"...The next talk was about Perl 6. Patrick Michaud was a good speaker, and he could convey his enthousiasm about the (many) novelties of Perl 6 as opposed to 5. He also quickly described what they used for their implementation of Perl 6, Rakudo Perl : the Parrot virtual machine. This seemingly allows you to put together your dynamic language in about 4 hours. Might pick up Perl again sometime..." -- via perlbuzz: http://perlbuzz.com/2008/02/patrick-michaud-spreads-the-word-at-fosdem.html

Bob Sutor discusses the effect of open source and open standards on innovation and markets. Specific topics include the effects of open source alternatives on software markets, open standards and interoperability, the new social aspect of software and the open source community.

"Richard Stallman, who started the free software movement, visits Russian in March 2008. The legendary programmer plans to give several lectures for students and specialists and hold a press-conference. Mr. Stallman is known to be the initiator of his visit to Russia. Experts relate his arrival to a boom in the domestic free software market..."

The Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for Document Liberation with grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general. The DFD was initiated and is supported by a group of organisations and companies, including, but not limited to the Free Software Foundation Europe, ODF Alliance, OpenForum Europe, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Getting my feet wet in OpenBSD has gotten me thinking about how different operating systems handle software updates -- and how important security patches and bug fixes really are.

At first, ranking GNU/Linux distributions seems alien to the spirit of free software. After all, free software is all about choice. What should matter is that your distro suits you, not how others judge it.

You can now add FSDaily news feeds to your website or homepage. The block will show the latest news from one of our great feeds.

With Linux becoming more popular and easier to use, more and more people are adopting it as their primary operating system. But the transformation from Windows user to Linux user can be a tough road to take. Most new users become long-term users because they have friends that introduce Linux to them, and help them through the first few weeks of rough-patches. Here are ten steps to help you introduce Linux to a would-be convert.