Remember ThinkFree? There are many situations where Microsoft approaches or acquires projects to ensure it can successfully exclude competitors and make third-party software developers (including their end users) more Microsoft-dependent. Watch what Microsoft is up to with Bldender at the moment. Blender is a FOSS poster child.

The United States warned China Thursday that it risked "technological isolation" for developing unique technical standards of its own that also are shutting out foreign competition.

A certain pattern has become a bit difficult to ignore. It would be easy to just let it pass or make a quick observation (as we did several times before), but this has gone on for too long and it cannot be coincidence.

"Thanks to all the hard work of the Mozilla community as of 9:15 AM PDT today we are code complete for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). [...] If all goes well we should have the Release Candidate publicly available in late May..."

"Riseup Labs is excited to announce the Freedom Summer of Code! We aim to advance critical movement technology projects and tools that benefit a wide-variety of radical social justice organizations and movements..."

Jeremy Allison on free software, Samba clusters and world domination...

Has the mission of OLPC changed so much? I say it has. No longer are the five core principals initially employed when the project started valid. The original Five Core Principles were:

In all seriousness of being a linux user we sometimes forget the fun side of it all, here is an attempt to capture some of it.