"...A broad movement of campaigners and organizations is calling on everybody to join action against excessive surveillance by governments and businesses. On 11 October 2008, concerned people in many countries will take to the streets, the motto being 'Freedom not fear 2008'. Peaceful and creative action, from protest marches to parties, will take place in many capital cities..."

"The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). In addition to correcting several security problems and a few serious defects in the stable release, for the first time in Debian's history an update for a stable distrubtion also adds support for newer hardware by giving users the option to install newer drivers..."

Steve Ballmer has recently sent a memo to every Microsoft employee. Ballmer's memo leaked really quickly (I wonder if he expected it). After swallowing the corporate-madness part (but that's allowed: he's a "mad" corporate leader after all), one particular passage really grabbed my attention.

"...Damn, I find it so cool when people combine all those free as in freedom things! In my opinion this is exactly the goal we wanted to achieve with the free software movement and which many of its naysayers and opponents did not get. :-)

A lot of people view Windows as Linux's main competition, largely because Microsoft has, by far, the majority of the market and is considered "the standard' by most people. Mark Shuttleworth and I disagree.

I am pretty proud of my adopted country, Macedonia. (Full disclosure - my wife is Macedonian.) At the end of 2005 Macedonia became the world’s first wireless country. The full BBC write-up is here. Two years later, in 2007, Macedonia became one of the few countries to roll out, en masse, Ubuntu throughout the educational system.

Some people seem to challenge the idea that most (if not all) free software projects need a benevolent dictator—that is, somebody who has the last say on every decision. They are quick to point out Linus Torvalds’ past “mistakes” (see the speech marks): using BitKeeper to manage the kernel, not allowing “pluggable” schedulers in Linux, etc.