FOSS Week in Review
How can it be Friday already? Not that I’m complaining, but it seems like only a few hours ago I was posting a story about SouthEast LinuxFest (more on SELF below) and now I’m collecting the week’s highlights, sins and foibles and giving them to you as this week’s wrap-up.
Microsoft joins the 21st Century: Our friends in Redmond — you know, the folks who love FOSS so much that they want to hug us to death, literally (in the traditional sense of the word) — have decided to provide support for SSH in their own PowerShell, according to various articles this week. We’re going to link to one in The Register, because any story with a sub-headline “Now that the door has hit Ballmer on the way out, OpenSSH support is go” is one you just have to go with.
From the article: “PowerShell’s SSH support will allow users to ‘interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH.'”
Hmmm. Yeah, it’s smirk-inducing to see them finally want to join the rest of the world in the SSH department after all these years. But after reading Christine Hall’s article yesterday about our friends in Redmond and their “fox guarding the henhouse” security teams and their affinity for backdoors, you have to wonder, on a privacy level, if this is a good idea. I guess we’ll just have to see.
More on SELF: An item from the “great minds think alike” files — both Christine Hall and I wrote articles about the SouthEast Linux Fest for this week (to be fair, I unexpectedly and rhetorically switched gears on Christine — apologies, boss), and after much discussion which culminated in a sea-to-shining-sea round of rock-paper-scissors which I won, my article ran on Wednesday.
But we’re not done with SELF — oh no, far from it. On Monday, FOSS Force will have a Q-and-A with SELF’s Jeremy Sands which is not to be missed, if for no other reason than to find out the connection between barbecue, firearms, and FOSS. Now if that doesn’t pique your interest, go ahead and see if you still have a pulse.
Also, FOSS Force will have “boots on the ground” — as Ken Starks likes to say — at SELF. Christine Hall will be in Charlotte next weekend covering the event in the “GNU/South,” and we’ll have reports from the expo here. Watch this space.
As Kubuntu Turns: As far as we know, the $143,000 in donations which can’t be found by the Ubuntu Community Council is still missing. As far as we know, the Ubuntu Community Council still considers Jonathan Riddell, a leading developer in Kubuntu circles, persona non grata for bringing up the issue of missing funds and Canonical’s intellectual property policies. As far as we know, the Kubuntu Council responded with a collective “bite me” to the Ubuntu Community Council in rejecting Riddell’s ouster and standing behind him.
Just another week in the Isle of Man.
Bryan Lunduke picked up the baton this week and ran with it in a Network World article, interviewing a representative of the Ubuntu Community Council — in this case, council member Michael Hall — and Jonathan Riddell, asking the same questions and having each of the two answer; followed, of course, by the seemingly out-of-place obligatory statement from Mark Shuttleworth because, of course, his input is…his input.
The most telling line in the article? Bryan Lunduke: “The whole topic borders on the line of reality TV stuff.”
Indeed.
Go ahead and read the article and draw your own conclusions. Contrasting the verbosity of Hall against the straightforward answers by Riddell, I’m just going to leave this quote by novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer: “When a writer tries to explain too much, he’s out of time before he begins.”
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
With regard to Microsoft and SSH: Interesting to see them catching up with the 1990’s.
While I don’t care if they bolt SSH onto their Powershell, I have misgivings about them contributing to OpenSSH. I can already imagine them filling it with Windows specific hacks and ‘extending’ it in ways only useful to Windows. If they try to contribute that kind of crap, I hope someone has sense enough to reject their pull requests, or yank their commit ability.
@Mike – Its incredible that a lot of people feel the same way you do, that the minute M$ touches something, it changes….loses some of it’s shiny-new-ness, and eventually becomes a “shelved” project that MS ignores! I don’t think I’d feel comfortable knowing I’m using something that MS built purposely to “work” with Linux!
@Eddie–
Relax, bro! Microsoft hasn’t purchased openssh; they’ve only decided to stop not supporting it in their “products”.