When you take a few steps back from the furor and zealotry and take a close look at what’s happened here, you will quickly start to see the cracks. One problem is that Dell appears to be under the misguided impression that listening to the IdeaStorm community is the same as listening to customers. It’s not.

Microsoft’s hire of Tom Hanrahan (right), formerly director of engineering for the Linux Foundation (and before that of the OSDL, one of its predecessors) says a lot about the company’s true open source situation.

The desktop is uncharted territory. Over the past year, I’ve been on a quest to find an operating system that balances ease of use, stability, low cost and high functionality...I think I can say when the open-source desktop will become a more widely deployed end-user operating system: when it becomes a product and not a project.

The GPLv3 debates are drawing to a close. By the end of the year, it may have become reality. Whether or not the Linux kernel team will adopt the new license, however is still up for debate. Linus Torvalds is not as fervently anti-GPLv3 as he was in earlier renditions of the license, but he still isn't ready to support a wholesale move to it, either.

What are we to make of this? Several things, I think, and none of them reflect very well on the legislators involved.

The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum will today release its first specifications in an effort to encourage people to develop more applications for Linux-based mobile phones.

In all the stories about Microsoft’s attack on open source, I have seen little talk about what the company is gaining in all this.