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Michael Still is the chief organiser for the 2013 event and has many irons in the fire. Once the conference process gets under way, things keep happening, and take on some kind of life of their own. He has just left a job at Canonical, the company behind the well-known Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, and moved on to Rackspace. And he has never let up his reading. Nevertheless, he took some time out from flitting between cities and family concerns to speak to iTWire.

It's early days for secure boot, the new method that Microsoft is using to protect its desktop turf, but it would not be unfair to say that the company has succeeded in showing up the sharply fragmented nature of GNU/Linux.

The 64-bit version of the last release of Ubuntu, 12.10, will boot on a machine which has Windows 8 installed with secure boot turned on.

Linux developer Matthew Garrett has completed work on a first-stage bootloader, called Shim, for supporting secure boot, and put it online for use by anyone who wishes to do so.

Marc Espie, a senior OpenBSD developer says that upstream vendors of free and open source software are adding in changes without any thought of whether downstream users could adapt to the change. And he has warned that this would hurt smaller players by not allowing them to keep up with the changes. Basically what is happening is that numerous changes are being made to Linux and smaller projects like OpenBSD cannot keep up with the changes, all of which, are not strictly necessary.

One of the biggest talking points in the run-up to the release of Windows 8 has been the feature that will supposedly lock down the operating system so that it cannot be infected by malware at boot-time.

At the gates of Microsoft, there are numerous competing Windows versions now almost falling over each other as they strive for marketshare.

One of the co-founders of the GNOME Desktop Project has reacted to the numerous criticisms that GNOME 3, the latest iteration of the desktop environment, has received, by putting it all down to the power users and "yellow" journalists.

Senior Linux kernel developer Ted Ts'o has denied that he has ever believed that rape is not a problem. He was reacting to allegations by a fellow kernel developer Matthew Garrett, who called him a "rape apologist" over comments that Ts'o had made on a mailing list in February 2011.

Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett has kicked off what could be a damaging episode in the free and open source software community by describing a fellow developer, senior Linux guru Ted Ts'o, as a "rape apologist" over comments the latter made in 2011.

Last week marked eight years since Ubuntu made its appearance on the GNU/Linux scene. Since October 2004, there has been a release of this distribution every six months, the initial buzz being very loud and then gradually fading away.

The Debian GNU/Linux project has yet to decide on the method whereby it will ensure that the Linux distribution it produces can boot on computers that are certified for Windows 8.

Despite public perception to the contrary, GNOME developers pay a great deal of attention to the opinions of users, senior GNOME developer Vincent Untz told iTWire.

How does a company harness the efforts of outsiders who want to contribute to its software, without making things too unwieldy and difficult to manage within its own framework?

The Linux Desktop. That's one phrase that hasn't been heard too much around the annual SUSE Linux conference, SUSECON, in Orlando, Florida.

Rod Nash is a systems engineer with SUSE in Australia. But he would easily do as good a job as a media manager, given the effortless ease with which he introduces journalists to technical people.

Going private and re-establishing itself as a separate business unit appears to have done SUSE, the Linux company, a world of good if one goes by the comments of Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager

The latest release of openSUSE, 12.2, which became available last week, does not have support for secure boot, Vojtech Pavlik, director of SUSE Labs and head of kernel development at SUSE, has told iTWire.

Chris Neugebauer is one developer who actually likes to organise conferences. And he makes a pretty good fist of them too.

One of the questions surrounding openSUSE 12.2, which was released mid-week, is whether it already supports secure boot, the Microsoft initiative that will be an integral part of Windows 8 when that operating system is released on October 26.