FOSS Week in Review
Thank goodness this week is over. After our Larry Cafiero spent last week “putting out fires,” as he puts it, at SCALE 14x, I’ve spent the last couple of days doing the same here at FOSS Force. It seems our article on Slashdot’s sale attracted some unruly types to the comments, forcing us to put the shields up on our comments site-wide for the first time in our nearly six year history. You can still comment, but you might have to wait a while for us to notice it and approve it for publication. We’ll take the shields down as soon as we determine it’s safe to do so.
Meanwhile, here’s the FOSS news highlights for the week…
SourceForge’s new owners aren’t exactly what you might expect to be purchasing a site that for all intents and purposes revolves around free and open source software. The new owners, SourceForge Media, is a subsidiary of BIZX, and while that may sound like some huge and gigantic mega corporation, it’s an LLC owned by Southern California residents Roger and Logan Abbott, who are probably either father and son or brothers, we’re not sure. What we do know is that their background is in telecommunications, not exactly the sort of business experience you’d expect for someone entering the share-and-share-alike world of FOSS, where there’s no such thing as vendor lock-in.
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
Dell Fixing UEFI for Linux? Linux users may be able to update their UEFI firmware on devices, if Dell has their way. The computer manufacturing giant is looking at making things easier for Linux users, and Richard Hughes writes on his 
Mozilla wants to shed itself of Thunderbird, its popular cross platform email client. Although widely used on GNU/Linux, OS X and on Windows, the organization now seems to pretty much view it as a liability.
The deal created a river of money flowing into Mozilla’s coffers — $138 million in 2011 alone — allowing rapid development of Firefox, proper maintenance of Thunderbird and Bugzilla, and the creation of Firefox OS. Although there was a bit of grumbling from some FOSSers who would’ve preferred a default search engine that was more respectful of user privacy rights, the deal was generally seen as a good thing for the free and open source community.
Wow…just wow.
