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Our friends at the Linux Foundation yesterday set sail wit the formation of the R Consortium, which includes such notorious pirates…um, I mean, notable companies as Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Google and Microsoft, along with the other founders like Alteryx, Mango Solutions, Tibco Software, and we won’t be sailin’ without our mateys at, wait for it, RStudio. Of course, when you read that last one, you read it as Arrrrrr Studio, right? Right?

Burt Rutan signed autographs on that blistering hot June day in the Mojave desert. His collection of engineers, scientists and "enterprise rouges" shouldered their way into front page news. SpaceShipOne had just become the first civilian aircraft/spacecraft to carry the first civilian pilot into space.

Also slated to make an appearance this year is Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO. No schedule has been published yet, but I’m assuming until I hear differently that Whitehurst will be a keynoter — which should fill the room beyond capacity, especially in Raleigh.

The company currently controls the smart phone market in a way that would’ve done the Microsoft of old proud, and it’s cloud services are already pretty much essential to many consumers and businesses — and that’s only going to grow as cloud-based Chrome OS takes increasingly larger slices of the PC market pie, which it’s poised to do.

While there has been a lot of oooh-ing and ahhh-ing over what’s been coming out of the Red Hat Summit in Boston this week, probably the most intriguing news to come out of the proceedings is that Red Hat and Samsung Electronics America “announced a strategic alliance to deliver the next generation of mobile solutions for the enterprise,” according to Red Hat’s PR department.

Poor Microsoft. The beleaguered company just can’t catch a break. We’ve already told you about how Snowden’s revelations have forced the pride of Redmond to spend who knows how many millions opening two “transparency centers” to allow government IT experts to pore through source code to prove there’s no back doors baked into Windows or other Microsoft products. Trouble is, while its engineers have been busy plastering over all traces of old back doors, they’ve left a side door standing wide open, waiting to be exploited.

Sarah Sharp, an embedded software architect at Intel, and Kesha Shah, a student at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, were named the winners of Red Hat’s first Women in Open Source Awards at the Red Hat Summit in Boston on Tuesday.

MaryTTS is an amazing app. In no time David was able to show me how to get it to work on my individual computer and not have to go online to use it. Trouble is…it’s a total mind-bash to someone who isn’t comfortable at the command line or to editing exotic text files. To the novice, or even some power users, getting MaryTTS to run on presents some daunting challenges. And that’s a shame because MaryTTS is more than likely the tool a speechless world is waiting for. Solid, dependable and free.

Mageia 5, released on Friday and over a year in the making, is familiar territory to those of us who cut our Linux teeth on Mandriva back in the days when it was called Mandrake. That’s not to say that the distro is old or outdated, far from it, but any Mandrake old-timer will instantly recognize the roots of this distro.

FOSS Force has learned that Mageia will soon officially announce the release of the stable version of Mageia 5, most likely later today. According to a source within the organization, the ISO images were pushed to the distro’s main mirror at about 7 P.M. EST yesterday. According to our source, the developers are now just waiting for the images to be available on all mirrors before making the official announcement.

Yeah, that Richard Stallman. You know, GNU’s project leader and the inventor of all those great tools that are essential to Linux or GNU/Linux, depending on what you call it — like the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (GDB), GNU Emacs, and a wide range of others. Oh, and his advocacy of free software, as well as campaigning against software patents and copyright laws, are the stuff of which legends are made.

The Linux Foundation, ever in the forefront of shaping the future of Linux, has announced the 2015 Linux Training Scholarship Program, which aims to provide educational funds “to up-and-coming developers and sysadmins who show incredible promise…but do not otherwise have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses,” according to a page on the Foundation’s website.

He points out that over the last year or so, Google has spent more money developing a set of fonts to be used in their advertising programs than openSSL has spent for the entirety of the project. No slam on Google, of course. This isn’t about how much Google is spending, it’s about how little is being allocated to projects like GIT, openSSL and bash by open source software companies who depend on the viability of these projects.

The topic came up when an old friend, Richard, and I began an email exchange to catch up after a number of years. He’s a senior Linux admin for one of the major New York City hospitals and the topic turned to some things we’ve noted over time. We talked about how Linux isn’t. It isn’t in the public awareness. It isn’t in stores. It isn’t offered by OEMs in any real quantity. It isn’t visible at all. Richard stated that it was probably better that way.

The Rupert Murdoch controlled Sunday Times of London finds itself embroiled in controversy today, over both a front page article that appeared in the paper yesterday and a related DMCA Notice it issued against the U.S. based political website The Intercept.

It seems that keeping the code we depend on maintained has come to resemble how we deal with our highways. We love to build new highways and bridges, but keeping the ones we have properly maintained and safe, not so much — it’s not sexy. Evidently this isn’t just affecting small projects. Nalley pointed to Git, where a single person has written 50 percent of the code over the last two years. Or Perl, where three people are writing over 50 percent of the code.

One thing he said really did catch my attention: “Overseas they don’t really trust proprietary software anymore.” Yup. I’ve been saying that here on FOSS Force for a while — like from the moment Snowden began giving us the lowdown on the NSA. I got a chance to ask him about that later on. He said that he and some of his open source business cronies were talking about that recently. He said the Snowden revelations are costing the proprietary guys and gals billions. I said that might explain Microsoft’s new Transparency Center in Belgium.

LinuxFest Northwest has had a brush with fame in the Michael Mann movie “Blackhat” which came out earlier this year. The protagonist in the movie, with his trusty Toshiba, has a stack of magazines next to his laptop and, lo and behold, one of those has to be a Linux magazine (I’m guessing Linux Pro, which ran full-page ads for Linux expos on a regular basis — but again, that’s a guess) because the back page ad is for LinuxFest Northwest. Of course, unless you are familiar with the ad, you may not recognize it, but for those who are observant can see the Linux totem associated with the Bellingham show.

If SourceForge were a person and I were the New York Times, I’d make certain I had an obituary on file right about now. It’s obvious that the once essential code repository for open source projects is terminally ill, although it’s just as obvious that Dice Holdings, which took over ownership of the site nearly three years ago, has no plans of letting SourceForge go gently into the good night, so we’ll probably see more kicking and noise-making until the lights are inevitably extinguished.

To be clear, like Microsoft’s foray into FOSS, Apple’s entry is a small step for FOSS, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong. It is hardly a giant leap for FOSSkind. Also, to be fair, Apple has dabbled in open source in its own way already, for example with OpenDarwin, which is available if you dig deep enough in the Apple website.