The FOSS Force Poll
A few weeks back when Ken Starks wrote an anecdotal column on an experience with a false positive from Avast antivirus on GNU/Linux, we started thinking. We run antivirus on our LAMP servers with the intent of protecting poor suckers on Windows, but on our Linux desktops and laptops? Pretty much, no. Some of us had tried the open source ClamAV at one time or another, mainly out of curiosity, but none of us had stuck with it. To our knowledge, until Starks wrote his column none of us even knew anybody who had ever run proprietary AV on Linux boxes.
Did any of it work? Who knows? But as an old friend of ours used to say, “We have to do something, even if it’s wrong.”
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.
But this incident wasn’t to be pushed aside. The emails started coming in faster and faster, until I acknowledged that I had a real problem.
Members of the popular 
Reading the post, you might be excused for thinking it’s not all wine and roses over in Debian-land. “Debian can be great,” Baumann wrote. “But depending on who you are, where you come from, and who your friends are, Debian can also be hateful and full of deceit.”
This news isn’t surprising, nor is it cause for alarm. Because WordPress is by far the most popular content management platform on the web, it’s an obvious target for hackers, and third party plugins are the most obvious way inside. However, the folks at Automattic, which develops the platform, have proven themselves to be diligent at finding vulnerabilities and keeping them patched.
