Not too long ago, I subscribed to a Linux magazine for beginners called Tux. Fantastic magazine, but the last I heard they were "headed out," so to speak, due largely to a lack of funding. However, unlike bigger publishers, which include Linux Magazine, Tux was special because they were giving away the magazine in the PDF format.

July 11, 2007, will mark the third-annual global "Fair Use Day," but chances are this is the first you've heard of it. Started back in 2005, "Fair Use Day" (project website) was created by Eric Clifford to raise awareness of the shifting balance in copyright laws around the world.

Software developers, academics, development groups and decision makers from Central Asia and Afghanistan met in the Tajik capital Dushanbe to see how the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) could be of help to the region.

The Internet has always been a place for corroboration and communication, but most Internet communities have degraded substantially. There are large numbers of communities devoted exclusively to sexual talk, and others that focus on illegal activities such as attacking servers or piracy. Here and there, good communities spring up and foster information exchange as well as general chatting.

Catharina Bethlehem wrote to tell me about her work on the Ubuntu community in Second Life. As you might expect, the free and open source meme is very much alive and well in SL. There is now a group looking to setup an island devoted to FLOSS that brings together members of the whole free software community

Determining usage and growth of Free software has always been a challenge. For over a decade, arguments have been held – sometimes flamewars – whose central point was the usage level of software that is freely distributed. While market share can be estimated based on sales numbers, Free software usually replaces existing software that is proprietary, i.e.

I stumbled across this article in the International Herald Tribune today and was shocked by how off such an otherwise reputable publication could be. The general tone of the article was that open source is struggling to grow. I'm not sure how 100 percent year-over-year growth for the prominent commercial open-source start-ups connotes "struggling," but....

"Certainly you've heard that running Linux is a whole lot safer, more reliable, robust, and secure than running Windows. Sure, this is true. You may have also heard that Linux is free. This is true, as well"