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I am just bustin’-at-the-seams happy to announce The New Hope Computer Technology Project here in my small town of Taylor, Texas. After way too many meetings and committees formed to insure viability, Reglue is fully operational and in the midst of installing computers for people who need them most.

The old and the new both made big news on the FOSS front this week. Representing the old was what appears to be the ending of the SCO vs IBM case after something like 13 years, which means that Caldera/SCO now gets to go it its final resting place. For the new, was the release of the Raspberry Pi 3, which comes weilding a 64-bit ARM processor with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But that wasn’t the only news of interest to the FOSS world this week…

Now that it's March, we can look for the first signs of spring. We can also take an early look at FreeBSD 10.3, due to be released later this month, through this beta release.

The transparency of open software means that security vulnerabilities are visible and can't be quietly swept under the rug.

The month of February kept up with the trend of bigger and better things happening in the Raspberry Pi world. From new games to updates from the International Space Station, things keep moving on for the Raspbery Pi and the Raspberry Pi community.

Most everyone reading this, to at least some point, is computer proficient. Whether we’ve written scripts for macros to make our typing tasks simpler, or created entire websites, we perceive our skills as part of our daily lives. Not a big deal. It’s simply the tools we’ve accrued to facilitate our work. Ctrl+A? Nothin’ to it. Ctrl+V? Same same. Vi vs Emacs? Don’t start it.

It appears as if SCO’s case against IBM, which began as a blustering tornado back in 2003, finally died with a whimper last week. The death notice came in the form of what is essentially a one page agreement between SCO and IBM which calls “for certification of the entry of final judgment on the Court’s orders concerning all of SCO’s claims….”

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has officially announced the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3, which is the first Pi to come with built-in wireless capabilities and a 64-bit processor.

On Thursday I had a very brief email discussion with the distro’s project leader Clem Lefebvre — “very brief” because Lefebvre was more than little busy at the time. He and his team are in up to their elbows, working to make sure that everything works and plays well with the hardening they’ve done to Mint’s server, as well as working overtime to find any niggling security issues. In other words, they have it all under control, even as they work to get it more under control.

The poll was pretty straight forward. “Should advertisers and ad agencies be forbidden to track users as they surf the web?” we asked. There were three answers offered, “Yes,” “No” and “With exceptions.”

Because I now use PC-BSD on a daily basis, the idea going forward is to pitch talks about the conversion from one side of the Free/Open Source Software street to the other; the uplifting situations and occasional hurdle such a conversion brings, and to outline the similiarities (lots) and differences (few, but relatively significant) between Linux distros and BSD variants.

She was speaking in support of two bills: the Free and Open Source Software Act, which “would minimize city contracts for proprietary software in favor of free and open source software that can be shared between government agencies and bodies,” and the Civic Commons Act, which “would encourage the collaborative software purchasing of free and open source software among agencies, cities and states to pool resources, avoid duplicated effort, create portable expertise, grow jobs, and reduce costs.” Both bills are sponsored by New York City councilman Ben Kallos, and both were originally introduced on May 29, 2014.

In Southeast Texas, a young girl easily harnesses the power of GNU/Linux as she prepares for her future as a veterinarian in America's heartland.

Everybody understands that none of a stage magician’s tricks are real. The one thing that is real, and which a successful illusionist must practice to perfection, is the art of misdirection — which evidently turned out the be the trick under the sleeves of the cracker/hackers who were responsible for compromising ISO downloads of Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon on Saturday.

Linux Mint project leader Clem Lefebvre revealed in a blog post today that the popular Linux distribution’s servers were hacked on Saturday. During the “brief” intrusion, the hackers modified the ISO for the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa) and also gained access to the distro’s forum database. Only this particular ISO is affected; other editions or releases are considered safe. Only ISO’s downloaded Saturday are potentially vulnerable.

After the accident, a call went out in the San Francisco Bay area, and in her former home of Colorado as well, to make this past Tuesday, February 16, Code for Aubrey day. Developers and coders throughout the Bay Area and elsewhere dedicated all of the code they wrote on that day to Ms. Howell, “to show her our support and to send her good vibes,” and then post comments and screenshots of their commits to Twitter using the hashtag #codeforaubrey. Her fellow coders, friends and supporters have also been donating generously to a Go Fund Me account set up to help the family.

The first song I heard about the Linux Desktop was Hold On, It’s Coming, released in 1971 by Country Joe McDonald. This was an amazing prediction, considering that Linus Torvalds was only two years old at the time. Is it possible that young Linus heard this piece and it spurred him to create the GNU/Linux operating system? We may never know.

You can rest easy, BSDers: Not our circus, not our monkeys. Dag-Erling Smørgrav, a FreeBSD developer since 1998 and the current FreeBSD Security Officer, writes in his blog that "neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected."

This past week marked a huge turning point for Raspberry Pi users, as the Manjaro Arm project marked its first alpha release. The reason this is such big news is that many Raspberry Pi users did not have a great entryway into Arch Linux prior to the Manjaro Arm Project. Arch has always been available for the Raspberry Pi, through either a direct download or using NOOBS, but neither is as user friendly as most other Raspberry Pi distros. This is where Manjaro Linux comes into the picture. Manjaro provides a more user-friendly approach to Arch with the goal of getting users into the Arch space who found either the installation or documentation a bit overwhelming.

A helpful tip for those coming of age as a Linux Advocate: Temper your rhetoric when explaining just how much Microsoft sucks. It’s easy to come off as a wild-eyed zealot. These are lessons in advocacy learned rather quickly. And yeah…, that whole wide-eyed zealot thing? It didn’t work out so well for me. Nor will it for you.