If you follow open source news at all, it's been pretty hard to ignore MySQL the last few months. With a desperate campaign to stop Oracle gobbling up MySQL, the FLOSS poster database has been front and center.

Our petition aims to unify the voices of concerned Europeans, associations and companies, and calls on our politicians in Europe to stop patents on software with legislative clarifications. The patent system is misused to restrain competition for the economical benefit of a few but fails to promote innovation. A software market environment is better off with no patents on software at all.

Welcome to 2010! I took a look back at 2009 at the end of the year, and now I am summarizing my thoughts and ideas about what topics will be important in the software development industry in 2010.

After watching the two Doctor Who Christmas episodes I thought I’d watch the ‘behind the scenes’ programme ‘Doctor Who Confidential’. During one segment where they discuss the set used in the Christmas episode I spotted a bunch of machines with what look like Ubuntu boot screens on them.

Larry the Free Software Guy would never let 2010 pass without a several timely forecasts. While this year lacks last year's inspiration, it would never stop him from making predictions like "2010 will absolutely, positively, without a doubt be the year of the Linux deskt . . . oh, never mind," and nine more.

Classical computer science is helpful to software engineering, but will never be the whole story. Good software engineering also includes creativity, vision, multi-disciplinary thinking, and humanity

I mentioned over a month ago that VTV visited my Linux Lab. A couple weeks ago they aired the 10 minute segment on VTV. I know several of the guys featured on the program including An Nguyen of SaigonLUG and Professor Son from the University of Education. The open source community is starting to grow in Saigon...