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The final day started with many an attendee with coffee in hand, filing into the Portland Ballroom for the morning welcome and keynotes. Matthew McCollough of GitHub, Sarah Novotny of NGNIX, and Rachel Roumeliotis of O’Reilly kicked off the opening welcome to a standing room only crowd — problematic since the ushers wouldn’t let anyone stand, so I ended up sitting in someone’s lap (just kidding).

The agreement between the two organizations is a two way street, one that should should be good on many levels for free tech. As part of the agreement, Crowd Supply has already redesigned its website to bring it into compliance with FSF’s Free Javascript Campaign — meaning that users will be able to use the site without running any non-free software. Going forward, the crowd funder will work with FSF on more software and hardware projects that pass FSF muster, which includes FSF’s famous “four freedoms.” In return, FSF officially endorses Crowd Supply as its funding platform of choice, and will recommend the site to developers who are seeking funding for open source projects.

OSCON resembles that Bonnaroo without the mosh pit (though now that I’ve written that, let’s see if something like that appears in Austin next year). But along with the camaraderie there’s also an element of “high school reunion” in the mix.

At OSCON, Purism has on hand the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops – the numbers designating the screen size (13-inch and 15-inch, respectively) — which are both designed, chip-by-chip and line-by-line to respect your rights to privacy, security and freedom, which is Purism’s philosophy.

“Big Blue” unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM plans to release 50 projects to the open source community to speed adoption in the enterprise sector and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile and analytics, among other areas.

The application Cap One is unveiling with much fanfare isn’t something designed to help potential clients interact with the bank’s network, but is a developers’ tool. Called Hygieia, after the Greek goddess of health, it’s a dashboard that ties together data from a variety of tracking tools commonly used by software developers and presents them on a single screen.

Isaac emailed me a few weeks ago, and introduced himself as someone who was extremely interested in the work we do at Reglue. He told me that he had already rebuilt a Lenovo laptop and placed it in the home of a local kid who needed it. Isaac lives and works in the Washington, DC area, by way of Virginia. We developed a friendship as we passed emails back and forth.

Forget that the folks at Microsoft were wrong about the “Start” button and the interface formally known as Metro. It seems they’re still convinced they know what’s best for their users. So much so that the new Windows, due to be released next week, will have users click off on an EULA that pretty much gives Redmond carte blanche to update the system at will, which will include updating apps as well as Windows itself, with no real way to opt out — except for users of the Enterprise edition.

FSF, Canonical Makes Progress on Licensing: The $140,000-plus in donations is still missing, but that’s not the biggest news coming from Canonical this week. After two years of wrangling between the Free Software Foundation and Canonical — with a little help from the Software Freedom Conservancy — the FSF announced that they have made some progress on updated licensing terms for, as the FSF calls it, “Ubuntu GNU/Linux.”

I unequivocally believe that all the talk about desktops and laptops being obsolete is hilariously misguided nonsense. In our mythical race to find The Next Great Thing, people who know better - or at least are given too much credit in the intelligence department - are grasping at straws because, heck, sooner or later they’ll be right about something.

The trolls are still at it. In spite of the fact that the Supreme Court was busy ruling against them last year — between January and June it ruled against patent holders six times — the number of cases being brought by non-practicing entities (NPE), which is one measure of a troll, continues to rise. According to a report published in June by patent defense organization UnifiedPatents, there will be about eight thousand tech related patent disputes this year, with over six thousands of these expected to go to trial.

Some of you have reminded me that there is a good assortment of text to speech applications for Linux, especially in the mobile market, such as Android and the iExperience. Granted, for both examples, but we are needing an application that can either come preinstalled or be easily installed on almost any Linux distribution. That leads us back to the plentiful choices within the Linuxsphere you feel the need to mention. Yes, there are a lot of them, but when it all gets boiled down, they all share one simple trait.

Indeed it is, and its tactics are beginning to resemble an extortion racket, with suited Oracle thugs threatening, “Nice database you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” The leverage the company has to make this tactic work is our old pal, vendor lock-in.

Between bringing up the unaccounted-for donations and Canonical’s iffy arrangement with developers, Riddell was shown the door and, wisely perhaps, he walked out of it. However, in a twist, it appears that Kubuntu 15.10 may be the last Kubuntu as we know it.

Immediately after the verdict, Newegg, which has made it a policy to duke it out in court rather than settle patent claims it thinks are unfounded, vowed to appeal. Trouble is, they can’t. Not until U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who conducted the trial, enters a final judgement, which he hasn’t done. He also hasn’t indicated when, if ever, that’s likely to happen.

I can vouch for this because for the last nine or so years, my daughter has used hand-me-down after hand-me-down (until she got her own ZaReason Alto 3880 laptop), all running Linux. With the exception of the first one, she had even installed her own distros. I don't think she uses Linux to placate her old man - I think she has grown to become a pro at Linux and FOSS by her own choice, to the point where she’s doing her artwork using GIMP and Inkscape on her laptop.

In relation to the real accomplishments in the Linuxsphere, I was late to the party. In 2005, my three city network of business offices had been hacked and defaced. I had no idea of what to do. I was our local IT guy, but that ain’t sayin’ much. The buddy who set up our network was living in San Antonio at the time and I called him at 6:30 in the morning. I called him out of panic…I didn’t know what else to do.

For at least a decade, Microsoft has been chanting the mantra, “at Microsoft security is job one,” over and over and over. During this time, they’ve repeated this mantra often enough to convince a lot of people that Windows is much safer than it once was, which I suppose is true since it couldn’t have gotten much worse. However, a new report from AV-Test proves the company isn’t yet ready to move up to the next mantra level and begin chanting, “at Microsoft we do security right,” because clearly it doesn’t.

Sean Michael Kerner reported yesterday on IT Business Edge that Ubuntu has earned its way onto Intel’s Compute Stick platform. The Compute Stick, a small form factor powered by a quad-core Atom processor with a USB port and a micro-SD card slot, can be plugged into any HDMI TV and — voila! — you have yourself a computing device. Once the sole domain of Windows 8.1, the Intel Compute Stick will use the year-old Ubuntu 14.04 LTS distribution.

There’s a bit of sobering news for sites like FOSS Force, as again in 2014, technology sites top the list of the type of sites most likely to be exploited by cracker hackers, with the number on the rise. According to Symantec, last year 21.5 percent of tech sites were infected by malware, up from 9.9 percent in 2013. Even more disturbing is that number two on this list are hosting sites, up from the number three position in 2013, with a 7.3 percent infection rate.