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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.

A significant portion of my second year college work dealt with psychology of the senses. Color plays a powerful role in how we perceive, interpret and react to an event, a situation or an environment. Both Microsoft and Apple have spent millions on volumes of research and focus groups. Do you think that the dominate shades of blue in Windows, or the close proximity Apple keeps with grey, silver and metal, is by haphazard design?

At the very least, I expect to find that at SELF even the software will be southern fried and smothered with gravy. That’s because SELF intends to be more than just another LinuxFest. It intends to be a celebration of southern living, hence the guns and barbecue. Presumably, grits will be served at breakfast, and Southern Comfort and Bourbon will be available at the after parties.

As far as we know, the $143,000 in donations which can’t be found by the Ubuntu Community Council is still missing. As far as we know, the Ubuntu Community Council still considers Jonathan Riddell, a leading developer in Kubuntu circles, persona non grata for bringing up the issue of missing funds and Canonical’s intellectual property policies. As far as we know, the Kubuntu Council responded with a collective “bite me” to the Ubuntu Community Council in rejecting Riddell’s ouster and standing behind him.

Is this any way to inspect source code? If you already have doubts about the company supplying an application (which you must, if you find the Transparency Center necessary), would you trust it to be honest with you in an environment it completely controls?

I realize that an older Pentium 4 with 1 gig of RAM isn’t gonna spin and shine, bringing out the wow factor right away, but there are most certainly ways to make it better than a dull wallpaper and dreary decorations from Windows 2000. And I will say this again…to many of you this won’t made a bit of difference. But to those of us who introduce Linux to people who have a real interest in using something other than the buggy, crash-prone Windows system? There are a number of things we can do straight out of the gate to get the new Linux user’s attention quickly and in a positive way.

It’s important to note that neither of these are high dollar top-of-the-line laptops requiring deep pockets to buy, but affordable Inspiron 14 3000 Series laptops priced for the rest of us. The laptop announced two weeks ago comes with a 15? screen and sells for somewhere between $250 and $350, depending on the configuration. The laptop announced today, which defaults to slightly lower specs and comes with a smaller 14? screen, is priced at $219 and up.

Mandriva S.A., the French company behind Mandriva, the distribution that long time Linux users will remember as Mandrake, died this week at the age of sixteen. The announcement came in the form of a notice posted by the company earlier this week. The cause of death was financial hemorrhaging.

Nevertheless, the boot comes, of course, with the imprimatur of Mark Shuttleworth himself. Much of this friction stems from a clarification Riddell requested of Canonical’s licensing policies regarding derivative distributions, like — oh, I don’t know, let’s take a wild guess — Kubuntu. Not getting satisfactory answers caused an unfavorable reaction by Riddell which didn’t sit right with some Community Council members.

I might be wrong, but I get the impression that my Windows friends — which would be most of the people I see on a daily basis — think of Linux as this incredibly geeky system from another planet. I think most of them don’t understand why I use it and why I don’t just stay in the known world — which to them would be Windows. Paradoxically, however, they do get why some folks use Macs.

Many of the changes in Fedora 22 come in the Cloud and Server versions, though one change stands out across the board. DNF, an updated package manager that has been around in development since Fedora 18, finally makes its debut here, replacing Yum. DNF provides faster installs and updates while keeping the Yum command-line interface compatibility — but instead of “yum” you’ll be typing “dnf” on the command line. Pretty simple, no?

When the folks at Mint released a new LTS Xfce version (Qiana) in June of last year, followed by another LTS (Rebecca) in January, we didn’t much care. We were more than happy with Maya, and following the age old philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” we decided to stay the course and keep using what we had until its sunset year arrived. As far as I was concerned, although approaching obsolescence, Maya was damned near perfect. How much better could the latest and greatest be?