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More and more I realize that there is a misconception about free software. Many people tend to believe that free software actually means software that should not cost any money. They somehow find natural and fair the fact that some people may work voluntarily in order to produce software, which the rest can use to make money without having any legal obligation to contribute either money or effort back upstream.

Yesterday I’ve attended the Nagios World Conference Europe hosted in Bozen (Italy) by Wurth-Phoenix, so as first thing thanks to Wurst-Phoenix for the organization this meeting, for the free access provided to the event , and for the good meal that we have enjoyed.

These are some notes I’ve took during the meeting.

Do you have an older PC that does not support booting from USB devices, and really want to boot from USB devices? You can, thanks to the Plop boot manager. This weekend, turn that aging computer into a USB-booting powerhouse.

It would take me a week just to write a sketch of all the new things that were discussed on the Ubuntu Developer Summit that took place in Budapest this week (which has ended today), so I'll only write a short overview of what's to come in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

Canonical has announced that Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud will adopt the OpenStack cloud platform over Eucalyptus. In other Ubuntu-related news, an Ubuntu 11.04-based Linux Mint 11 release candidate (RC) was announced that opts for the GNOME 2.32.1 desktop environment over both Canonical's Unity and GNOME 3.0.

O'Reilly Media announced a new Android Open Conference Oct. 9-11, in San Francisco, designed for anyone who creates, sells, or markets Android-related products. In other open source conference news, the Linux Foundation last week announced keynote speakers, including Linus Torvalds, for LinuxCon Japan, June 1-3, and Linux Expo of Southern California announced events for Software Freedom Day 2011 on Sept. 17.

It's 2011. Do you know where your Semantic Web is? Hmm. Good question. After so many years, one might wonder whether you should still care whether the Semantic Web ever makes it. Well, you should. Why? Because the more the Web is capable of doing, the more we can get out of it. And given how much we now rely on the Internet and the Web, we can't afford to allow either to be less than they are capable of being.

From free, open-source software user, to blogger, then Linux distro developer -- that's the path of 20-year-old Jeff Hoogland, who in 2010 started Bodhi Linux, a distribution based on Ubuntu that features the latest version of the Enlightenment window manager and key newer applications in a stripped-down base that lets users set things up the way they like them.

The Ubuntu system requires you to login as an administrative user to be able to execute commands that only root can execute. However, you can alter the system to allow root to login to perform hours of administration as root. This eliminates the requirement of typing the full path for commands.

You may recall the saga of patent troll Bedrock, which claims that it has patents over Linux and successfully sued Google over Google's Linux use. Well, the verdict from Bedrock's suit against Yahoo on similar grounds has come in — and Yahoo is victorious, not least because Yahoo went second and got to see how the arguments in the Google case went.

When gnome 3.0 was released and its new shell became the point of attraction, many users were disappointed. They did want their old Gnome 2.32 panels and nothing else. A set of Gnome shell extensions are available now that make the shell look and act more like the old panel.

What do you get when you combine something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue? You get IBM and Red Hat: A new private cloud market contender.

GroundWork Inc., (www.groundworkopensource.com) the leading open platform for network, application and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has released GroundWork Cloud Connector for GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4. An automatic, monitoring provisioning system, GroundWork Cloud Connector gives users the ability to monitor Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus cloud instances right along side traditional data center infrastructures.

This week's 5 links include Vint Cerf on cloud standards, if process is killing developer passion and a cartoon on mobile development run amok.

Common wisdom has held for years that Linux is superior to Windows when it comes to security issues. But now that open source is growing in popularity both on the consumer side (think Android phones) and the enterprise side (Linux runs the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, for example, according to Wikipedia), it's time to push past the adage and look again at the whole "which is safer" issue.

[Common wisdom..if users have any know Linux is by its design and not just its licensing and user-base is more secure, period. - Scott]

Even though in the beginning of the default email client session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, it looked like it's certain that Evolution will stay as default in Ubuntu 11.10, towards the end of the session things changed and it was decided to stay with Evolution for now BUT switch to Thunderbird as the default email client in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot as long as it integrates with the desktop.

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced its next two day, hands-on course that provides substantial practice with key tools and capabilities available to developers of Linux based applications and system software. The course shows attendees how to use development and debugging tools and how to make use of many Linux system calls and library routines.

Google just launched an encrypted search portal which is a Godsend for people on public networks since there is a lot that can be gleaned from your search queries. For doing your protected searches, however, you have to go to a different portal which I linked to above. Now, the omnibar (the address bar in Google Chrome) also serves as a search box but searches on the normal google portal by default. Here is a simple, few seconds process to switch it over to encrypted search.

On June 15, Samsung and Acer will release the first consumer-oriented Chrome OS laptops, or Chromebooks as Google likes to call them. Both hardware- and software-wise, these netbooks are nothing special: You can download Chrome OS's open source brother, Chromium OS, for free -- and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering.

Released in March 2009, Linux-Libre is in a sense a grandchild of the already established distributions gNewSense and BLAG. Though, UTUTO-e , a Gentoo based Linux distro, is credited to have removed licensed linux source code for the first time, Linux-Libre improves considerably on the entire process and is more pro-active in its features.