Bruce Byfield

Two weeks ago, Project Renaissance, the OpenOffice.org team tasked with overhauling the interface of the popular free office application, unveiled its first prototype. The prototype resembled the Ribbon interface first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007, and the denunciations came so fast that few bothered to check the facts, or to give the idea any serious […]

The KDE desktop has been the center of changes and controversy for the last eighteen months. However, with last week’s release of version 4.3, the majority of users finally seem to accept — if not necessarily love — the changes. At this point, it seems fair to ask: How successful are the KDE 4 series […]

This year, a new dimension is appearing on the Linux desktop. It’s geolocation: the capability to detect and record where you and other people are, and to use the information to enhance the desktop. Potentially affecting everything from the metadata stored with files to the mechanics of social networking, geolocation is already starting to arrive […]

The Desktop Summit two weeks ago in Gran Canaria was supposed to be the first joint conference between GNOME and KDE. And, in the reporting, that’s what it was. But in the blogs, the event is going down as the time that Richard Stallman was accused of sexism. You can understand why journalists are reluctant […]

Remember vaporware? That’s the name that used to be applied to software that was described in glittering generalities before it was written. It wasn’t a compliment. But, after reading all the speculation in the last few days, I’m convinced that vaporware is a term that we need to revive and apply to the Google Chrome […]

Mono, the free software implementation of .NET (C#), has been the subject of bitter debate for eight years. Yesterday, that debate ended — or at least shifted to another level — with Microsoft’s announcement that it was extending its Community Promise to include the patents that left Mono possibly encumbered. The move was greeted with […]

To most people, Mono is a disease that leaves young people tired and listless. But to members of the free software community, Mono is something worse: a controversy that leaves everybody over-wrought and mistrusting each other. After watching the controversy flare yet again over the last couple of months I’m convinced that no current issue […]

For the last eighteen months, the GNU/Linux desktop has been in a period of radical innovation. KDE 4 introduced new features and workflows. Mark Shuttleworth launched Ubuntu on a unilateral redesign campaign, starting with notifications. GNOME announced a new desktop that, so far as anyone can tell, will profoundly change the user-experience. These innovations are […]

On June 7, 2009, Swedish voters elected a member of the PiratPartiet (Pirate Party) to the European Parliament. A second parliamentary seat will go to the Pirate Party this fall if the Lisbon Treaty is ratified and Sweden gains an additional two seats. These are small but solid results for a party founded three years […]

Traditionally, any mention of marketing has the average member of the free and open source software (FOSS) community reaching for the garlic and crucifixes. Yet, despite the baying of mobs with pitch forks and torches in the background, the topic of how FOSS presents itself to the world at large has started to be raised […]