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The good news about all this is that it demonstrates how quickly the Linux community can get the word out and then rally to engineer a solution when a security problem is discovered. The bad news is that not all Linux users listen. Too many users believe that the security features that are baked into Linux offer complete protection, no matter what. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It never was, nor can it ever be.

I like KDE. I use KDE, now that I have hardware with enough horsepower (namely a Toshiba laptop with 4GB of RAM) to operate it in a relatively easy manner. In addition, KDE is an outstanding desktop environment, far too complicated for what I normally do, but that’s OK. It’s not my favorite desktop environment –- that distinction continues to go to Xfce –- but still, I have nothing but love for KDE.

Oracle appears to have had little luck finding takers for its enterprise distro since first releasing it in 2006. The release came about as an apparent move to punish Red Hat for its acquisition of open-source middleware provider JBoss, which Oracle saw as a move into its territory by a company it had considered as something of a partner. In other words, Oracle Linux, essentially a slightly modified clone of RHEL, began life as one side of a tit for tat - as Oracle's way of saying, "Two can play at that game, buster."

For the purposes of this article, we're just going to look at the Fedora 21 Workstation Alpha – both the default GNOME version and KDE desktop spin. If you want a breakdown of what’s available in the Cloud and Server versions, you can see Paul Frields' excellent article in Fedora Magazine.

“Yeah, that’s easy. You just click on the icon you want to put down in the bottom panel, then reboot three times. It’s gotta be three times exactly and you have to do them one right after another real fast. If you wait too long between reboots it won’t work. On the third reboot, it should be there.”

Obviously she doesn’t understand FOSS or those of us who advocate its use. She’d probably seen the site, noticed a lot of writing about computers and software and jumped to the conclusion that we’d be great for her software hawking client. I wouldn’t doubt that she’d Googled the term “FOSS,” but got no further than the word “software” when reading the definition.

Wearing your fireproof underwear? KDE's Aaron Seigo - never one to shy away from saying what he thinks - lit into community managers in a Google+ post on Monday, calling the community manager role in free/open source software projects “a fraud and a farce.”

You’ve no doubt already heard that Larry Ellison stepped down this afternoon as CEO of Oracle, though he’ll be sticking around for a while in his new position as executive chairman. In other words, he’s still the boss by way of being the boss’s boss – and by dint of the fact that he remains the company’s biggest shareholder with a 25% stake in the business.

“The patrons are quite happy using Linux to get their work done,” Shapiro said. “Very few of them have any clue they’re not using Windows. They surf the web using Firefox and Chrome and use LibreOffice to compose and edit their word processing documents. In the nine years I’ve worked at this library, only one or two people have ever told me, ‘Hey, this isn’t Windows.'”

“FOSS is not something most of the people know about,” he said. “I try to let my friends know about it, and they are always amazed by its benefits, especially when mentioning that it is ‘free as in beer.’ In general, when people hear about it and how it works they simply start loving it.”

With a sigh of resignation. I got myself into the support call queue and waited about ten minutes for my turn. Finally, “Bradley” informed me that he was pleased to help me and would I be good enough to tell him the nature of my problem. Just a tad grumpy from his enthusiasm, I ‘splained what was going on.

“Our production value continues to improve with each video and tutorial we create,” Jared wrote. “‘Superusers: The Legendary GNU/LINUX Show’ is leagues ahead of our first episode, ‘What is a Robot?’ The ten computer science videos proposed in our Indiegogo campaign will only be better. We will focus on improving our script writing, fine-tuning the balance of education and entertainment, incorporating more animations, and refining our audio/visual production techniques.” So far, they’ve created videos under the subject headings Computer Science, Linux, Web Development and Python.

Jeff Hoogland, the lead developer of Bodhi Linux, said in a blog post on Friday that “for a variety of reasons,” he is stepping down from the leadership of his “labor of love.”

Bodhi Linux, based on Ubuntu, is a lightweight distro leveraging the Enlightenment Desktop. A note on the Bodhi Linux web page says, “We regret to inform you Bodhi Linux is no longer being maintained,” and has a link to Hoogland’s blog page.

Wednesday’s Internet Slowdown action generated just over 300,000 calls and nearly 2.2 million emails to Congress by Thursday afternoon. Facebook shares of the spinning “loading” icon topped 1.1 million. In addition, 722,364 filed comments Wednesday at the Federal Communications Commission, bringing the total number of comments since March 1 to 7.7 million.

This year, we at “FOSS Force” are expanding our coverage of Linux, FOSS and OSS conferences. This got us wondering, in a self serving sort of way, how many of you regularly attend conferences?

I don’t know how much Google’s paying him, but it has to be more than plenty. As the Triangle Business Journal reported on August 29 when he walked out the door for the last time at Red Hat’s Raleigh headquarters, he left behind a boatload of cash.

To illustrate the point of the “fast lane/slow lane” approach proposed by the Federal Communications Commission, some of the biggest tech players today are leading a symbolic “Internet Slowdown” on their websites in what could be the largest virtual political protest since the 2012 blackouts in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

To test this theory, I went to HTML5test, a web site that scores how well browsers support HTML5 standards and specifications. Since The Register reports that two of the browsers affected are Opera 12.X and Safari 5.1.x, I compared those browsers’ HTML capabilities against the browser I had open at the time, Chrome 36.0.1985.125. In addition, I compared the results with Opera 22 and Safari 8.0, the latest versions of these browsers with stats available on the test site.

My personal opinion is that Firefox OS has a stronger privacy and security model than Android and iOS. I think Mozilla continues to be a champion of user privacy and security in everything it does and Firefox OS is no exception to that. In the Mozilla community, we are always stepping back and thinking about how we can better protect our users’ privacy and make sure the products we produce are as secure as possible.

On a Monday last October, Tennessee based publisher and writer Susan Linton decided her plate was too full and put the website Tux Machines up for sale. That Friday, October 28, she announced that she’d found a buyer in Roy Schestowitz, known in FOSS circles as the publisher of TechRights, a site which focuses on the political side of free tech.