The FOSS Force Poll
The voting is all done for the second round of our poll to decide which GNU/Linux distro our readers would choose to receive our “Reader’s Choice Best Linux Distro” award for 2015. As in round one, Arch Linux won the day. The poll results are considered to be more a measure of a distro’s community support than any indication of a distro’s technical merits.
The first round of our poll was a qualifying round, which Arch won as well, racking up 1,376 votes. The second round of voting was “winner take all,” and with the voting lighter than in the first round, Arch still managed to put together 592 votes. In all, 2,625 votes were cast in round two, which was active for seven days.
Is Ubuntu the new Novell? It probably wasn’t news to anybody when Microsoft failed to renew it’s deal with SUSE when it expired at year’s end. Many with long memories will remember that way back when SCO was still a viable company, Microsoft inked a deal with Novell, which was then the proud new owner of the SUSE Linux distro. Among other things, the deal gave SUSE users a free pass against getting sued by Microsoft for infringing any of its patents. As part of the deal, Microsoft purchased tons and tons of SUSE support contracts to sell to enterprise customers who might need to keep a Linux machine or two running, which were reportedly given away. Mainly, Microsoft was using SUSE as its official Linux distro, and as a testing ground for Microsoft’s attempts to get Windows to work and play well with Linux.
With the holidays and all, the month of December wasn’t as action packed as some of the past months have been concerning the Raspberry Pi, but there were still some interesting stories that occurred. Let’s take a minute to reflect back on the Raspberry Pi and December.
There was a time, back when FOSS Force was young, when we called the weekly round-up Friday FOSS Week in Review. Sometimes we’d get so far behind in our work that the Friday column wouldn’t get published until Saturday, sometimes late in the afternoon. To solve the problem that caused with the column’s title, we pulled a page from an old ABC playbook, from when they owned the Monday Night Football franchise, and called these late roundups “Friday FOSS Week in Review — Special Saturday Edition.” We didn’t change the header, but always made the “Saturday edition” mention in the text of the column, just as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Node-RED: One of the biggest features of this release is support for