It is no secret that Microsoft uses a lot of GNU/Linux in house and we covered some examples of this in the past. Even just a week ago Microsoft acquired yet another company (Forecast) for over 100 million dollars and that company has merely everything based on Free software, including GNU/Linux. It brags about it in its Web site.

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.

I'm hammering away in Debian Lenny right now, and I can pretty much say that it does what I need it to do.

The growth of Free software cannot truly be measured. This is a marketing problem that we highlighted in the past, the focus being GNU/Linux. To shed some light on the growth of OpenOffice.org in Europe, consider the following new post.

I recently asked my father (he’s in his eighties and has been using Linux for about 6 years now) how he felt about Linux and what were some of his opinions. I asked if he could share his thoughts with the Linux community. These are his words, emailed yesterday.spacer_gif Linux is Good for the Elderly

As some of you already know, I am the main developer for Drigg. I donated probably more than 1000 hours of my life to the Drigg project, because I believed in it. After reviewing existing CMSs out there, I believe that Drigg is the best system available today for people who want to create Digg-like sites (but, in fact, when people deploy Drigg they get fully functional Drupal sites…!).

After failing to get any response from Linspire as to why they are not holding annual shareholder meetings, I asked them publicly to do so in my last blog, in a hopes that pressure from customers, partners and shareholders would encourage them to do the right thing. I hold a fairly large amount of Linspire stock, but I remain in a minority position with about 100 other shareholders.

After using computers for over twenty five years, I was suddenly struck by the thought that I do not know what to do with a fully functioning, uncrashable, secure and attractive operating system. For me a computer has always been a toy, something to be played with and tweaked to squeeze out every possible advantage.