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Would you like to test your knowledge of the people of FOSS? Take our quiz. We have eighteen questions, each concerning a person considered to be a leader in the FOSS world. Have we left anyone out? You betcha — starting with you. The way we see it, each and every one of us, whether we merely use FOSS at home, work to keep FOSS software maintained or fight the good fight to keep free tech free, is equally as important.

“And so, as we are pushing our ISV [Independent Software Vendor] and hardware partners to build great new stuff that takes advantage of Windows 10 that obviously makes the old stuff really bad and not to mention viruses and security problems.”

First up for the big tent events for this spring will be Great Wide Open in Atlanta. Although the event will take place March 16-17, which is actually a few days before spring’s official arrival, it’s a good bet that Atlanta will be in full bloom by the time the conference opens its doors at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center in the city’s midtown area.

SourceForge’s new owners aren’t exactly what you might expect to be purchasing a site that for all intents and purposes revolves around free and open source software. The new owners, SourceForge Media, is a subsidiary of BIZX, and while that may sound like some huge and gigantic mega corporation, it’s an LLC owned by Southern California residents Roger and Logan Abbott, who are probably either father and son or brothers, we’re not sure. What we do know is that their background is in telecommunications, not exactly the sort of business experience you’d expect for someone entering the share-and-share-alike world of FOSS, where there’s no such thing as vendor lock-in.

Inquiring minds wanted to know, so we asked. When choosing what to run on a machine — we’re talking computing machines running GNU/Linux here — what’s more important, the choice of distro or which desktop environment to run? We began asking the question among ourselves several weeks back when we were running our “best distro” poll and a few commenters observered that the desktop might be a more important metric for most users, since it’s the desktop that supplies the interface with which the user interacts. Good point, we thought.

This afternoon I exchanged a few emails with Logan Abbott who is one of the owners of BIZX and the president of the SourceForge Media subsidiary which he said “was formed for the purposes of this transaction.”

BSD had itself its own row of booths in the expanded expo hall — FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation, and OpenBSD were all neighbors on the exhibit floor. As is common for all the conferences we attend, Dru Lavigne and I — she moreso than me — got to catch up on things, and I took the time to drop in on her “Doc Like and Egyptian” presentation (though, burdened with a radio, I was called away to put out a minor “fire,” rhetorically speaking, in the press room).

To start the conference off on Thursday morning, Jorge Castro gave a speech regarding “Gaming on Ubuntu” as part of UbuCon. In only 15 minutes he was able to deliver a State of the Union address on gaming on Linux distros, particularly Ubuntu. He covered the pros and cons of such, Steam, and Linux getting next gen titles. Most helpful was a reference to multiple Personal Package Archives for the Linux gamer for controllers and new drivers, as well as the proper hardware to use to complement Linux gaming. This was followed by a presentation by Didiers Roche discussing Ubuntu Make, a command line tool for developers of many kinds.

So armed with some information and just as much misinformation, I set out to study the options open to us Linux users. I mean, in my heart of hearts, I didn’t think that virus and malware threats are near as prevalent on Linux as they are on Windows, but it turns out that several antivirus companies did not agree, to the point that they created antivirus programs for Linux too. And just about the time I began to despair at the number of choices I had and the amount of research that would be necessary to get the best protection available, it came to me….

It’s not the distro that’s important to most users, they said, because most users don’t interact with the distro itself as they work and play on their Linux machines. Instead, the average user’s direct interaction with a computer is primarily through the desktop environment, whether that be KDE, GNOME, Unity or something they rolled on their own on a Friday night instead of having a boys’ or girls’ night out.

Are you a distro hopper? Are you one of those people who knows what day of the week it is because of which distro you’re using? If so, this quiz for you. But even if you’re one of those people who finds a distro you like and sticks with it until it becomes as comfortable as a well worn shoe, you’ve probably done your homework, and that’s why you were able to find the distro that was a perfect fit for you. In other words, you’ll probably do well on our quiz too — because it just might be a tortoise and hare sort of thing.

Is world peace next? GNOME and KDE are neighbors at SCALE 14X, and for all intents and purposes that was by design. Thank, or blame, SoCal SUSE, which arranged for the two desktop rivals — both available on openSUSE and other major distros — to share a large booth at SCALE 14X.

This is the second time in three years that IT-oLogy’s longest running conference has been cancelled. In 2014 the event was cancelled, evidently due to logistical problems as IT-oLogy was in the process of launching the first Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. Last year there was no Atlanta event, and POSSCON was successfully rebooted in Columbia, attracting around 850 atendees.

One of the fears — one of the many in having an established conference at a brand spanking new venue — is this: Suppose they gave an outstanding Friday keynote, and nobody came? All those sleepless nights worrying about it were essentially for naught, since Cory Doctorow’s keynote at SCALE 14X Friday was a standing room only success.

The Linux Foundation’s board has always been weighted heavily in favor of corporations and money, with a large majority of the foundation’s board being elected by member corporations. The nine platinum members, who pay $500,000 yearly in membership dues, elect up to ten board members (or one each for up to ten directors), the sixteen gold members elect three, and the more than 250 silver members elect only one. Until last week, individual members, who pay $99 in annual dues elected two members to the board, not enough to influence foundation policy in a vote, but enough to give the community some say in the decision making process.

Shuttleworth’s keynote kicked off a busier-than-expected day at SCALE 14X. Sessions on Thursday throughout UbuCon and the rest of SCALE 14X seemed to have more than adequate attendance, especially in the larger rooms at the Pasadena Convention Center. In fact, the Chef Training was standing room only, and some of the attendees had to be turned away.

Starting today, the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 14X in this year’s 14th annual iteration — moves from being hotel-based event busting at the seams to hold all the exhibitors and sessions to being a full-fledged, freewheeling convention center-based event with wide-open spaces and widespread talks.

But I realized this morning that the emails I’ve been receiving from SCALE — I signed up for them back before registration was open — actually brighten my day and do much to make me wish I could travel cross continent to take part. Indeed, I think that other conferences, especially the big ones, could learn something by taking a look at SCALE’s use of email — for not only do they offer information for those attending this year’s event, they plant the seed in those who couldn’t make it this year that maybe they might want to decide now to be at SCALE 15x.

What hasn’t been cool is the destruction of expensive things that occur when Monty’s has one of his moments. The 42 inch TV donated by Melissa’s church has a plexiglas shield in front of it, and the last two computers we’ve placed in Monty’s home were destroyed as well. The first computer we placed was a fairly powerful quad core desktop with a 22 inch monitor and built-in speakers. Monty broke his left foot trying to pick the computer up and smash it onto the floor. After Melissa and I spoke about it, it was decided that a laptop would be more practical, as it can be placed out of harm’s way when not in use.

While Arch’s taking of the gold wasn’t much of a surprise, given the distro’s commanding performance in the qualifying poll, round two results below the top slot were a little different from what we expected. Elementary OS took second place, with 502 votes, just three percentage points behind the winner. In the qualifying round, Elementary wasn’t even offered as a poll choice and only made the final round due to a write-in campaign from the Elementary community.