Mea Culpas & Cranky Patients Named Ken

FOSS Week in Review

One of the most discussed items of the week, arriving with much fanfare, comes from our friends at Canonical/Ubuntu, who brought you Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu Edge — oh wait, they said they’d bring them but never actually delivered — and who now wants to be the operating system behind the nebulously termed “Internet of Things.”

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols starts with a mea culpa in his ZDNet article for assuming that Ubuntu Core — Canonical’s entry in the Internet of Things operating systems — was “a pure server play.” The article, of course, outlines the plan, with details provided by Mark Shuttleworth himself. It’s definitely worth a read.

Let’s see what happens in the follow through on this, if one is forthcoming.

In other developments:

Cue cranky patient in 3…2…1… : Without going into great detail for the sake of brevity (and the fact FOSS Force will be updating his condition as we get news from deep in the heart of Texas), my esteemed colleague Ken Starks is slowly returning to his old self as he begins his post-surgery healing. At the hospital, a physical therapist had him up and walking Wednesday, according to Ed Matthews, albeit with considerable assistance on the therapist’s part. Matthews also reports that Ken did some swallow tests which indicated that he may be able to eat again after considerable healing takes place, ditching the feeding tubes in the process.

Again, FOSS Force will keep you informed on Ken’s condition.

On a personal note, I wanted to thank those who have pinged me with their insights on text-to-speech options, which I’ll forward along (and which you are welcome to add in the comments below). My own research so far has centered around how to conveniently have his speech program easily say “crybaby liberal,” one of Ken’s — ahem — “terms of endearment” for some of us here in California…

Get well soon, buddy.

One more mea culpa (sort of): First, I stand by everything I wrote on Wednesday about how, in my opinion, it’s nowhere near time to even start thinking about considering the possibility of remotely curtailing distro development for 32-bit architectures. Unfortunately, Stephen Smoogen was not serious about his “proposal” that was an exercise in absurdity, but I took the bait anyway — hook, line and sinker.

Susan Linton of Ostatic picked up the fumble and ran with it — the wrong way, maybe — and I’d like to clear up a couple of things that appear there.

For starters, I thought the proposal — not Red Hat or the Fedora Project — was the product of “first-world thinkers.” Neither Red Hat nor the Fedora Project needs me to explain the length and breadth of their worldwide community and how they fit within the structure of positively promoting FOSS worldwide. Also, to be clear: My commentary appeared after Stephen’s “let-me-explain” blog post, by a matter of minutes incidentally, so there was no cause-and-effect involved on my part.

Most importantly, though, I apologize for helping make this non-story a bigger deal than it deserved to be through my commentary on Wednesday. While the topic gave me a soapbox to promote an issue about which I am passionate — a wide range of distros so everyone can use Linux and FOSS — had I known it was not a serious proposal, the tone and urgency of my commentary may have been different. Also, I agree with Stephen in his latter post that there will be a time in the future to do so, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near throwing out the 32-bit baby with the 32-bit bathwater.

See you next week.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero