent operating systems, each with reasonable applications and windowing systems. I find myself more productive on a Linux system, though, because of a few very simple differences.

As part of my interview with Dean Drako of Barracuda Networks, he mentioned to me some survey work Barracuda has done. Barracuda talked to 228 enterprise customers and asked what advantages open source has over proprietary software, and vice versa.
The answers were a bit surprising.

One of the most common conversations when people discuss Linux is the freedom it brings. Talk of free as in beer, free as in creative expression, free as in legal widespread distribution, modification, and dissemination. These are all important and great conversations to have. One thing that doesn't get discussed a lot though, when talking about Linux is community.

Studies done by a prestigious think tank in Silicon Valley have identified the most common behavioral changes in people who have switched to Linux. They were nice enough to share their information with us. According to them, these are the ten most frequent side effects of Linux use with us.