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As Richard Stallman has pointed out, when it comes to advertising, those of us who buy and use products instead of making and selling them are the inventory the ad agencies are selling, not the customer, and we have no leverage. About the only tool available to us who wish to protect our privacy is to block ads, either through browser configurations or by using an ad blocking app.

The last time I used Opera on a regular basis was back in the day when Netscape 4X was long in the tooth, Netscape 6 was a disaster and Internet Explorer was…well, Internet Explorer. Opera was $50 for the ad free version, or free for those who didn't mind a few ads. I didn't mind because I could ignore them. It stayed on my computer until Mozilla came along, then it disappeared from my radar. Something tells me that my experience wasn't uncommon.

On Monday when we ran Christine Hall’s opinion piece on why she thought the upcoming Ubuntu tablet could change the future of mobile computing, we included a poll which asked, “If the price is right, will you be considering buying a Ubuntu tablet when they’re released in March?” Guess what? Well over half of you said you’re ready to break out your credit card and make a purchase.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Lumina Desktop Environment — let’s just call it Lumina for short — is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment focusing on getting work done while minimizing system overhead. Specifically designed for PC-BSD and FreeBSD, it has also been ported to many other BSD variants and Linux distros. Lumina is based on the Qt graphical toolkit and the Fluxbox window manager, and uses a small number of X utilities for various tasks.

The case ruled upon on Tuesday goes back to the time when SCO famously tried to force enterprise Linux users to pay SCO a license fee, since according to SCO, Linux was nothing more than a stolen version of SCO Unix being dressed up under another name. IBM, already a little ticked off at SCO because they’d sued them for the billion dollars, told SCO “hell no,” or words to that effect, when they heard of the licensing scheme, terminated whatever dealings they had left with the company, and just before slamming the door in a huff on their way out, told SCO that they would encourage their partners to do likewise.

Seemingly out of the blue, Batman: Arkham Knight’s planned Linux and OS X release has been cancelled. In all likelihood, this cancellation stems from the litany of problems with the game’s Windows port, which has been panned by critics and players as glitch plagued and often almost unplayable.

Late Tuesday evening, SourceForge’s new owners announced that the controversial DevShare program has been ended as a “first order of business.” The announcement came in a blog post by Logan Abbott, a co-owner and the president of SourceForge Media. “As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated,” he wrote.

On Monday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India shot down Free Basics, a scheme that offers free Internet access to a limited number of websites, which includes selected local news and weather sites, the BBC, Wikipedia and some health sites. The plan is backed by Facebook and six tech companies: Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia and Qualcomm. Free Basics has been available in India since February, 2015 and remains available in 35 other countries.

Guess who’s back in the news? Even as a ghost, SCO is trying to pickpocket IBM’s wallet. Well, it’s not a ghost exactly. It’s brain dead and on life support, but just alive enough to seek yet another day in court.

GNU/Linux, of course, is the most obvious difference between Ubuntu's mobile offerings, phone or tablet, and those from the usual suspects. The upcoming tablet, however, has a big feature that's been MIA from the phones so far, and depending on how well it's implemented and how savvy the marketing folks are, it could completely change the mobile market.

It’s a sad, sad day in Germany as openSUSE 13.1 Linux has reached the end and has been removed from support. Evergreen, the hospice care workers for terminal operating systems, will be keeping the patient supplied with a minimal number of patches until it finally falls into that good sleep and is carried off by penguin angels.

Long before the end of the twentieth century, the antivirus guys were fighting whack-a-mole battle — and that was in the days before the bad guys had the sophistication to write malware that could hide, constantly rewrite itself to avoid matching a definition, or to return seemingly by magic after being deleted. There is just too much malware being created for even a hard drive loaded with definitions to handle. For a while it seemed as if heuristics were the answer, until it became obvious that much of what we do on our computers looks like bad behavior to a halfway effective heuristics program.

If you’ve been waiting for a tablet offering the full GNU/Linux experience, your wait is almost over. Ubuntu announced today that a tablet offering the full “convergence” experience will be available to the public in March. The 10 inch device, dubbed the Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition, will be built by the Spanish company BQ, which currently manufactures two Ubuntu phones, and will be sold through BQ’s online store. So far, no information on pricing seems to be available.

Would you like to test your knowledge of the people of FOSS? Take our quiz. We have eighteen questions, each concerning a person considered to be a leader in the FOSS world. Have we left anyone out? You betcha — starting with you. The way we see it, each and every one of us, whether we merely use FOSS at home, work to keep FOSS software maintained or fight the good fight to keep free tech free, is equally as important.

“And so, as we are pushing our ISV [Independent Software Vendor] and hardware partners to build great new stuff that takes advantage of Windows 10 that obviously makes the old stuff really bad and not to mention viruses and security problems.”

First up for the big tent events for this spring will be Great Wide Open in Atlanta. Although the event will take place March 16-17, which is actually a few days before spring’s official arrival, it’s a good bet that Atlanta will be in full bloom by the time the conference opens its doors at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center in the city’s midtown area.

SourceForge’s new owners aren’t exactly what you might expect to be purchasing a site that for all intents and purposes revolves around free and open source software. The new owners, SourceForge Media, is a subsidiary of BIZX, and while that may sound like some huge and gigantic mega corporation, it’s an LLC owned by Southern California residents Roger and Logan Abbott, who are probably either father and son or brothers, we’re not sure. What we do know is that their background is in telecommunications, not exactly the sort of business experience you’d expect for someone entering the share-and-share-alike world of FOSS, where there’s no such thing as vendor lock-in.

Inquiring minds wanted to know, so we asked. When choosing what to run on a machine — we’re talking computing machines running GNU/Linux here — what’s more important, the choice of distro or which desktop environment to run? We began asking the question among ourselves several weeks back when we were running our “best distro” poll and a few commenters observered that the desktop might be a more important metric for most users, since it’s the desktop that supplies the interface with which the user interacts. Good point, we thought.

This afternoon I exchanged a few emails with Logan Abbott who is one of the owners of BIZX and the president of the SourceForge Media subsidiary which he said “was formed for the purposes of this transaction.”

BSD had itself its own row of booths in the expanded expo hall — FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation, and OpenBSD were all neighbors on the exhibit floor. As is common for all the conferences we attend, Dru Lavigne and I — she moreso than me — got to catch up on things, and I took the time to drop in on her “Doc Like and Egyptian” presentation (though, burdened with a radio, I was called away to put out a minor “fire,” rhetorically speaking, in the press room).