«With the words "It’s Christmas, baby, and do we have a present for you.", David Heinemeier Hansson announced that the Merb and Rails developers were merging their efforts for Rails 3.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution has attracted a broad audience of Linux enthusiasts, and it's beginning to gain traction among mainstream computer users. Although Ubuntu is relatively new, it builds on the rich history and deep roots of the venerable Debian project, one of the oldest and most influential Linux distributions.

Matt Asay weighs in today on whether OpenOffice is "profoundly sick," as Novell employee Michael Meeks claims it is. Meeks argues that OpenOffice is "not getting better with age" and that a big part of the problem is that Sun Microsystems exerts too much control over the suite, not allowing more contributors to innovate and improve.

Jack ponders the past year of Linux highlights and what they meant to him. What are yours?

To many people, the move from Windows to Mac and O SX might seem very odd indeed. To them, Linux would seem a better choice. Personally, I get along fine with *nix. I first used it in the Berkeley flavor in 1981, at Berkeley, as a matter of fact. I have used it on and off ever since, on a variety of platforms and in a number of flavors.

Today, I read about a new netbook (running Linux, of course) that stores its operating system on a USB key, presumably so that you can take it out and bring your file and settings to any computer. The first time I skimmed the article, I misread it and didn't see that it ran Linux. Later, I realized that it must run Linux, since you just couldn't do that with Windows.

"Are you a GNU/Linux developer? Do you care about your freedom? Would you like to enhance a wonderful distribution? gNewSense is looking for developers..."

Creative Commons is becoming a web force to be reckoned with. I recently switched to a Firefox browser from Internet Explorer (a revelation in many ways, but that’s another article) and didn’t even have to modify my toolbar to create a Creative Commons search shortcut.