The Software Development Times has published an in-depth look the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) attempts at breaking down barriers for women in open source. It highlights the recently released report by the FSF's Women's Caucus, a mini-summit held last year to address issues in the FOSS community that some say prevent more females from participating.

The story of how Icarus Falling is being written and published is almost as interesting as the book itself - that is if you are nerdy kind of writing geek. The book was originally written in MS Word 97. Over the last several years, our computers have been upgraded a few times and my wife migrated permanently to Linux, Ubuntu specifically.

Does Linux kernel development face a crisis in the coming years? That was one of the topics of discussion at LinuxCon this week, and the concern has been raised before.

Last year, the GNOME Foundation began hosting summits for developers alongside another desktop environment community: KDE. "In our meeting with the KDE conference, we're trying to cooperate in our common goal of providing a free desktop," said Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation.

This week's LinuxCon featured some lively discussions over the fate of Linux, says eWEEK. Hosted by the Linux Foundation (LF), the event explored cloud computing, social networking, Android integration, GPL licensing, Linux kernel challenges such as multicore processing and code complexity, and MeeGo, among other issues.

As I was browsing the Web, I read this comment of a user who considered that Windows is a necessary OS "to get things done". He said this in the context of his disappointment with Linux because of the need of the command line.

A while back I was helping someone out over in the #fedora irc support channel. We managed to work on their issue and get it solved, but instead of enjoying their victory or working on another problem they indicated that they were happy, but were going to go off and install $otherdistro now.

Open source went mainstream long ago. It's a pity, then, that it's still so poorly understood by many of its most ardent admirers.