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Some of you have reminded me that there is a good assortment of text to speech applications for Linux, especially in the mobile market, such as Android and the iExperience. Granted, for both examples, but we are needing an application that can either come preinstalled or be easily installed on almost any Linux distribution. That leads us back to the plentiful choices within the Linuxsphere you feel the need to mention. Yes, there are a lot of them, but when it all gets boiled down, they all share one simple trait.

Indeed it is, and its tactics are beginning to resemble an extortion racket, with suited Oracle thugs threatening, “Nice database you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” The leverage the company has to make this tactic work is our old pal, vendor lock-in.

Between bringing up the unaccounted-for donations and Canonical’s iffy arrangement with developers, Riddell was shown the door and, wisely perhaps, he walked out of it. However, in a twist, it appears that Kubuntu 15.10 may be the last Kubuntu as we know it.

Immediately after the verdict, Newegg, which has made it a policy to duke it out in court rather than settle patent claims it thinks are unfounded, vowed to appeal. Trouble is, they can’t. Not until U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who conducted the trial, enters a final judgement, which he hasn’t done. He also hasn’t indicated when, if ever, that’s likely to happen.

I can vouch for this because for the last nine or so years, my daughter has used hand-me-down after hand-me-down (until she got her own ZaReason Alto 3880 laptop), all running Linux. With the exception of the first one, she had even installed her own distros. I don't think she uses Linux to placate her old man - I think she has grown to become a pro at Linux and FOSS by her own choice, to the point where she’s doing her artwork using GIMP and Inkscape on her laptop.

In relation to the real accomplishments in the Linuxsphere, I was late to the party. In 2005, my three city network of business offices had been hacked and defaced. I had no idea of what to do. I was our local IT guy, but that ain’t sayin’ much. The buddy who set up our network was living in San Antonio at the time and I called him at 6:30 in the morning. I called him out of panic…I didn’t know what else to do.

For at least a decade, Microsoft has been chanting the mantra, “at Microsoft security is job one,” over and over and over. During this time, they’ve repeated this mantra often enough to convince a lot of people that Windows is much safer than it once was, which I suppose is true since it couldn’t have gotten much worse. However, a new report from AV-Test proves the company isn’t yet ready to move up to the next mantra level and begin chanting, “at Microsoft we do security right,” because clearly it doesn’t.

Sean Michael Kerner reported yesterday on IT Business Edge that Ubuntu has earned its way onto Intel’s Compute Stick platform. The Compute Stick, a small form factor powered by a quad-core Atom processor with a USB port and a micro-SD card slot, can be plugged into any HDMI TV and — voila! — you have yourself a computing device. Once the sole domain of Windows 8.1, the Intel Compute Stick will use the year-old Ubuntu 14.04 LTS distribution.

There’s a bit of sobering news for sites like FOSS Force, as again in 2014, technology sites top the list of the type of sites most likely to be exploited by cracker hackers, with the number on the rise. According to Symantec, last year 21.5 percent of tech sites were infected by malware, up from 9.9 percent in 2013. Even more disturbing is that number two on this list are hosting sites, up from the number three position in 2013, with a 7.3 percent infection rate.

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.