FOSS Week in Review
To be honest, I’m really not finished going through all the materials I picked up at the Open Compute Project 2015 U.S. Summit this week in San Jose. There is a lot of interesting stuff here to wade through, and I’m still going through it.
Meanwhile, much of what makes the FOSS world interesting didn’t wait for me to finish. Like:
Linus Under Wraps? We all know Linus Torvalds. We “get it” — he’s a guy with a big vocabulary who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Many of us are okay with “Linus being Linus,” though some lately have begun to question how positive his criticisms can be. Earlier this week, Business Insider reported the Linux Foundation appeared to try to rein him in, slapping him on the wrist when they issued a new “Code of Conflict” policy that declared “personal insults or abuse are not welcome.”
The “Code of Conflict” says that if “anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable” while working on Linux, they should report the situation to the Technical Advisory Board who will step in and mediate.”




So on May 15, some lucky Bodhi contributor — key word here is “Bodhi contributor” — will receive “a gently used Acer C720 Chromebook powered by Bodhi Linux.”
Evolution, not revolution, to match users’ needs: That is what’s behind the process the Xfce team uses in developing their desktop environment. So, despite what some consider a long time between releases, Xfce released version 4.12 last week, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.10.
Well, much of the focus for the week was on the Federal Communications Commission vote on increased net neutrality protections, and according to rational news sources reporting on the issue (e.g., just about everyone but Fox News and their wannabes), this is a good thing.


