FOSS Week in Review
The big Linux conference down in the land of Oz just completed and there are no really big shows on the agenda until Atlanta’s Great Wide Open opens its great doors wide in March. Everybody here in North Carolina, which I call home, is on the road, hanging out in Baghdad-by-the-Bay waiting to see how well the Panthers play in fog and trying to pretend to be old hats at having a pro home team worth the effort of a root or two.
You’d think it would be quiet around here, but it’s not. As always, it’s one thing after another, and as a coworker often often says, I’m getting too old for this. I could tell you stories, but I’m not. What I am going to tell you is the high points of this week in FOSS…
If you’re a Windows user, which most of you reading FOSS Force aren’t, then Microsoft wants to hijack your machine. It seems that the company that’s been spending millions — and has been buying into every free and open source conference it can find and a few it can’t — to get the word out that “Microsoft has changed,” hasn’t. If you happen to be unlucky enough to be using Windows 7, 8 or 8.1, you’re probably beginning to realize this right about now.
Windows users might be well advised to think about unplugging their computers from the Internet when they’re not around to keep an eye on things or they’re likely to wake-up in the morning, or return home from work, to find they’re running Windows 10 instead of whatever version they know and love.
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
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.”