It takes money and it takes new ideas to build a better desktop, both of which are being raised by the open source GNOME Foundation. GNOME is one of the most popular Linux desktop GUIs and is included in nearly every Linux distribution.

Free software is a remarkable phenomenon. It is a highly evolved form of collaboration: compared to other creative endeavors, free software developers all over the world are able to work together on a project with surprisingly little friction.

Terry Hancock made a few statements about why developers choose a copyleft licence as did Tony Mobily in his editorial for issue 20. So let me tell you why this developer chose (and continues to choose) a copyleft licence?

Mozilla Corporation has claimed that the transition to Firefox 3.1 won’t be “a major pain-in-the-ass” and pledged developers will not be hit by “surprises along the way”, after royally hacking off users with the 3.0 launch.

Years ago, there was a great deal of worry about the possibility of burning out Linus. Life seems to have gotten easier for him since then; now instead, I've heard concerns about burning out Andrew. It seems that you do a lot; how do you keep the pace and how long can we expect you to stay at it?

I have been trying to digest two unrelated stories from last week. The first was the report by the Standish Group on the $60 Billion dollars open source is purported to be costing the proprietary software industry. The second was Steve Reubel’s, “The Web 2.0 World is Skunk Drunk on Its Own Kool-Aid“. As I looked introspectively into these stories I wondered how relevant they were.

In the beginning, there was Linus Torvalds, a single developer who put together the original Linux kernel. Fast forward to 2008 and Torvalds is no longer the lone Linux developer.