Bruce Byfield

Comment at the bottom of this page: what are your choices for the best Linux desktop? I confess: leave me alone in your house, and I’ll browse through your books. I don’t usually have the chutzpah to pry into your desktop and configuration files if you leave your computer unlocked, but the temptation is strong. […]

Using free and open source software (FOSS), advocates like to say, is not a popularity contest. It’s about doing what’s right. However, the Debian and Ubuntu Popularity Contest projects might disagree. Using the Popularity Contest package, these two projects collect and post weekly anonymous reports about the software used on each system on which they’re […]

Is OpenOffice.org (OOo), the popular free office application, “a profoundly sick project,” as developer Michael Meeks alleges? Or are his comments a poorly concealed effort to promote Go-OO, Novell’s version of OOo, as the anti-Novell lobby suggests? The answers to these questions are important, because the flame war that continually threatens to erupt over them […]

Pundits and business executives alike are predicting gloomy economic times for 2009. But when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and […]

Cisco Systems is a gold member of the Linux Foundation, the non-profit association “dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux.” Yet according to a lawsuit for copyright violation filed last week by the Software Freedom Law Center on behalf of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Cisco has repeatedly infringed on the copyright of core GNU/Linux […]

“The mission statement: Create a User Interface so that OpenOffice.org becomes the users’ choice not only out of need, but also out of desire.” With these words, the Renaissance project was launched last week with the goal of giving the popular free office suite a face lift. It’ s about time. That is my first […]

If the first beta of KDE 4.2 is any indication, then the final release of the popular GNU/Linux desktop should be the release in which KDE 4 comes into its own. Featuring numerous small enhancements to system settings and standard applications, as well as improved customization and features on the desktop and panel, 4.2 is […]

Knowing when a GNU/Linux distribution is free used to be simple. If all its software had licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative, then a distribution was free. Otherwise, it wasn’t. However, the release of the GNewSense distribution a few years ago has complicated the situation, pitting idealists against […]

Any release of a GNU/Linux distribution marks a milestone in a continuous cycle of software development. However, Fedora 10 promises to be a larger milestone than most, both for its development community and users, according to Paul W. Frields, the Fedora leader and chair. On the one hand, its release on November 25 is being […]

The question of whether business can co-exist with free and open source software (FOSS) was settled long ago. It can, and not only successful companies like Red Hat but also the willingness of venture capitalists to fund FOSS business models proves the case. However, the very term “FOSS business” reminds us that it is not […]