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What most people are still unable to understand is that the FOSS community is the FOSS community. There is no central body that governs it. Bruce Byfield is completely unaware of this too. In his latest misguided rambling 'Open Source Projects and the Meritocracy Myth' he lists a number of major projects with paid developers. As if meritocracy is and should only be applied there.

"Sushi, huh?" is an application which serves the same purpose as the command we posted about two weeks ago, to get a list of packages and dependencies for offline installation in Ubuntu, but many will love it since it comes with a - I almost wanted to say GUI - an web-based interface which runs on your machine, and it can download the dependencies for the packages you want to install, for the following Linux distributions: Mandriva, openSUSE, Fedora (and obviously, Ubuntu and Debian). But "Sushi, huh?" can also run on both Linux and Windows, meaning you can download the packages with dependencies from Windows too.

Wine Technology advances at a rapid rate, in the last month we have seen two updates to Wine (1.1.33 & 1.1.34). Many of us like to stay using the latest and greatest Wine software - with good reason each new version typically fixes issues and improves performance - however on occasion a new Wine release will suffer from some regressions that cause some applications to stop working properly.

If a full-blown calendar application like Evolution of Lightning is overkill for your needs, try Day Planner. This simple yet efficient calendaring utility sports a refreshingly simple interface and it's ridiculously easy to use.

When it comes to new features in an open source operating system, sometimes features are developed by community developers and other times they are contributed by commercial vendors. The recent FreeBSD 8.0 operating system release benefited from both types of contributions.

Have you read the past 25 or so entries in this blog? Once I finally solved all my issues with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, I decided to start the upgrade path to version 9.10. I wanted newer applications. I needed better hardware drivers. But especially with 9.10, nicknamed Karmic Koala, I've had to deal with too many issues. I'm tired.

Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.

As a MySQL administrator, you’ll probably end up doing some preventive and corrective database maintenance. You can use mysqlcheck for both. The mysqlcheck command will allow you to verify your database to insure the integrity of the MySQL database.

OK, up until now I am talking about broad principles and governments. The reason I went off in that direction is to make the point that most reasonable people in free countries do understand, accept and support reasonable limitations on free speech. By the strictest definition of the word these examples are all forms of censorship. Censorship, in and of itself, is not evil. What is evil, or at the very least damaging to a free society, is the indiscriminate or unjustified use of censorship. This brings us back to last week's post. What about individuals, blogs and websites?

Members of the Java Community Process (JCP) voted to approve the JavaEE 6 specification this week, concluding two years of discussions and development. Yet even after JCP members' approval for JSR-316, the Java Specification Request (JSR) that defines the new Java spec, the release still has its detractors.

Microsoft's Office 2010 will be released in June and is packed with features to keep it ahead of the competition

The Wine development release 1.1.34 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

The battle between Linux and Windows will most likely rage on for years to come. I can foresee that even when all things migrate to the cloud,

MySQL use declining, PostgreSQL and MariaDB use rising and no majority support for any of the possible outcomes of the current European Commission investigation into Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems; these are some of the results of a survey, carried out by the 451 Group, of open source users show which shows they are split over the future of MySQL.

If browsing the featured workspaces teaches you anything, it's that a good scrubbing and a fresh coat of paint goes a long way towards making an office over. Check out the before and after pictures of today's total makeover. Lifehacker reader Vanderfleet-Martin had an office in serious need of some cleaning and some "spiffing up", so he designed a new layout in Google Sketchup. Over Thanksgiving weekend he hauled everything out, repainted the whole thing, brought in a new desk with support shelves, and remade the whole office into a colorful and well organized version of its former self.

Has the federal government overreached in tapping social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to investigate possible criminal activity? The non-profit civil liberties' group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) doesn't know, but it's filed suit to find out the scope of the government's investigations.

There are more options than ever for mobile Internet, from ubiquitous w-i-fi to purchasing your own personal MiFi to carrying all of Wikipedia with you. Paul Ferrill looks at some cool mobile gadgets for traveling Linux users.

When the graphical interface setup under openSUSE didn't work just right, one could always run SaX2 to correct it. Now Novell wants to retire the tool.

It has been a tough year for a lot of vendors in the IT space and for Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), it's been no exception. But even as it posts a widening quarterly loss, the company's executives aren't easing up on the pace going into 2010. Instead, they described plans to expand Novell's Linux business as well as a new strategy to cash in on what they see as enterprises' need to better manage their workloads across physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. "I believe there is a new market for solutions that address the risks and challenges for computing securely across multiple environments," Hovsepian said. "This need plays to the strengths of Novell -- identity and security, systems and resource management, and our new SUSE Appliance program."

Novell announced quarterly results on December 3. So how are the company’s individual solutions groups performing — particularly the SUSE Linux solutions group? And what’s the latest with Novell’s partner efforts? The VAR Guy got some perspectives from Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon. Here’s a recap.