It’s almost 8 PM on a Tuesday night, and the lecture hall here at Virginia Tech University is filled nearly to capacity. The students – many of them computer science majors – have come to hear Richard Stallman, the grand forefather of GNU/Linux. The crowd is chatty and seems in a good mood.

"What could possibly be better than working on a challenging free software project and helping to create something of real value to your community?

Getting paid for it.

I believe the problem of communication is by far the biggest problem and obstacle in the adoption of free software. I believe we have solved all the major technical problems in the adoption of free software, and the ones that remain are either being worked on or in testing. What has yet kept us from becoming the dominant supplier of software is our way of communication and marketing.

"Geneva, 1 April 2008. The International Organization for Standardization announced at a press conference that its processes are "broken" and "need radical reform". ISO president Håkan Murby told journalists that "the Microsoft OOXML process was a near-disaster and we want to make sure such a thing never happens again."

Desktops starting with Dell have begun being sold with Linux pre-installed, almost all of the new UMPC Eee-like notebooks that are selling in extremely large numbers these days are coming with Linux pre-installed, Everex is pushing Linux desktops through Wal-Mart, and lots of new computers are getting SLED certified or some other form of Linux certification.

You may or may not have heard of it, but the PWN to OWN Competition is an annual competition where hackers get together to try to hack into 3 different machines: a Mac, a Linux box, and a Vista box. So far, the results have been both surprising and unsurprising as well.

Aaron Seigo joined the KDE project in 2000 and is sponsored by Trolltech. Based in Calgary, Canada Aaron spends his time thinking about KDE project and its client-side software. Here he describes how porting KDE4 to Windows and MacOS will enable Kontact, the Open Source groupware application, to challenge the dominance of Microsoft Outlook in the enterprise.

This is a web page designed to provide some laughs to the working hackers. It contains software, documentation, music, poems, etc. submitted by GNU users and collected by GNU contributers over the years.