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While my own priorities were shifting, the state of political discourse was going through huge changes. Activist communities were slowly moving most of our political conversations and many of our personal interactions to the web. At some point it hit me that I had no idea who built any of the tools we were all using or what that entity’s end goal was. Of course, large corporations rarely value individual freedoms unless they happen to align with their profit-driven goals.

With an announcement on the Linux Weekly News site on Tuesday, the Ada Initiative will be tying up the loose ends and wrapping up their work in October.

It didn’t take me long to figure out something I should have snapped-to long before: You can dress a Linux system up to look like Windows as much as you like or as much as you can, but once the clothes hit the floor the whole façade crumbles and it doesn’t at all resemble Windows. Not even close.

Back in the early days of the 21st century, Dotcom seemed to have overcome his checkered past and to have developed the Midas touch with the popular online storage site Megaupload. Like Midas, however, he was to discover that gold is an overrated commodity, the ownership of which often creates as many problems as it solves. For one thing, you can’t eat it. For another, lots of people want to take it from you.

But, of course, we won’t be careful. Nor will we keep guns and worse out of the hands of our self aware and much smarter than we robots. Just the opposite, if history is any guide. As far as I know, we have never developed a technology that we haven’t militarized. In fact, the most rapid development of technologies comes when the military begins to see a use for them.

While it joins an already crowded field, with the likes of Android, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and others already in the mobile OS space, Plasma Mobile “offers a free — as in freedom and beer — user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices,” wrote Sebastian Kugler, a lead architect, on KDE’s website. “Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.”

Jane answered the phone and a pleasant young man identified himself as an internet technician with Microsoft. He told her they’d received a report that something was extremely wrong with their computers and he was calling to help. And yeah…you know where this is going. But Jane did not.

phpMyAdmin, the popular free and open source web based tool for administering MySQL databases, has left the SourceForge building. In a blog post on Saturday, the project’s infrastructure coordinator, Michal ?iha?, announced that a migration from Sourceforge is all but complete. The few remaining items left on the SourceForge server will be “hopefully handled in upcoming days as well.”

OSCON wraps up, as it always does, with its closing remarks, a short talk — this year by Simon Wardley on “Situation normal, everything must change” — and the annually awaited O’Reilly Open Source Awards, which had five winners this year. The five are…and because no one else will say it, I will: The OSCON goes to…

The final day started with many an attendee with coffee in hand, filing into the Portland Ballroom for the morning welcome and keynotes. Matthew McCollough of GitHub, Sarah Novotny of NGNIX, and Rachel Roumeliotis of O’Reilly kicked off the opening welcome to a standing room only crowd — problematic since the ushers wouldn’t let anyone stand, so I ended up sitting in someone’s lap (just kidding).

The agreement between the two organizations is a two way street, one that should should be good on many levels for free tech. As part of the agreement, Crowd Supply has already redesigned its website to bring it into compliance with FSF’s Free Javascript Campaign — meaning that users will be able to use the site without running any non-free software. Going forward, the crowd funder will work with FSF on more software and hardware projects that pass FSF muster, which includes FSF’s famous “four freedoms.” In return, FSF officially endorses Crowd Supply as its funding platform of choice, and will recommend the site to developers who are seeking funding for open source projects.

OSCON resembles that Bonnaroo without the mosh pit (though now that I’ve written that, let’s see if something like that appears in Austin next year). But along with the camaraderie there’s also an element of “high school reunion” in the mix.

At OSCON, Purism has on hand the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops – the numbers designating the screen size (13-inch and 15-inch, respectively) — which are both designed, chip-by-chip and line-by-line to respect your rights to privacy, security and freedom, which is Purism’s philosophy.

“Big Blue” unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM plans to release 50 projects to the open source community to speed adoption in the enterprise sector and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile and analytics, among other areas.

The application Cap One is unveiling with much fanfare isn’t something designed to help potential clients interact with the bank’s network, but is a developers’ tool. Called Hygieia, after the Greek goddess of health, it’s a dashboard that ties together data from a variety of tracking tools commonly used by software developers and presents them on a single screen.

Isaac emailed me a few weeks ago, and introduced himself as someone who was extremely interested in the work we do at Reglue. He told me that he had already rebuilt a Lenovo laptop and placed it in the home of a local kid who needed it. Isaac lives and works in the Washington, DC area, by way of Virginia. We developed a friendship as we passed emails back and forth.

Forget that the folks at Microsoft were wrong about the “Start” button and the interface formally known as Metro. It seems they’re still convinced they know what’s best for their users. So much so that the new Windows, due to be released next week, will have users click off on an EULA that pretty much gives Redmond carte blanche to update the system at will, which will include updating apps as well as Windows itself, with no real way to opt out — except for users of the Enterprise edition.

FSF, Canonical Makes Progress on Licensing: The $140,000-plus in donations is still missing, but that’s not the biggest news coming from Canonical this week. After two years of wrangling between the Free Software Foundation and Canonical — with a little help from the Software Freedom Conservancy — the FSF announced that they have made some progress on updated licensing terms for, as the FSF calls it, “Ubuntu GNU/Linux.”

I unequivocally believe that all the talk about desktops and laptops being obsolete is hilariously misguided nonsense. In our mythical race to find The Next Great Thing, people who know better - or at least are given too much credit in the intelligence department - are grasping at straws because, heck, sooner or later they’ll be right about something.

The trolls are still at it. In spite of the fact that the Supreme Court was busy ruling against them last year — between January and June it ruled against patent holders six times — the number of cases being brought by non-practicing entities (NPE), which is one measure of a troll, continues to rise. According to a report published in June by patent defense organization UnifiedPatents, there will be about eight thousand tech related patent disputes this year, with over six thousands of these expected to go to trial.