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Redmond’s Used iPads, Spy Wars Escalate & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Court rules on Facebook privacy

If an employee makes a post on Facebook using a privacy setting that excludes the boss from seeing it, that post is off limits to the employer. Unless, that is, the poster has a turncoat friend who willingly supplies the post to the employer with no prodding to do so. That’s evidently the gist of a ruling handed down in August, as reported by PCWorld on Sunday.

The case involved Deborah Ehling, who was suspended by Monmouth-Ocean Hospital Service Corp. (MONOC) after she posted on Facebook in June of 2009 a response to news that a white supremacist had opened fire and killed a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Oracle Losing Its MySQL Grip to MariaDB

When it comes to Oracle as caretaker of FOSS projects, users are voting with their feet.

The company that already very quickly lost control of OpenOffice when most of the project’s developers bolted, formed the Document Foundation and forked the code to create LibreOffice, is now in danger of losing another open source jewel it inherited when it took over Sun. LibreOffice, as you know, is now the defacto office suite of choice among Linux users and is rapidly gaining traction in the Windows world as well. OpenOffice is pretty much only a memory.

Of course, no one ever expected Oracle to be a good open source caretaker.

Microsoft: Knock, Knock, Knocking on Nokia’s Door

FOSS Week in Review

The Microsoft saga continues…

Ten or twelve years ago somebody noticed that no one except IBM ever entered into a partnership with Microsoft and survived. Since then a few got lucky, but not many, and one of them wasn’t Nokia. For the life of us, we can’t figure what ever convinced the Finnish folk that hiring Stephen Elop, then head of Redmond’s business software division, as CEO was a good idea. We guess they never really grokked the whole understanding-history-or-being-doomed-to-repeat-it concept.

When Mr. Elop decided to scrap all plans for all mobile operating systems other than Windows Phone at Nokia, red flags should’ve gone up. We figure the only reason they didn’t is that the Finns spent most of the 20th century nurturing an aversion to red flags. In this case, the aversion cost them dearly. They bet the farm on an OS that no one else wanted and now the used-to-be-leader in the cell phone business is just another division of Microsoft.

No Early Death For Microsoft Surface or Windows RT

More and more it seems as if CBS scripted shows are looking like infomercials for Microsoft’s Surface RT.

Evidently this has been the buzz in some media sectors since last November, but I don’t watch much TV so I didn’t see it for myself until a few weeks back when a couple of minutes in a Hawaii Five-0 episode I was half-watching out of the corner of my eye while working on an article suddenly turned into what was unmistakably a commercial for Windows RT and the Surface tablet. Since then I’ve seen more obvious product placements for Surface RT in episodes of NCIS LA and CSI.

Microsoft Surface RTWe’ve grown used to seeing demonstrations of computer tech in these police proceedurals, but rarely anything that looks so obviously like a commercial. In all instances, the camera lingers on a shot of the GUI formerly known as Metro. In some cases we see Skype being used, with the brand conspicously evident. In others, we get treated to watching a handheld tablet turn into something resembling a laptop, perhaps a netbook, when the device is connected with it’s cover keyboard. Wow! Microsoft magic at work.

MIT Reviews Aaron Swartz, Google’s 100 Million Takedowns & More…

FOSS Week in Review

USPTO shoots down Apple patent

There seems to be more than enough tit-for-tat to go around in the ongoing patent battle between Apple and Samsung. If we wanted to be snarky, we’d say we haven’t seen this much legal maneuvering since the last days of the Beatles and the “sue me, sue you blues.”

Why Mark Shuttleworth Is Important to Desktop Linux

If you want to see desktop Linux finally get some traction with the unwashed public, Mark Shuttleworth is more likely to be the guy who’ll make that happen than anyone who’s come along so far. He’s a capitalist and for better or worse this is a capitalist world. He knows that nothing big is going to get done on this market oriented planet without the art of the deal and some hustle. He also understands something about fit and finish, which was always lacking in desktop Linux until he came along.

For too long, we’ve been sitting around wringing our hands, sometimes proclaiming this to finally be the year of the Linux desktop without doing anything to make it happen and sometimes bemoaning the fact that the world still hasn’t discovered Linux as the secret to computing happiness. The thing is, the world never knows anything about secrets until they’re not secret anymore. We’ve been wanting Linux to just “catch on,” while we’ve been blaming the OEMs for not automatically pushing our home grown geek-centric distros with the same elan they put behind their bread and butter Windows.

What If Ubuntu Edge Misses Fundraising Goal?

It’s beginning to look as if the naysayers are right about Mark Shuttleworth’s hopes to raise $32 million to produce about 40,000 Ubuntu Edge devices. It ain’t going to happen, unless he manages to pull another rabbit out of the hat. Right now, his Indiegogo campaign is stalled at a little over $7 million, where it’s been for several days.

I’m not going to go into the details that led to this, we’ve covered that already, but it’s beginning to look like the Ubuntu Edge happy train is running out of steam, especially since about half of the money raised came in the first day or two of a campaign that’s now in day nine.

Eolas Doesn’t Own Internet, Ubuntu Hacked & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Ubuntu Edge–computing on the go-go

Probably the biggest news in all of tech this week, not just the FOSS world, came with Canonical’s announcement on Monday of the Ubuntu Edge. In case you’ve been away camping somewhere all week, the Edge is a hybrid device that can function both as a high end smartphone, running either Android or Ubuntu Touch, or it can be hooked up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse to work as a conventional PC running Ubuntu Linux.

That news alone would be dumbfounding enough, but as the pitchman on TV always says, “Wait! There’s more…”

NSA Exposes Cloud Computing’s Weakness

Cloud computing was always a bad idea.

Not totally bad, mind you. It has its place. I use Google Docs/Drive or whatever they’re calling it this week sometimes so I can work on articles on the computer at my day job without leaving a mess behind on the bosses hard drive. But mostly cloud computing has always been a bad idea.

Ask Richard Stallman; he’ll tell you. Or ask me.

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