Last summer, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu distribution and of Canonical, Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, challenged the free and open source software (FOSS) to deliver a desktop experience superior to Apple's.

Apple believes it has a patent that could potentially throw a wrench into an effort to develop a Web standard for updating widgets.

I have a bunch of designers at my job, and they all carry around an apple. No not the fruit, you know the vastly overpriced and over-hyped electronics brand. These guys think they are so cool. While Linux is actually a lot cooler then apple, it's not perceived by enough people as being cool.

Novell is still pursuing intellectual monopolies and Apple threatens to use them to attack Linux-based products from Palm

"...We must continue to put pressure on Apple. That means continuing to boycott all DRM-content on iTunes, including the iPhone and the App Store. We encourage Apple to continue to remove DRM from iTunes content, including all movies, TV shows, games, audiobooks and applications, as well as support for free formats, such as Vorbis and Theora..."

Signs of weakness at Apple and why it's good for GNU/Linux

Apple has always been very protective over their proprietary software. The company doesn't want anything but iTunes to control an iPod - and for good reason, too.

All Linux distributions have their own home base: their homepage. How well is this homepage taken care of and how well does it perform? To answer these questions we have monitored the uptime and load time of the homepages for 16 Linux distributions for a month.