Last year I was happy to see several Linux netbooks included in the Black Friday madness. This Friday Linux-based tablets will be available in stores like Target, Kmart, Best Buy, and Toys R Us, just to name a few. Here's my list of the top Black Friday Linux-based tablets deals along with their specs and where you can find them.

Analysis of the patent deal with Amazon and why it is a breach of some laws and should therefore be reported to authorities or regulators

On Tuesday, Rick Spencer announced on the Ubuntu developers mailing list that Ubuntu has entered a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and will make Yahoo! the default search engine. Well, I believe the community should have been consulted.

Today IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Canonical are introducing a cloud- and Linux-based desktop package in the U.S. designed for use on a company's existing fleet of personal computers (PCs) or even low-cost netbooks.

Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun has hit a snag. The European Commission is concerned that Oracle's will terminate the open source MySQL project, a move that would have a detrimental impact on competition in the database market. In light of the resilience inherent in open source software, it's unclear if such a maneuver would even be possible.

ASUS betrays GNU/Linux after getting "closely tied up with Microsoft", a new Web site called "It's better with Windows®" appears

Reports surfaced late this evening that computing giant IBM — which has been in talks for some time to buy Sun Microsystems — has pulled its $7 billion offer to buy the struggling company.

It's a familiar story. Microsoft does a secret deal with a company over patent licences. Almost no details are provided about which patents, how much money has changed hands, or why, except for one vaguely worded press release that talks about how such secret deals benefit the customer through openness and innovation.