Last night and this morning I installed the latest Ubuntu Linux desktop, version 10.4 LTS Lucid Lynx. LTS stands for “long term support,” though I usually update to new versions when they come out every six months.

Apparently, there's an interesting thread over on a site called Quora about the future of Firefox. It's no longer put together by a small, agile team that can turn on a sixpence, but has developed a complex, global group of skilled and generous people collaborating in different ways and at different levels.

The organizers of the 2010 SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) have announced new speakers for the second annual event, to be held June 11-13 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Some 30 speakers have been announced for the Ubuntu-heavy show, including Jon "Maddog" Hall, Wietse Zweitze Venema, and Keith Bergelt.

During the next week, Fedora contributors will vote for open seats on both the Fedora Project Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo).

The CouchDB developers at CouchIO have had some fun releasing a rap video, but tell The H they are serious about bringing their NoSQL database to the world

Google has unveiled a new incarnation of Android: version 2.2, codenamed Froyo. And yes, it includes support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1. "It turns out that on the internet, people use Flash," Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said this morning as he unveiled the new Android at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco.

Despite their claims that WebM was been checked for patent risks when ON2 was acquired, Google has neither made its research available nor does it offer a patent indemnity. Google has expressed extreme confidence in the patent safety of WebM, yet has failed to create a patent pool with its other endorsers and grant free and indemnified licenses to WebM contributors.

...along comes Google. And instead of piling on to this patent suit scrum, they offer immunity instead. Which is astonishing.