Free Software Linux

Over 800 people were in attendance in Brasilia for the opening ceremony of CONSEGI as more people continued to stream in throughout the day. According to Sandra Sipp (Coordinator of Social Communication for SERPRO) over 2000 people registered to attend the conference, including high-ranking Brazilian officials such as Minister of Science and Technology Sérgio Rezende, Minister of the General Secretary of the Presidency Luiz Dulci and many other government officials from all over Latin America. The event is free and open for everyone and on the first floor is an all-Linux computer lab.

"Having already tripled the number of collaborations with Microsoft, Novell intends to triple them yet again" - DISGUSTING!

"We see the adoption of the FLA by KDE as a positive and important milestone in the maturity of the Free Software community," says Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe. "The FLA was designed to help projects increase the legal maintainability of their software to ensure long-term protection and reliability. KDE is among the most important Free Software initiatives and it is playing a central role in bringing freedom to the desktop. This decision of the KDE project underlines its dedication to think about how to make that freedom last."

Feast your eyes on these Royal Pingdom maps of worldwide Linux popularity. Russians, Indians and Indonesians have taken Tux into their loving arms, while in Europe, Germans are showing the most Linux love. The maps also detail distro-specific popularity around the globe -- we can't wait to hear all the 'Linux = communism' remarks due to Debian being the most popular distro in Cuba.

Novell and Microsoft have expanded their partnership further, with Redmond agreeing to buy another $100 million in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server support certificates. This Linux Insider piece explains that, since the original 2006 deal, "Novell has invoiced more than $157 million in certificate revenues, or 65 percent of the original allotment, according to Microsoft". Community outrage commencing in 5... 4... 3...

Sun is battling hard to break into the open source operating system world with OpenSolaris. Juliet Kemp takes it for a test-drive, sampling its unique features and seeing how it fares against Linux...

In the year 2012 we'll definitely have hoverbikes, brain implants and all the other life-changing stuff that futurists once promised. But what about Linux? This InformationWeek piece guesstimates what the Linux world be like in four years, looking at free vs paid-for versions, desktop technologies and hardware support. It neglects, however, to mention that RMS will have cloned himself 200 times by then, to create an invincible army of Free Software activists. Gulp.