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On a personal note, some of you know that I inherited an old PowerBook G4 — yep, PowerPC 32-bit — now with limited options regarding what distro to put on it. It wasn’t like that when I started back in ’06 with Debian on an iMac, but I digress. I tried what few options are left on the PowerPC side, from both Linux and BSD, and the winner — drumroll, please — is Xubuntu.

Folks who follow news about FOSS, OSS and Linux who also watch the “talking heads” shows the TV networks serve up on Sunday mornings might be excused for not noting that David Boies, the lawyer speaking for Sony on this week’s “Meet the Press,” has on several occasions been involved in news stories affecting Linux. Over the years, he’s played the role of both friend and foe, but it’s been a while since his and the FOSS world’s paths have crossed.

One more prediction: Upon sailing through the Post-PC era, there will be a post-Post-PC era, after the advent of the pre-post-Post-PC era, where people will start thinking, “You know, I had a laptop (or desktop…or both) once where I didn’t have to strain my eyes on such a small screen, and where I actually got stuff done rather than just wasting time.” Or something like that.

See, that’s the problem with many people in my generation. If something happens or is added to their computers, they believe it’s supposed to happen, that “the Internet knows what I need.” Apparently, the Internet thought Jake needed eleven toolbars and so many JavaScript exploits that the damned thing took over five minutes just to open the browser.

For those of you with short memories, back between 2005 and 2007, Sony didn’t want us playing their CDs on our computers, fearing we might rip-and-burn, so they surrepticiously used their CDs to install DRM software on our computers, which ended up making our machines vulnerable to all sorts of malicious attacks. Their solution to that brouhaha was to release an “uninstaller,” which didn’t uninstall anything and actually installed more exploitable software while collecting email addresses to send back to Sony’s home office.

Not to be outdone by the FSF and looking to appeal to more cosmopolitan tastes, Linux Mint will change over the course of the year to something a little more contemporary and stylish. It becomes Linux Merlot, with a bouquet that resonates from the north side of the vineyard. The distro will have a more celebratory nature and it will go a lot better with most cheeses.

The movie moguls want to do this in the name of fighting their old monster-under-the-bed, content piracy. Not surprisingly, they plan on evoking an old enemy of a free and open Internet in the process, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), while attempting to revive at least a part of the ghost of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was killed back in 2011.

One great thing about this poll — probably the best thing about this poll — is that each of the categories has an extremely wide range of candidates, and there are programs in many of the categories that I’ve never heard of. Hearing about them for the first time, I get to try them out. So not only is it fun — yeah, I think voting is fun (so shoot me) — it’s also educational.

Without consciously realizing it, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat up. My heart was beating so hard that it hurt. My mouth was dry and my hands shook if I held them out in front of me. I wasn’t sure if my legs would hold me if I tried to stand up. I opened my mouth to call to Diane but all that came out was raspy, raw air.

If all goes according to plan, in June of 2015 HP plans to release a new operating system they’re calling Linux++. Before we start jumping up and down and putting on our party hats, we should know that this is not a new Linux distro being designed by HP to be featured on a new line of laptops. Although based on Linux and Android, this won’t even be an operating system at all in the sense that mortals such as I generally use the term. Most of us won’t be downloading and installing it. If we do, we won’t be using it as a drop-in replacement for Mint, Fedora or any of our other favorite desktop distros.

Sure, the phone license app might be offered as a option at first, but how long until it becomes a requirement and old fashioned plastic licenses are no longer available? This would mean that anybody who wants to drive a car, at least in Iowa, would have to invest in a certified NSA ready smartphone and data plan. If this sounds far fetched, think of the amount of required government paperwork that’s now only available online and sometimes must be filled in and filed from a computer.

But the real reason behind Fedora 21’s success? It’s an odd-numbered release. Historically, the odd-numbered releases have always been better than the even-numbered ones. Don’t ask me why. There’s no documentation or detailed research to prove why it happens this way. It’s just a physical law of the universe.

Yesterday, the Fedora Project released Fedora 21, and with it the tech media got on its proverbial horse and started reports and reviews of the latest release. While it’s a good release and we won’t be reviewing it here — I already gave it a shakedown during the alpha and found it to be fantastic and completely worth the wait — there’s one thing that’s missing from Fedora 21 that I find rather disheartening.

Namely, Fedora 21 is missing a release name.

Over at OpenStack, a discussion initiated by Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph goes into the possibility of a logo for Zuul, OpenStack’s pipeline-oriented project gating and automation system. Because she gets asked during presentations, “What is the logo for Zuul?” Elizabeth has picked up the baton and gone to bat, to woefully mix sports metaphors, on behalf of the issue.

FOSS may no longer be under the big guns, but free tech certainly is. In other words, the battle lines have shifted. The fight is no longer over open source software licensing, which has been embraced — some say usurped — by big business. There are new battles now, in which the stakes are just as high, maybe even higher, than they ever were.

As for Devuan, I’m sorry that I don’t have a lot of faith in their endeavor being successful. Successful projects usually aren’t the ones that are driven by anger or attempts to unreasonably hold onto the past. At the risk of sounding Californian, there are not a lot of good vibes or warm fuzzies that would normally draw people to such a project, so it will be interesting to see how many developers get behind this effort.

Linux is a global community…a quarrelsome community, I will give you that, but a community nonetheless. We are richer by many degrees for our links to each other within this community. We are friends within the Linux community. A community where real friendships do in fact begin.

While we in the States were dealing with family and turkey, the EU was busy working on preparing Google’s head for the platter. The European Parliament yesterday passed by a wide margin a non-binding resolution urging anti-trust regulators to break up the company. For those keeping score, the final vote was 384 yeas and 174 nays.

While it’s not really on anyone’s radar, and barely on mine, several communities are either openly discussing curtailing — some are already outright walking away from — a 32-bit version of their distro, opting instead to go 64-bit only. Understandably, more of today’s focus is on some of the more pressing issues of the FOSS day, like how systemd will end life as we know it while plunging the entire universe into its black hole of doom.

Get those proposals in: The Call for Papers for the 13th annual Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 13x, for those of you keeping score at home — ends in less than three weeks from today.