The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is scheduled to mark the official release of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) today at noon with a ceremony in its Boston office that features a lunch for local free software activists and the announcement of several GNU projects switching to the new license. Richard M. Stallman, FSF’s president and founder, plans to repeat remarks about why developers should move to GPLv3. Video coverage of the ceremony is slated to be available from the FSF Web site.

Red Hat is a company that is easy to dislike.

Maybe it’s the relationship with IBM. Maybe it’s the way they absorbed JBOSS. Maybe it’s CEO Matthew Szulik, or the proprietary way in which the company operates.

Maybe it’s because they’re based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and don’t schmooze the Silicon Valley press corps, which has something in common with that of Washington, D.C.

Whatever, I think it’s time we got off Red Hat’s case. The company delivered another solid quarter yesterday, helped out by channel partners and bigger JBOSS subscription sales.  

The company probably goosed those JBOSS sales further with its acquisition of MetaMatrix, which specializes in metadata and data services. That sale closed this week.

Red Hat is never going to be Mr. Pinstripe Suit, Mr. hi-dee-hi-dee-ho. They don’t roll that way in Raleigh. But it’s a solid Linux vendor, in the center of the enterprise space, it continues to grow, it does its bit for the open source movement, and maybe that’s enough. 

What else do you expect from them?

The opening day of the 9th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) began with Jonathan Corbet, of Linux Weekly News and his now familiar annual Linux Kernel Report, and wrapped up with a reception put on by Intel where they displayed hardware prototypes for upcoming products.

For a variety of reasons (mostly having to do with the vagaries of Post Office administration in Noe Valley), OSI has a new official mailing address as of today…

If you want to send us donation checks (or snail mail of any kind)…henceforth please send to:

Danese Cooper, Treasurer
Open Source Initiative
P.O. Box 410990, #256
San Francisco, California 94114-0990

Sincere apologies to anyone whose mail may have been caught in the crossfire of our mail box battle. Please resend.

I started to respond to David Richards (the CEO of CentricCRM) comment to the thread I started last week, but that thread has generated a number of sub-threads which I think are better addressed separately. (You can be the judge as to whether this thread separation is a good idea or not.) Thus, I gave a partial response there, and here’s really my full response.

David,

First, let me thank you for stepping forward into this discussion.

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I’ve been a fan of SimplyMEPIS for years. The distribution was one of the early pioneers in the field of user-friendly Linux development, and to this day offers a system that usually “just works.” Earlier this month the MEPIS site announced a community variation for older computers based on SimplyMEPIS. AntiX is an installable live CD that features a modern kernel, recent X server, and lighter applications for use on computers with as little as 64MB RAM. I tried it, and liked what I found.

At last week’s DebConf 7 Debian Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, nearly 400 attendees had a chance to meet and socialise after years of working together online. They attended more than 100 talks and events, ranging from an update by the current and former Debian Project Leaders to a group trip to the Isle of Bute, off the opposite coast of the country.

Why bother using a dedicated FTP client when you can use FireFTP? This nifty extension turns Firefox into a full-fledged FTP tool, so you can transfer files back and forth without leaving the browser. FireFTP offers all the features you’d expect from a decent FTP client.

The Avon and Somerset Constabulary in Great Britain uses animations created with the open source tool Blender to help citizens understand how to protect their vehicles and possessions from theft.

Dana Blankenhorn’s story How far can open source CRM get? has finally pushed me to respond to the many people who have asked “When is the OSI going to stand up to companies who are flagrantly abusing the term ‘open source’?” The answer is: starting today.

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