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The project’s original purpose, in large part, was to keep free software free. KDE had begun development the previous year using Trolltech’s then proprietary Qt framework. GNOME was built using the GTK+ toolkit, which had been created for GIMP and was licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The GNOME desktop was released under the LGPL, with most of its applications licensed under the GPL, making GNOME and its apps totally free software.

Canonical is banking on the solution being the Snappy package manager, which includes all of an app’s dependencies in a single compressed package, “so in theory, there should be no compatibility problems.”

Last October, we published a story on the 2012 imprisonment — without charges — by the Syrian government of Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Syrian computer engineer specializing in open source software development. Bassel has become known worldwide for his strong commitment to the open source paradigm, teaching others about technology, and contributing his experience freely to help the world.

Another thing the Mad guys and dolls have been working on is getting tons of free publicity through news articles placed on content hungry news sites. Well, actually, this publicity isn’t exactly free, since Redmond spends big bucks advertising on most of these sites, which is something that must cross editors’ minds when deciding to go ahead and make important news out of what should be merely a product release.

Let’s set things straight: The ThinkPad is no longer a laptop, according to the Lenovo press release. The first paragraph of the press release says the company “unveiled the beginning of a new family of mobile workstation innovations.” So I guess that’s what we’re calling them now – mobile workstations.

On one of the back desks there was a stack of Lenovo R-500s. We love supplying Lenovo laptops because they are the most durable machines we’ve given away. Pete was working on them in order to make them ready for this school year. As we passed that table on the way to my desk, our visitor jerked his head in that direction and asked, “Are those being prepared for recycle?”

There was a time years ago when Linux and gaming weren’t fit to be in the same sentence. I first made the jump to Linux around the late ’90s with a copy of Doom II. There were glitches at times: the occasional crash, loss of sound and lack of some features. The flaws of the Linux version in contrast to its Windows counterpart turned me away from Linux gaming at first.

While my own priorities were shifting, the state of political discourse was going through huge changes. Activist communities were slowly moving most of our political conversations and many of our personal interactions to the web. At some point it hit me that I had no idea who built any of the tools we were all using or what that entity’s end goal was. Of course, large corporations rarely value individual freedoms unless they happen to align with their profit-driven goals.

With an announcement on the Linux Weekly News site on Tuesday, the Ada Initiative will be tying up the loose ends and wrapping up their work in October.

It didn’t take me long to figure out something I should have snapped-to long before: You can dress a Linux system up to look like Windows as much as you like or as much as you can, but once the clothes hit the floor the whole façade crumbles and it doesn’t at all resemble Windows. Not even close.

Back in the early days of the 21st century, Dotcom seemed to have overcome his checkered past and to have developed the Midas touch with the popular online storage site Megaupload. Like Midas, however, he was to discover that gold is an overrated commodity, the ownership of which often creates as many problems as it solves. For one thing, you can’t eat it. For another, lots of people want to take it from you.

But, of course, we won’t be careful. Nor will we keep guns and worse out of the hands of our self aware and much smarter than we robots. Just the opposite, if history is any guide. As far as I know, we have never developed a technology that we haven’t militarized. In fact, the most rapid development of technologies comes when the military begins to see a use for them.

While it joins an already crowded field, with the likes of Android, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and others already in the mobile OS space, Plasma Mobile “offers a free — as in freedom and beer — user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices,” wrote Sebastian Kugler, a lead architect, on KDE’s website. “Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.”

Jane answered the phone and a pleasant young man identified himself as an internet technician with Microsoft. He told her they’d received a report that something was extremely wrong with their computers and he was calling to help. And yeah…you know where this is going. But Jane did not.

phpMyAdmin, the popular free and open source web based tool for administering MySQL databases, has left the SourceForge building. In a blog post on Saturday, the project’s infrastructure coordinator, Michal ?iha?, announced that a migration from Sourceforge is all but complete. The few remaining items left on the SourceForge server will be “hopefully handled in upcoming days as well.”

OSCON wraps up, as it always does, with its closing remarks, a short talk — this year by Simon Wardley on “Situation normal, everything must change” — and the annually awaited O’Reilly Open Source Awards, which had five winners this year. The five are…and because no one else will say it, I will: The OSCON goes to…

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.