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Our story so far:  Security expert Frank Adversego comes under suspicion when the Library of Congress is hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown and a taste for the bizarre; to protect himself, Frank had better get to the bottom of things.

As you may recall, the CodePlex Foundation indicated in January that it expected to name a permanent Executive Director within a few weeks’ time. That has now happened, and in the “small world” department, the new ED happens to be Paula Hunter - someone I’ve known for years, and worked with several times in the past. The full press release is below. Paula is someone I like and respect a lot, and a great choice for CodePlex.

…Sure enough, as Frank strode up the half-lit corridor in Cube City, there was Rick standing next to his cubicle, coffee cup in hand.  His face lit up as soon as he saw Frank.  “Morning, Frank,” he called out.  “Recovered from your big Saturday night yet?”  He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast and leaned casually against his cube so Frank could barely squeeze past. 

Yesterday I watched Apple’s Steve Jobs unveil the iPad. Jobs clearly can create revolutionary products; he can also produce spin like no one else. Yesterday was no exception.

His main message about the iPad was “a magical device at a breakthrough price.” He repeated this many times throughout the pitch and twice at the end. This phrase demands an honest response: how will Linux-based devices compete with the iPad?

The last issue of Standards Today focused on XML - the underpinning of ODF and hundreds of other standards - and one of the most important standards ever developed.  Here is the editorial from that issue.

The Linux Foundation today announced a free Linux training Webinar series and an expanded set of courses and course locations for its existing training program. There is no coincidence that this shortly follows the Foundation’s recent jobs board announcement.

The Linux community is a pyramid. The base is comprised of millions of Linux users and system administrators. The second level is programmers who work with Linux; some of those developers contribute to the kernel, many do not. The top rung of the pyramid is the thousand or so kernel developers and maintainers who actively contribute to the kernel or other projects that make up a distribution. These are the leaders whose code and ideas shape the system that users and sys adminswork with everyday.

The second chapter in this online cybersecurity mystery novel

Frank wondered how long his phone had been buzzing.  He was about to turn it off when he saw that it was his daughter Marla calling.

“Hi Kid,” he said, “Listen…”

Well, i've been away for a while, work has been keeping me busy.

I recently came across the Transitive Grace Period Public License (alternate link) by Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn.  I fonud it interesting because it’s very similar — almost identical — to something I had first starting floating about ten years ago.  I called it the Temporary Proprietary License (TPL).  I’m sure this is a case of

Open source software development is innovative and exciting. It has produced the software that runs the internet; Linux, Apache, Firefox, and so much more. In addition to being technically innovative it also has turned business models on their head and introduced new software licensing and IP sharing concepts.

As we continue to innovate at the technical level it is equally important to discuss innovative legal concepts to allow the unfettered deployment and development of free and open source software.

Last week, David Coursey reported that Microsoft entertainment and devices boss Robbie Bach made the prediction in an analyst briefing that Linux on mobile will lose. Why? It’s choice is a bad thing for customers and that there is too much Linux in the mobile marketplace

By Bach’s count there are 17 variants of Linux available on mobile phones. He sees this as a bad thing for customers. We, unsurprisingly, see this as a bad thing for Microsoft.

We just announced our event line-up for 2010 and the Call for Papers for CollabSummit. I’m very excited we’re offering the continuation of events that have been with us for awhile (CollabSummit, Kernel Summit) along with the second year of  LinuxCon.

This is the first chapter in my new cybersecurity eBook in which you’ll meet Frank, our erstwhile hero, and get your first clue about the tangled train of events yet to unfold:

Those that know me know that I firmly believe that there is a Monty Python vignette, or at least a catchphrase, for every occasion. And on this occasion, that catchphrase is, “And now for something completely different!”

With Linux powering nearly every mobile device that hits the market, the demand for Linux-related jobs is rapidly growing despite national unemployment figures. Combine this with the ongoing success of companies such as Red Hat and it’s easy to see why demand for Linux professionals is on the rise.

That’s why today Linux.com is adding an important function that will connect job seekers, employers, and recruiters.

Thanks to tech like Moblin and Android, netbooks, smartbooks, and smartphones are all the rage right now for consumers, but Linux is also showing up on the very sales counters where all of these devices are being bought.

While there's no denying the rise of Linux on these consumer systems, there's been a rather quiet but steady rise in Linux deployments on point-of-service (or point-of-sale) systems.

Retail systems are an interesting niche for Linux... one where the free operating system has historically done well.

Although I obviously had nothing to do with Google’s decision vis-a-vis China, having only started working there for a week, I was definitely glad to see it and it made me proud to be able to say that I work there.  Kudos to Google’s management team for having made (IMHO) the right decision.   Hopefully Yahoo and Microsoft will consider carefully what the ethical implications of their collusion and collaboration with the Chinese governmen

To say there was a lot of Linux news coming out of CES last week was an understatement. As I watched the morning TV shows present their inevitable "look-at-what-the-nerds-have-made-this-year" segments from the CES floor during the event, I had the distinct pleasure of turning to my family many times and proclaiming: "See that? Runs Linux."

Betamax vs.VHS, HD DVD vs. Blu-ray and now DECE vs. Keychest. Can’t the consumer electronics industry and studios cut us a break?

Earlier this week, I noted the fact that the 100 day mark for the CodePlex Foundation had passed (on December 19) without any comment from the Foundation on how they had fared against their aggressive goals for that time period, including the replacement of the founding, interim Board of Directors, with a permanent board. 

There's been a lot of technology predictions for the upcoming year, with Linux playing a big part in the future direction of tech. Fortunately, we won't have to wait long to see how some of those predictions will play out: it's just a mere three more days until the start of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

As you may recall, Microsoft announced back on September 10 that it had launched a new foundation “as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects.” It called it’s new non-profit organization the CodePlex F

Linus has released the 2.6.33-rc1 prepatch, closing the merge window for this development cycle. This kernel has a few features which will shake things up, with dynamic tracing being near the top as far as I am concerned. But, perhaps, the most interesting addition is one that almost nobody expected: a reverse-engineered driver for NVIDIA graphics chipsets called “Nouveau.”

Yesterday a very small company won a very big victory against a very large software vendor. The small company is i4i, a Canadian company that claimed that the large company had not infringed its patent accidentally, but knowingly and willfully, after engaging in discussions relating to the very same technology in question.

If you’re like me, you became fully aware of free and open source software only gradually, rather than suddenly and all at once. In my case, the process was somewhat schizophrenic, because I was personally involved, through my clients, in some of the evolutionary steps of FOSS itself, and only realized in retrospect how they fit into the whole picture.