FOSS Week in Review
Well, as they say, TGIF: Thank God it’s FOSS. As folks get settled in this weekend in beautiful downtown Orem, Utah, at OpenWest — the expo formerly known at one time as the Utah Open Source Conference — here’s a look at some of the things that transpired during the course of the week.
Hello, Rafaela: According to a Softpedia article, Linux Mint announced this week that it will release its next version of Linux Mint 17 — 17.2, which was given the release name Rafaela. Not much else was released in the way of information, other than the release candidate would be available next month, as well as lead developer Clement Lefebvre saying that Linux Mint 18 will be available sometime next year.
Fun fact: The naming convention of Linux Mint release names is a simple formula — a woman’s name in alphabetical order ending with the letter “A”. Years ago, for another story, I asked Lefebvre what happens when he gets to “Zelda,” or whatever the “Z” name will be, and his reply was very logical. They’ll start with the letter “A” again, but end the name with an “E”. Remember where you heard it first.
Was it something I said? Oh, great. I finally get to sit down with the Jupiter Broadcasting crew at LinuxFest Northwest and I finally get to meet in person someone whose FOSS work I hold in the highest regard — that would be Matt Hartley’s work at Jupiter — and he has just announced that he is leaving Jupiter Broadcasting, moving on to “new exciting projects.”
Matt writes in his most recent blog post, “As of today, I am no longer part of Jupiter Broadcasting. I enjoyed my tenure co-hosting two of the programs and stand by my belief that they have a great production staff and amazing co-hosts. I wish all of them tons of success in their endeavors going forward.”
And these “new exciting projects” he speaks of? We’ll have to wait to find out, but whatever they are, there’s an excellent chance that he will nail it. Good luck on your future endeavors, Matt.
Brought to you by the letter W: We’re at that point in the alphabet where Mark Shuttleworth is starting to run out of letters for Ubuntu release names, but as far as the letter for Ubuntu 15.10 is concerned — that would be W — Shuttleworth this week has divined that the release name will be, wait for it, Wily Werewolf. Here’s hoping that the self-appointed benevolent-dictator-for-life has not jinxed the next release into being Wile E. Coyote instead come October.
Where is the love? Remember how much Microsoft is supposed to “love” open source and how they are trying to shed the image of their corporate gospel that Linux and FOSS are a cancer? Well…a Venture Beat article this week provides us with yet another example of Redmond’s inability to commit to a long-term relationship, opting perhaps to remain “just friends.” The VB article points out that Microsoft Edge, the new browser from our friends in Redmond, won’t be open after all. While it was not really expected to be open, it would have been a kind gesture.
See you Wednesday.
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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
