FOSS Week in Review
How can it be Friday already? Not that I’m complaining, but it seems like only a few hours ago I was posting a story about SouthEast LinuxFest (more on SELF below) and now I’m collecting the week’s highlights, sins and foibles and giving them to you as this week’s wrap-up.
Microsoft joins the 21st Century: Our friends in Redmond — you know, the folks who love FOSS so much that they want to hug us to death, literally (in the traditional sense of the word) — have decided to provide support for SSH in their own PowerShell, according to various articles this week. We’re going to link to one in The Register, because any story with a sub-headline “Now that the door has hit Ballmer on the way out, OpenSSH support is go” is one you just have to go with.
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.
We’re 31 days into our 
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.