Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than "a marketing thing," according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.

Ubuntu seems to be the latest, greatest thing in the world of operating systems. The creators of Ubuntu have done some good things in terms of making Linux easier to use and in providing guidance for Linux newbs. But with newbs you bring ignorance, and there are a couple things I’ve been seeing that are kind of ridiculous.

Last year, Dell began offering Ubuntu on non-corporate desktops and laptops... With this offering came a lot of discussion over what Dell should include with each computer sold... comments ran the gamut from FOSS purity to legal questions to even questioning Dell's motives. Clearly the FOSS community is pulled in all directions trying to satisfy users. Is there any happy medium? Can the community balance the requests of purists and pragmatists and still release usable products?

In the past week alone, Windows deals in Dubai, in Paris and even in Greece were announced not quite by Microsoft, but by Bill Gates, who had met politicians. We seem to recall press releases suggesting so — giving Gates all the credit. This was a not technical decision as much as a political one. Here is the latest news from Greece, which we have not covered yet (follow the links to find the rest).

"Well, that's it. You'll never have to listen to Stanford professor Larry Lessig talk about Free Culture again. Lessig is moving on - to fight the good fight against "Corruption". The technology-leaning lawyer announced this last year, but has continued to discuss Wikipedia, the Creative Commons and the like. That is until yesterday, when he delivered a 'last lecture' on Free Culture at Stanford University..."

With the recent release of version 4.0, the KDE open source project has garnered a lot of international attention. One of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality, Aaron J Seigo is in Australia to speak at this year's Linux.conf.au on his vision for better desktop computing. Computerworld spoke with Seigo, a native of Calgary, Canada, about his view of the world and how a little bit of innovation will permanently change how people interact with software.

Vietnamese students learn how to use the GIMP wth PClinuxOS.

"As we enter into our final hours of our yearly membership drive, I wanted to thank all our supporters and welcome our nearly 450 new members! I'm happy to report that this has been the most successful membership drive since we launched the program in 2002. We are still 50 short of our goal of 500 new associate members. So, here's the challenge for today. Please consider..."