If you haven’t heard yet, Google have released a developer preview of their new social networking and collaboration tool - Wave. What impact might this have on free software users and developers?

Recently, I had to fact-check some older articles I wrote about One Laptop Per Child in order to bring them up to date. This meant digging through the controversy in 2008, and what I found was some pretty appalling human behavior. That’s the “bitter”. The “sweet” is that both OLPC and Sugar (now separate projects) are both doing a lot of good in the world. Sugar, in particular, is doing a better job of connecting with the community. That’s a challenge for us in the community to step up and do a much better job connecting with Sugar. We need to make it the best thing ever, and that’s going to mean more than lip service. So we all need to get it installed and start contributing.

This post is in response to Dario Borghino’s story, “Why Open Source is not Free Software”. Go read that first…

I have a couple problems with this post. First of all, there is much less difference between free and open source software than this post suggest. Secondly, patents do not have much effect on the software industry, in practice. Those may sound controversial, but let me explain.

First of all, show me an open source license in wide use that is not also a Free software license, and vice versa. See http://opensource.org for the open source definition, and a list of licenses.

So here we are, entering another year — and no doubt at some point during this year, more than one person will declare it the “year of the Linux desktop”. Of course it won’t happen and those who consider themselves free software opponents will soon let us know. Some things will never change. That said, is there any reason to suspect it might be different this year? Is it possible that the current economic climate is better placed to generate a significant growth in free desktops? Can the cloud of economic gloom have a silver lining for free software?

Some of us will find some kind of alleged spare time on our hands over the next few weeks. Certainly, there’s often some kind of break from “work” over the festive season. Traditionally free software developers have used such times for long coding sessions, get-togethers and “hack-fests”. Of course we’re not all hard-core (or even soft-core) hackers so here’s a few suggestions for the rest of us who might want to try something new over Christmas.

Free software advocacy is something I do — both for a living and as a hobby. Over the years I’ve gleaned a few best practice tips and I thought I’d pass them on. They may not all work or even be applicable in your case, but I have found then all useful at some time or other. They are in no particular order and in my opinion carry equal amounts of weight.

Not long ago I watched a free software developer totally lose his cool with a user who (admittedly very frustratingly) posted a “bug report” in Spanish on an English-language project that amounted to “it doesn’t work”. He posted a very sarcastic reply in a couple of random languages (one of them through a machine translator). It was an understandable reaction, and in a way, kind of funny if you could understand all of the languages involved, but it wasn’t exactly good public relations. It was a sure sign of burnout. He had forgotten one important point: you are not obligated to help just because you wrote the thing.

The world of computers has changed. Sub-notebooks are becoming immensely popular, mobile phones based on Google’s Android software are about to come out (T-Mobile have just announced their G1 will launch on October 22), and computers are looking increasingly like small devices that fit in our pockets. The end of 2008 might see the dawn of a new revolution in the computer industry and in people’s lives. Maybe 2009 will be remembered as the year when the “world went mobile”. What does this mean for the (free and non-free) software industry? Where will we be, technologically and (more importantly) culturally? Where will the market (and the money) be?

In my last article I talked about how interest leads people to program. Then life rose up behind me like a giant Doberman pincer and bit me on my backside; so, I didn’t think of programming for over four months. However, just this week something happened that made me want to program again.

I was preparing to teach some students how to use dichotomous keys to identify organisms. Suddenly, while I was staring at a simple teaching key for identifying fruit, my eyes glazed over and I had a moment of clarity.

The gender inequality among developers and supporters of free software is stunning. Less than 2% of us are women, according to studies conducted for the European Commission. Why? The evidence says we’re driving them away. There are even some pretty good published guidelines on how not to drive them away. What’s missing is a practical implementation strategy: here I present ten relatively simple changes in how you run your project, to make it more attractive to would-be contributors—especially women.

I was surprised and delighted to find this video presentation by one of my favorite performers, Stephen Fry, called “Happy Birthday to GNU”, on the GNU project homepage.

Posted on September 1st, in honor of GNU’s 25th anniversary, it turns out to be only the latest in a series of entries on Mr. Fry’s official blog site praising the virtues of free software.

Today I want to talk about free and open source software in connection with the them and us feeling that I believe is widely felt all over the world.

Initially you might think that these two topics have nothing to do with each other but hopefully by the end of this post you will understand that these two topics are actually connected in many complex ways.

Garry Saddington is ICT co-ordinator at Skegness Grammar School. It is a specialist sports college and a specialist maths and computing college with nearly 800 pupils, and has a boarding provision for around 60. Alistair Crust is responsible for serving the technology needs of the Skegness Grammar School community. All the school’s 180 curriculum computers run GNU/Linux.

Zock is a new piece of free software for organizing betting games.

It is a “betting office” targeted at cliques of friends or co-workers which would like to organize a betting game for a sport event.

Right now, it needs testers. If you are interested in using it, read on.

A report by the Standish Group indicates that adoption of ‘open source’ has caused a drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year. That’s not a huge amount of money compared to what has been lost though the misselling of mortgages, but it is still a lot. The report identifies the value of these ‘open source’ products to be about 6% of the world market for software.