Mozilla has received widespread criticism from within the open-source community for bundling a EULA with official binary builds of Firefox 3. Critics argue that including a conventional user license agreement in Firefox is antithetical to the principles of unencumbered use that are cherished in the open-source software community.

Larry Cafiero is sitting in his cluttered office in the Santa Cruz Mountains looking nothing like a revolutionary. Friendly bearded face. Casual blue jeans. Comfy work shirt with the little penguin logo.

Open source software may sound like just another passing buzzphrase, but it is no fly-by-nighter. It has been around for decades and we have all relied on it for some time, as more and more people are coming into direct contact with open source, it's a good time to ask what makes it so special.

One of the key proponents of open source software within the South African government, the department of science and technology is joining in this year’s Software Freedom Day celebrations with a dedicated programme on OSS during its Insite show this week.

Mark Shuttleworth, the man at the helm of Canonical and Ubuntu, went into greater detail last week about his thoughts on making future Ubuntu releases more user-focused. In the past, Shuttleworth has made no pretense that he feels Apple has, historically, offered a superior user experience.

OpenOffice 3's release candidate is here and ready for download for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows. This is more than a little cool. Those of us who don't like paying the Microsoft Office suite tax have been waiting for the next version of OpenOffice for some time now and it's almost ready to go.

As you propably already know, mozilla is now demanding that vendors display their EULA if they want to ship the Firefox branding. I could understand the issue they had with debian last time, since the debian package was not it that good shape - but now I think it is going over the top.