The FOSS Force Interview
From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
At the height of the media frenzy that developed around Snowden’s initial revelations, there were allegations that Microsoft had not only built back doors in its software for the NSA and other government agencies to use against foreign businesses and governments, but that it was cooperating with U.S. authorities in other ways as well. For example, one report indicated that the company was passing along details of unpatched security vulnerabilities in Windows to the NSA, effectively adding temporary tools to the spy agency’s cyber arsenal.
I’ve spent a good deal of time, as well, kicking this around with my partner-in-ink Larry Cafiero. And some of the things I’ve taken away were not gotten face-to-face: Folks like Steven Vaughan-Nichols and Matt Hartley have discussed it through their preferred media in one way or another.
Mandriva S.A., the French company behind Mandriva, the distribution that long time Linux users will remember as Mandrake, died this week at the age of sixteen. The announcement came in the form of a 
Quite simply, most of us use desktop Linux because it’s superior to all other brands, including Windows and OS X — even including Unix and the BSDs. This is a fact, not an opinion. There are reasons why Linux runs a majority of the world’s servers and powers most big enterprises, and in an example of where the trickle down theory actually works, those reasons trickle down (or up — depending on your viewpoint) to the desktop.
Since the introduction of Fedora.next — the umbrella program for the roadmap for the distro going forward — the distro comes in three basic flavors: Workstation, Server and Cloud. Workstation is the desktop/laptop version — and workstation version for businesses. Cloud and Server are pretty self-explanatory.
Yeah, that’s a stretch but work with me here.