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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.

There’s just one teeny-tiny little problem. For the last several years, Yahoo has been obtaining its search results from Bing, owned by Microsoft, with no indication this will change. I’m not exactly sure how the Microsoft/Yahoo deal works, but you can be sure that some money goes to Redmond each and every time a search is done via the web portal, something that many FOSS supporters might find unacceptable.

Linux Outlaws is not for shrinking violets — it is portrayed on its site as “very much like listening to two friends sitting in a pub, having fun and talking about things they find interesting.” However, I think that sells the show short — it is far more entertaining than that (and when they say, “Not recommended for the faint of heart or the ignorant,” they mean it). Always straightforward and honest, always informative and humorous, Linux Outlaws never met an issue they couldn’t tackle with their unique brand of wisdom, insight and jocularity.

In the long term, Reglue will continue to operate. I will remain the Executive Director and our mission will not change. However, it may dwell in hiatus for a couple of weeks after my surgery. Pete Salas and James, two extremely important volunteers for Reglue will keep the lights on and will continue to repair and refurbish incoming computers and maintain the building. Unfortunately, some other things will not happen in my absence.

We conduct classes for people who want to learn how to effectively use a computer. We have almost no young people attending these classes. The people who dominate the seats in my classroom are between 40 and 60 years old. A large percentage of them are scared to death of a computer. To many of them, a blinking cursor taunts them with just how incapable they are of living in the Age of Tech.

“Consumers like free, they’re big fans of that,” he went-on, “but I’m not sure that some of the other properties of open source are as big a deal to them as to a technical person who sees all these different facets that are interesting, whether it’s the forking side being interesting, that they can read the code or whatever. From the consumer point of view, you don’t get that usually.”

One subtext here, of course, regarding the misplaced euphoria by some begs the question, “Is Microsoft trustworthy?” The answer is clearly, “No. Absolutely not.” Despite the fact that Redmond has been playing nice with FOSS lately, we should not trust Microsoft any farther than former CEO and Stasi agent look-alike Steve Ballmer can throw a chair.

“It felt very clear to us that it needed to be open source, what we were doing,” Merriman continued. “We also like open source, so that was a factor too, almost a non business reason. A business reason, though, is part of the idea of strategy. We really wanted to be ubiquitous; we wanted to be everywhere. If people are using this database they need to know it and they need to understand it. There needs to be a community. There needs to be a critical mass of knowledgeable people, workers, who can code to it, who can administer it, who can operate it. It’ll be much easier to do that if it’s open source because it’ll be much wider used.”

So Tuesday morning, the Internet was abuzz. Groupon has a tablet based point of sale “operating system for merchants to run their entire operation” called Gnome, which is accompanied by 28 — count ‘em 28 — trademark applications. With trademark not being the same as copyright, trademarks are constantly defended by owners because, well, that’s they way the system works (or doesn’t, depending on your perspective), and GNOME was in a position of having to spend a significant amount in defending its trademark, used for the last 17 years and officially trademarked in 2006.

Our custom distro, based on Linux Mint 17 KDE LTS, is a playground completely filled with learning opportunities. Many of the applications were taken from standard Linux educational apps available from the regular repositories. The 3.3 gig ISO file produces a live cd/install disk which not only provides hours of entertainment, it includes educational software that meets most any academic need the child will encounter. Many of our kids, however, are at the age where they like to play simple games. We’ve provided an abundant environment for that.

“We had a R&D group there that we started,” he said. “Started by my boss there, Kevin O’Conner. That group and his kind of vision for how you innovate on things is really what got me interested in trying to be creative, trying to come up with ideas either for products or businesses, whether it’s inside an existing big company or starting something new that is a startup. So, that was really the catalyst.”

In a full-page ad in “The New York Times” on Nov. 9, 2004, the Mozilla project announced the release of Firefox 1.0, the first full version of the browser which has become the third most popular way to navigate the Internet, behind Google Chrome and Internet Exploder, er, Explorer. What makes Firefox unique is that it’s the only one of the three leading browsers that’s completely open source. Ten years later, more than 450 million people use Firefox, of which about 40 percent of the code is written by volunteers. In addition, its reach can be measured by the fact that more than half of the users employ non-English versions. The browser is available in 75 languages.

The day is rapidly approaching when every city in the U.S. will be like London is now, with survelliance cameras connected to a grid covering every cubic inch of the city, not disimilar to what we see weekly on “Person of Interest”. Already, in London, computers connected to these cameras can detect “suspicious behavior”. Add facial recognition technology to that and it really will be like “Person of Interest”, especially in a nation that’s convinced that terrorists are hiding around every corner. The technology is sure to be abused, as law enforcement has never found a technology they didn’t overuse.