I was reading an interesting post on phoronix, now everybody is talking about Nouveau drivers for Nvidia cards but it seems that all forgot that ATI cards already have open source drivers that need attention!

I am not trying to tell you to not support the Nouveau project, as those developers should have whatever they need in order to get their driver completed and ready for public consumption. However, the ATI driver must not be lost in this action. Linux users must continue to embrace the fabulous work done by these developers on the open-source ATI driver and this work must continue in order to provide R500 (and eventually, R600) support.

Dell (ubuntu-pc) and Intel (ubuntu mobile) have just signed some sort of partnership with Canonical/Ubuntu, but I’m asking myself why now and why Ubuntu?

I think the answer is composed by two parts:

1. Ubuntu has a solid company behind (and also a big community, but NOT ONLY a community)
2. Ubuntu was created in the name of freedom (I hope the trademark issue will be resolved in the near future)

We also had other big Linux companies such as Red Hat and Novell but the real difference between them and Ubuntu is freedom, Ubuntu has always released every part of its system as free software, unlike the others did.

Well, actually there’s also debian which lies behind Ubuntu and that’s a good thing but I don’t really think Dell and Intel cares about debian

I think Dell and Intel care about interacting with a big company and not just with a community, wich would not help maintaining a solid relationship with business based target, but they also care about trusting in the products, and what’s better than free software? Free licenses give partners a major stability about the future for fund investments for the many reasons we all know.

That’s why Ubuntu wins the race, now all the others should adapt their business and re-enter the race

Will Linux die in 2018?

Someone doesn’t think so and I’m really glad about that :)

You want to start a commercial website, you want to spread the the Ubuntu word and you’re already involved in some Ubuntu related free initiatives (let’s say you’re also an Ubuntu affiliate).

You’ve to decide the name of your business (and the website domain too) and we all know how much relevance this task has in the future success of the business itself.

You and your marketing team decide that “hey-you-have-ubuntu-we-can-do-things-for-you.com” (it’s just an example :P) it’s the right one, but… hey Ubuntu is a trademark, we can’t use that name!

So what? Let’s take a look at the Ubuntu trademark policy, it’s a long text but we’ve to read it all but we note:

it is very unlikely that we will approve Trademark use in the following cases:
- Use of a Trademark in a company name
- Use of a Trademark in a domain name which has a commercial intent

But you think “Hey I’m not going to steal Ubuntu identity or capitalize on Ubuntu name, I’m just building an Ubuntu based service” so any marketer would never suggest you a different name (for your website, you can change the company name, that’s not the problem) because it’s too effective and any alternative won’t work.

So you write to the Ubuntu trademarks team asking if you can use the name, Ubuntu knows you’re in good faith cause they know your free projects and Ubuntu advocancy but… I still haven’t got back a complete answer to my mail thus… updates will come (I hope soon!).

OK I know that the title of the post has “free software” but a commercial service promoting a free project (support or anything else) it’s always a good thing for the project, or am I wrong? Thus my question is “trademarks and free software can live together?” It could be good to protect a fraud service using the protected name but it also is a limitation for an enterprise level growth of services.

PS: Remember that Ubuntu and Canonical are registered trademarks of Canonical Ltd.

Just changed the graphic theme, I liked the dark one very much but it seemed a bit difficult to read, this should be better :)

Another thing, I added the meebo widget to the sidebar, now you can IM me at any time.

Talking about web we have many open standards, actually we also have an open standard for documents (opendocument). Till now animations were only done by Macromedia Flash, now is going out Microsoft Silverlight, both with obviously different “protocols”.

We (Linux users) had some difficulties with flash player in the past, some guys are working on free/open flash players, what will happen with this new technology?

Could we think about creating an open standard for web animation format? Should Macromedia/Adobe open his specs?

This post is nothing more than a reminder to me, ruby.NET is out today, Microsoft is working with Zend to build PHP.NET, is bigM trying to catch developers working with open languages? This surely mean that these languages gained (with python) so much audience and respectability that no one should ignore them.

No no, that’s not what you’re thinking, I’m just talking about the development cycle…

It seems to me that bigM is reacting the right way to the free software challenge, between ie6 and ie7 we had to wait for something like 5 years, not they’re already talking about new forthcoming features. I hope the challenge will get harder for everyone, the result will only be better software.

Citing a little sentence from this post on ie blog:

There were many lessons learned, and I’ll talk about how we’ll take those lessons forward into future releases of Internet Explorer

This is interesting, everyone should learn lessons and don’t even sits down on achived results (ok you got me, I’m talking about firefox).

Maybe Microsoft will release more often? Maybe they’ll get closer to standards? I’ll keep an eye on that in the next months.

Actually I’m hoping to see a gtk-webcore browser for my gnome, I use gnome since 6 years and I’m a bit upset to see firefox working better on windows (UI/system integration, speed, crashes) than on my beautiful gnome.

If you read any news website in these days you already know that Dell officially announced that will (in the next few weeks) start selling Ubuntu (7.04 feisty fawn) based PCs.

That’s wonderful, you know what I think about that

Now? What will other distributors do?

It seems that Toshiba is already thinking to linux-PCs, now I’m reading that HP could do the same.

Nice to see all this movement around Linux hu? I’m pretty pleased about that, we’ll still have to wait a lot to see linux-PCs in the mall near home but… when it will happen we’ll have a stronger Ubuntu, more interested people (and companies) and thus more developers and people will start asking: «hey what’s that Linux?» and so on.

Good times are coming for the free software :)

Every news website today is flooded by the “HD-DVD key found” news, but what’s the meaning of all this confusion? I see two different episodes:

• censorship: some of those sites censored the news that publishes the key
• revolt: after the news were deleted, those sites were flooded, a real attack against that kind of control, seen as an abuse

Why those news have been censored? Fear of the majors or what?

It’s been told to us that it’s illegal to crack media protections to copy cds/dvds but it seems now that people are claming again their freedom to use what they bought. Can people make a law, seen as wrong, change?

Some of the majors are partly abandoning DRM, but if it’s absolutely clear that people don’t want that kind of armor-plate, how long will this fight last? Are the majors gainin’ hate from fighiting the final user (and buyer)?

Too many questions and no answers… from my personal point of view I hate go to the cinema and beeing forced to see 1 minute anti-piracy spot, maybe someone should remember I paid the ticket to watch the movie?