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As promised in this week's Open Ballot (and thanks for your fantastic contributions), here's our own distro contest from issue 162 of Linux Format magazine.

This is a personal post and does not neccessarily represent the views of Canonical or the Ubuntu community.. Today Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and Free Software Foundation wrote a critical post accusing Ubuntu of shipping spyware (which is referring to the online search capabilities of the Ubuntu dash). He goes on to suggest “in your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.“. This is FUD.

One of the major advantages of free software is that the community protects users from malicious software. Now Ubuntu GNU/Linux has become a counterexample. What should we do? Proprietary software is associated with malicious treatment of the user: surveillance code, digital handcuffs (DRM or Digital Restrictions Management) to restrict users, and back doors that can do nasty things under remote control. Programs that do any of these things are malware and should be treated as such. Widely used examples include Windows, the iThings, and the Amazon "Kindle" product for virtual book burning, which do all three; Macintosh and the Playstation III which impose DRM; most portable phones, which do spying and have back doors; Adobe Flash Player, which does spying and enforces DRM; and plenty of apps for iThings and Android, which are guilty of one or more of these nasty practices.

Sony again snubs Linux users with a PS3 by refusing access to the new SEN Web Store, with a generic error message giving no rhyme or reason

At the very least I need my operating system to have a web browser and a ssh connection - the former ChromeOS provides very obviously (the whole OS is one giant web browser). Getting an SSH connection from the device was not as straight forward however.

Most distros include Btrfs, and Btrfs has been included in mainline Linux kernels since the 2.6.29 kernel. To use it just install the user-space tools. So what's the story, is it ready for prime time or not?

This week, we look at why Darth Vader would have made a darn good IT project manager (in spite of his obvious brutality and ruthlessness), if Agile is for everyone and the double-edged sword of code optimization.

Amazon unwittingly mounts a perfect demonstration why you should not trust Kindle as a place to purchase books.

I recently graduated in May, and I had not heard of Creative Commons until I came to work at Red Hat. After a few months, I had gained some familiarity with Creative Commons but it was only when I was recently asked to create images for their 10th Anniversary that I realized I had some research to do. 

Roll-your-own app store means game on for BYOD Organisations planning to give users access to curated collection of Android apps can now do so with their Google Apps account, after the advertising giant quietly threw the switch on what it has poetically dubbed “The Google Play Private Channel for Google Apps”.…

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into PureFTPd for virus scanning on an Ubuntu 12.10 system. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through PureFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.

XBMC 12 is getting closer and closer, with the latest beta adding on the Raspberry Pi support from the previous one

The rumor mill kicked into high gear last week when several sites, corroborated by evidence from unnamed PC OEMs, claimed some of Intel's future desktop CPUs would forgo processor sockets in favor of being soldered directly to motherboards. This move would theoretically render end users and system builders unable to swap out processors on their own.

Apple and HTC chose what to redact (see Declaration of Robert Becher), and it's a lot. But we learn enough, despite their efforts, to know that it's a cross-license and a settlement of all the 52 litigations and various administrative actions then pending around the world. The "Payments" section is redacted, of course, but the plural means both paid something, as in crossing out a lot of the others' need to pay, and only HTC is listed as paying any royalties going forward. The other thing we learn is that Apple did not license its design patents, which isn't what Samsung was probably hoping it had done. But the rest of Apple's patents are licensed, which ought to matter in the Apple v. Samsung injunction analysis. There are some HTC utility patents excluded as well (see p. 4 and Ex. G of the agreement, p. 141 of the PDF), if I've read it right, the ones on loan from Google, I believe, and Apple reserves to itself all other IP it owns, like trade dress rights. All the litigation is dismissed mostly without prejudice, because one or the other might violate the agreement, but otherwise they agree to drop their disputes and basically leave each other alone.

To adjust the rate at which how fast software updates are forced onto users, some Fedora and Red Hat developers have made a "Software Collections" proposal. The purpose of Software Collections is to allow users to install a package and choose between different versions of RPM-packaged software in parallel at run-time.

The ZevenOS developers have decided to bring their users an "early Christmas present" and have released version 5.0 of their Xubuntu-based distribution. ZevenOS 5.0 is designed to look like the BeOS of old.

The 64-bit version of the last release of Ubuntu, 12.10, will boot on a machine which has Windows 8 installed with secure boot turned on.

More great games coming to Linux thanks to Steam!

NVIDIA is still working on a way to implement buffer-sharing for their closed-source Linux graphics driver...

It's been a few months since last delivering any Intel SNA acceleration architecture benchmarks but with all of the many recent xf86-video-intel 2.20.x driver releases, here's some new benchmarks comparing the UXA and SNA acceleration back-ends for Intel's Ivy Bridge hardware.