The title of this article "Because the simple things in life are often the best." comes from a Kellogs cornflakes commercial I used to watch in Australia. However it doesn't just apply to cornflakes. It applies to all parts of our lives. It is also part of the philosophy of the *nix crowd.

The basic idea behind open source, a fledging model employed in the software industry, is very simple : When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves.

"...Juris’ book provides an ethnographic study of anti-corporate globalization movements [...] «Because they use tools such as email lists, Web pages and free software to organize actions, share information, and coordinate at a distance, anti-corporate globalization networks have become models for emerging forms of directly democratic politics,» Juris says.

"In the spirit of the Anarchist Cookbook, I have written some informal notes to help people understand the GNU-Darwin Distribution.

http://www.gnu-darwin.org/index.php?page=guide-cookbook ..."

"Just returning from the iCommons Summit in Sapporo, Japan. The Free Beer project made a showing, with a locally brewed version. But this ad caught my eye: "Free Beer" for "500 yen."

Open Source is not about freedom, nor is it about licenses. It's about community. Of course everyone knows about Richard Stallman's concern about having the freedom to modify all software on his machine. Tim O'Reilly has had a concern for many years that Open Source licenses do not keep software Open Source when it is not being distributed but instead performed as in Web 2.0 applications.

Here you can vote for the next open source icon. It is a poll from Groundwork who will be present at Linux World 2008. I voted for the Gnu Gnu. It might not be the cutest, but still I hope you will too.

We all know the term “FUD“, don’t we? If you haven’t heard of it, it means “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”, and it was created by a big software monopoly, often headlined “Get the facts”.