I found this article over on Linux Today, it’s an excellent read, very well written Brian!

Editor’s Note: Hard Choices
By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor: Linux Today

The divide between totally-free vs. free-when-we-can got needlessly wider this week when open source practitioner Eric Raymond issued a press release announcing his departure from Fedora to Ubuntu, citing–among other concerns–Fedora’s adherence to purely free software as a reason for his departure.

Okay, first off, let me ask something: a press release? I mean, I’ve run blog entries here about someone leaving one distribution to another… I’ve even written a few. But alerting the media?

Truth be told, my concern is not about ESR’s assertions about Fedora. I don’t believe that anyone should use a distribution that does not fulfill their needs. And I understand that needs can change over time. If he doesn’t like Fedora, and wants to try something else, then by all means, he should feel free to.

What I don’t get is this need to constantly bring down projects that people don’t like or don’t use. It’s not just ESR; he’s just the perpetrator of the week. Last week it was Linus Torvalds, railing on GNOME again (though admittedly, he did put his code where his mouth was when he submitted patches for what he perceived were long-term GNOME issues). Next week it’ll be someone else.

This is a hard thing to stop, because it’s easy to offer criticism. I know I have done it, and will likely do it again. But I wonder when genuine critiques become merely gratuitious insults?

This is, without a doubt, the thing that bugs me the most about Linux, free software, and all of the open source community: the apparent need to assert your favorite project by tearing down projects you don’t like. I realize this is part of the human condition, not just native to open source, but it seems especially stupid when you consider that positive collaboration, not negative, is what makes an open source project successful.

I don’t know who’s right or wrong: Eric or the Fedora developers. GNOME or KDE. vi or emacs. What matters to me, and what should matter to all of us, is that each of us has the choice to use what we want.

That’s the whole point.

Source: Linux Today

This article shows how to use a Sandisk MP3 player (Sansa E250) on a Linux desktop. Now I can have all the tunes I want without dropping into Windows to manipulate them.

I got my daughter one of these last Christmas, it works great and it’s no problem to use with linux.

Source: Howto Forge

Feb 22, 2006

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Opinion — Last September, some of the Debian Linux distribution’s leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its December 4th due date. So, the “Dunc-Tank” group decided to experiment with financially supporting some key developers to get Debian out the door on time.

Whoops.

Debian has a reputation for being almost as late as Duke Nukem Forever, the perpetually never-arriving PC first person shooter game. Not all developers were pleased at this experiment in speeding up Debian development.

Source: Desktop Linux

The company’s hosted productivity tools will be offered as an outsourced subscription service, challenging Microsoft and others. Then there’s all the third-party firms that may come along for the ride

Early enterprise adopters of Google Apps Premium Edition will face a choice: get their IT departments to customize the product to meet their needs, or work with third parties who hope to ride the search firm’s coattails.

Google on Thursday announced a version of its online hosted productivity tools that will be available for an annual US$50 subscription fee per user. The suite includes Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail, among other programs. While free versions of the applications have been supported by online ads, the subscription to the enterprise version comes ad-free with additional customer support. It also includes access to application programming interfaces (APIs) for the programs that can be used to integrate them with other systems.

Source: itbusiness.ca

SEATTLE (AP) – Microsoft Corp. must pay US$1.5 billion in damages to telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent SA for violating two patents related to digital music, a federal jury ruled Thursday.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software company said the patents in question govern the conversion of audio into the digital MP3 file format on personal computers.

Source: Yahoo News

For the uninitiated, creating Debian packages is a mysterious process that looks much harder than it really is. To make it a little less mysterious, let’s take a look at two methods of building Debian packages: using standard Debian packaging tools…

Source: Make your own packages for Debian-based systems