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While we in the States were dealing with family and turkey, the EU was busy working on preparing Google’s head for the platter. The European Parliament yesterday passed by a wide margin a non-binding resolution urging anti-trust regulators to break up the company. For those keeping score, the final vote was 384 yeas and 174 nays.

While it’s not really on anyone’s radar, and barely on mine, several communities are either openly discussing curtailing — some are already outright walking away from — a 32-bit version of their distro, opting instead to go 64-bit only. Understandably, more of today’s focus is on some of the more pressing issues of the FOSS day, like how systemd will end life as we know it while plunging the entire universe into its black hole of doom.

Get those proposals in: The Call for Papers for the 13th annual Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 13x, for those of you keeping score at home — ends in less than three weeks from today.

There’s just one teeny-tiny little problem. For the last several years, Yahoo has been obtaining its search results from Bing, owned by Microsoft, with no indication this will change. I’m not exactly sure how the Microsoft/Yahoo deal works, but you can be sure that some money goes to Redmond each and every time a search is done via the web portal, something that many FOSS supporters might find unacceptable.

Linux Outlaws is not for shrinking violets — it is portrayed on its site as “very much like listening to two friends sitting in a pub, having fun and talking about things they find interesting.” However, I think that sells the show short — it is far more entertaining than that (and when they say, “Not recommended for the faint of heart or the ignorant,” they mean it). Always straightforward and honest, always informative and humorous, Linux Outlaws never met an issue they couldn’t tackle with their unique brand of wisdom, insight and jocularity.

In the long term, Reglue will continue to operate. I will remain the Executive Director and our mission will not change. However, it may dwell in hiatus for a couple of weeks after my surgery. Pete Salas and James, two extremely important volunteers for Reglue will keep the lights on and will continue to repair and refurbish incoming computers and maintain the building. Unfortunately, some other things will not happen in my absence.

We conduct classes for people who want to learn how to effectively use a computer. We have almost no young people attending these classes. The people who dominate the seats in my classroom are between 40 and 60 years old. A large percentage of them are scared to death of a computer. To many of them, a blinking cursor taunts them with just how incapable they are of living in the Age of Tech.

“Consumers like free, they’re big fans of that,” he went-on, “but I’m not sure that some of the other properties of open source are as big a deal to them as to a technical person who sees all these different facets that are interesting, whether it’s the forking side being interesting, that they can read the code or whatever. From the consumer point of view, you don’t get that usually.”

One subtext here, of course, regarding the misplaced euphoria by some begs the question, “Is Microsoft trustworthy?” The answer is clearly, “No. Absolutely not.” Despite the fact that Redmond has been playing nice with FOSS lately, we should not trust Microsoft any farther than former CEO and Stasi agent look-alike Steve Ballmer can throw a chair.

“It felt very clear to us that it needed to be open source, what we were doing,” Merriman continued. “We also like open source, so that was a factor too, almost a non business reason. A business reason, though, is part of the idea of strategy. We really wanted to be ubiquitous; we wanted to be everywhere. If people are using this database they need to know it and they need to understand it. There needs to be a community. There needs to be a critical mass of knowledgeable people, workers, who can code to it, who can administer it, who can operate it. It’ll be much easier to do that if it’s open source because it’ll be much wider used.”

So Tuesday morning, the Internet was abuzz. Groupon has a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation” called Gnome, which is accompanied by 28 — count ‘em 28 — trademark applications. With trademark not being the same as copyright, trademarks are constantly defended by owners because, well, that’s they way the system works (or doesn’t, depending on your perspective), and GNOME was in a position of having to spend a significant amount in defending its trademark, used for the last 17 years and officially trademarked in 2006.

Our custom distro, based on Linux Mint 17 KDE LTS, is a playground completely filled with learning opportunities. Many of the applications were taken from standard Linux educational apps available from the regular repositories. The 3.3 gig ISO file produces a live cd/install disk which not only provides hours of entertainment, it includes educational software that meets most any academic need the child will encounter. Many of our kids, however, are at the age where they like to play simple games. We’ve provided an abundant environment for that.

“We had a R&D group there that we started,” he said. “Started by my boss there, Kevin O’Conner. That group and his kind of vision for how you innovate on things is really what got me interested in trying to be creative, trying to come up with ideas either for products or businesses, whether it’s inside an existing big company or starting something new that is a startup. So, that was really the catalyst.”

In a full-page ad in “The New York Times” on Nov. 9, 2004, the Mozilla project announced the release of Firefox 1.0, the first full version of the browser which has become the third most popular way to navigate the Internet, behind Google Chrome and Internet Exploder, er, Explorer. What makes Firefox unique is that it’s the only one of the three leading browsers that’s completely open source. Ten years later, more than 450 million people use Firefox, of which about 40 percent of the code is written by volunteers. In addition, its reach can be measured by the fact that more than half of the users employ non-English versions. The browser is available in 75 languages.

The day is rapidly approaching when every city in the U.S. will be like London is now, with survelliance cameras connected to a grid covering every cubic inch of the city, not disimilar to what we see weekly on “Person of Interest”. Already, in London, computers connected to these cameras can detect “suspicious behavior”. Add facial recognition technology to that and it really will be like “Person of Interest”, especially in a nation that’s convinced that terrorists are hiding around every corner. The technology is sure to be abused, as law enforcement has never found a technology they didn’t overuse.

It turns out that we like cookie cutter distros, except when we don’t. We like a newly adopted distro to work exactly the way the one we were using before worked, except when we don’t. We want to be able to move back and forth between Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian with ease, without having to learn slightly new ways of doing things on each distro, except when we don’t.

We are not referred to as “The Linux Community” out of hand. Yes, we can be a loud community. We are often an argumentative community, coloring outside of the lines into larger reaches of the Internet. But we are a community nonetheless. We’re people like Alan Dacey, who stops what he’s doing to write a script to solve a vexing problem for Reglue. People like Clem Lefebvre, who’s devoted to creating a safe and fantastic Linux environment in which to work.

Here at FOSS Force we’re proud to be associated with Ken Starks. We’re proud because of the great articles he writes advocating Linux. We’re also extremely proud that he was chosen to be a keynote speaker at this year’s Ohio LinuxFest. But most of all, we’re proud because of his big heart, which he expresses through his work through Reglue, the nonprofit he founded in 2005 to give Linux computers, and training on how to use them, to financially disadvantaged school children in and around the Austin, Texas area where he lives.

Linux is more than an alternative operating system. It’s an entire culture of sharing, of learning…and learning how to share. The torch will be passed from graybeards like Jon “Maddog” Hall to the young who are now making their talents known. Guys like Michael Schultheiss and Warren Moore…and I am just breaking my brain trying to remember the java programmer who Randy Noseworthy and I had lunch with. It’s these people that will lead us to Mars, cure diabetes and make cancer an inconvenience and not a death sentence.

I thought perhaps it was a one-off mistake, made by a marketing department flunky who had too much Red Bull while writing a press release. Being the responsible company that Canonical/Ubuntu is, and being the good FOSS community member it portrays itself to be, I assumed they’d fix the error right away and make sure that ludicrous hyperbole was not the order of the day.