The question of whether business can co-exist with free and open source software (FOSS) was settled long ago. It can, and not only successful companies like Red Hat but also the willingness of venture capitalists to fund FOSS business models proves the case.

For at least the third time in recent weeks, prominent Dell newspaper advertisements feature the Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook running Canonical’s Ubuntu 8.04 (that’s a small Linux notebook, folks). The VAR Guy hears Microsoft “has gone postal” over the Linux notebook ads. You might even say this is Microsoft’s nightmare before Christmas. Here’s the complete scoop.

"...Later he found Lisp and it was the opposite of everything in Basic -- total freedom to do just about anything. And he loved it. That was, however, before he started using Lisp. When he started using Lisp in practice, he wasn't having a good time..."

The GNOME user experience hackfest in Boston was a great way to spend the worst week in Wall St history! Though there wasn't a lot of hacking, there was a LOT of discussion, and we covered a lot of ground.

This week, Canonical opened sales of legal multimedia codecs and DVD playback software to all Ubuntu users, regardless of whether the distribution was pre-installed on a purchased system or downloaded gratis from an Ubuntu mirror.

With 1.4 billion people connected, the Internet is the greatest collaborative network that mankind has experienced. One of the consequences of the growth of this network is a shift in the way knowledge is being created and distributed.

I can't fault Mark Shuttleworth for being ambitious. He wants to make Ubuntu into an operating system of choice -- one not only as good as the Mac, but better, and he wants to do it in 24 months, give or take. Dream big or die, right?

The Linux community has come up with a bunch of new technologies to bring the UI eye candy on Linux to the next level…following the path of a well established player : Apple with its 8 years old compositing window manager Quartz.