Late last year Uruguay landed its first shipment of 100,000 units of the much lauded, sometimes criticised XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation. Buoyed by that success, Walter Bender, president software and content at OLPC effused over the next countries in line for the little green machine. The question is, however, can the likes of Peru, Mexico, Ethiopia, Haiti, Rwanda, Mongolia and a myriad of other impoverished countries stump up with the cash needed to join the OLPC bandwagon? The sums are not that difficult to do.

I know that this subject has been hacked up by people all over the internet, but now it’s my turn. I’ve been using Ubuntu on my laptop for a few months now and I think it’s great. The operating system starts up and shuts down quickly. It hasn’t crashed or suffered any periods of slowness and I love the idea of being able to search for software and install it AND have the operating system maintain it. After my Ubuntu experience, I had to ask myself, “What’s holding desktop Linux back?”.

RMS: "People are writing as if I had announced my final retirement. This is just a matter of other people maintaining Emacs. [...] This is the fourth time that the Maintainer of GNU Emacs has been someone other than me. Previous maintainers include Joe Arceneaux, Jim Blandy, and Gerd Moellmann."

-- SOURCES: [ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02284.html ] -- [ http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg02232.html ]

Enjoy the third installment in our series of video-taped talks with the iconic Alan Cox. Afterwards, in case you need a catch-up, you can hear Alan talk about community and the enterprise or the state of free software in our video archives.

AMD has been criticized for being slow on releasing NDA-free documents to the open-source community, but they are sanitizing and clearing these documents for release in real-time and with only two people (John Bridgman and Alex Deucher) doing a majority of the work and then having this information cleared by their legal department.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, I am pleased to announce a brand new initiative in the Ubuntu community that we have been working on for a little while, and one that has been alluded to by some members of our incredible community. It is of course…5-A-Day!!

I had an interesting chat yesterday with Javier Soltero, the CEO of open source web infrastructure management firm, Hyperic. We got to talking about the different attitudes to open source in the US and in Europe; you’ll recall a recent blog entry I did found slightly higher Linux desktop penetration in some European countries than in the US.