As a Canadian, I'm always irked by airy statements by Americans that they won World War II. With all respect, I feel much the same way about the recent interview on Wired.com with Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.

The thesis of Marcus Manfred Dapp offers an explanation of why software patents are bad for Europe (and for any other continent/country for that matter)

I have stated a few times that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its advocates don’t have a vision of the future that I find viable. Twenty years from now, across the globe, every individual, business, organization, and government entity will have FOSS suitable for all their needs.

Assuming that the numbers from 2006 hold true, the level of participation by women in open source could use a lot of improvement. According to the Flosspols study, women make up less than 2 percent of the open source community. Proprietary software shows a not-great but much higher participation rate of nearly 30 percent.

ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be complex. Given the deficiencies in ReactOS developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch using Wine source code.

First branded as a communist plot, then derided as a form of cancer, before being upgraded to merely a 'grey spectre', free and open source software (FOSS) has had a pretty rough ride from Microsoft over the years. For many in the open source community, the company represents all that is troubling about closed source software development. Recently, though, there have been developments.

Andy Updegrove writes an article providing an overview of the history of FOSS and its champions, the major philosophical differences that divide FOSS from OSS developers, the multiple licenses under which FOSS is made available, and the principle non-profit institutions that support and promote FOSS.

I am looking at a claim thats usually made against many outspoken people in the FOSS, but often you see it when there is no counter in an debate/argument. When I first started writing this article little did I know I would get my own example of “killing the FOSS” directed at me.