There’s little doubt that a few eyebrows were raised by the news on Friday, when Larry Cafiero reported on FOSS Force about Canonical’s partnership with Microsoft involving Microsoft’s OCS hardware and Ubuntu’s open source Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) deployment product. Those with a little memory might wonder if this is a case of history repeating itself, as we’ve seen Microsoft court aspiring princess distros before, with SUSE, not long after the distro was purchased by Novell, a company with an uneven history.
In 2003, to establish its open source cred, Novell went on a buying spree, which began in August when it spent an undisclosed amount to acquire Ximian, the open source company behind Evolution, Mono and Red Carpet, the later being an early attempt at an universal package manager for Linux, a precursor to Linspire’s Click & Run. In November, just three months later, Novell spent $210 million, partly financed by an investment from IBM, to purchase SUSE (then SuSE), which was at the time one of the top three Linux distros by most estimations.
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
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.
