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A round up of a number of events relevant to the Linux world for the past week.

Usually when we run a poll we’re not surprised by the answers. We’re certainly surprised by these results, however.

The desktop market is shrinking and they have no market share to speak of in mobile. Windows 8 hasn’t yet worked out well for them. So far, their biggest growth in smartphones and tablets seems to be in selling patent protection for Android devices from the likes of Samsung and HTC. This comes as they’re attempting to create the perception that their attitude toward open source has changed. The Microsoft FUD machine has been relatively quiet for some time and it’s been years since Mr. Ballmer publicly referred to open source as “communist” or claimed Linux to be “a cancer.”

Sometimes the manual is of little use, however. Such was the case in a recent Zen Cart migration I undertook. However, even in cases where the manual is being ignored, it should still be read first. Before going off book, it helps to understand the process behind what you are doing.

This has the look and smell of a business play all the way through, although that might not be immediately evident when reading what ad giant Google and open source Mozilla have to say. At first glance, their reasoning makes sense. Flash is just too darn ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; buried in everything. Including Flash in “click to play” would put too much of a burden on the user.

Microsoft unveiled their new and improved lineup of Surface tablets on Monday. You know, the tablets they’re hoping you’ll buy just before selling your old Nexus through their buyback program. Remember, this is an upgrade on a product line that Microsoft is hoping will turn damp and rainy Redmond into sunny Cupertino; the line that was behind a $900 million write-down just a few months back. Just in case you went to a public school in the U.S., 900 million is getting pretty darn close to a billion.

Back on June 30th we asked you, “Which of the following best describes your thoughts about the GPL?” The poll’s been active since, though for most of that time it’s been buried in the article What’s Your Take on the GPL? back in our archives. We took it down just this morning.

“Click to play” means that every time a webpage wants to take advantage of a plugin, the user will have to click to give it permission. Eventually, Google hopes to replace the old architecture with PPAPI or the Pepper Plugin API, which supposedly fixes a lot of NPAPI’s problems, if they can get traction outside of Google which doesn’t seem likely at this juncture. The folks at Mozilla have already said, “Mozilla is not interested in or working on Pepper at this time.” That sounds like a “no” to me.

The next morning there were two emails from site visitors informing me that FOSS Force was serving blank pages, one even sending a screen shot that showed our logo up top with nothing but white space below. However, our site looked fine on the company desktop and on my laptop so I figured they’d been attempting to access the site while the upgrade was in process and paid them no mind. I also noted that when I checked our AdSense account we’d only earned a couple of cents so far for the day, a fraction of a percent of what I would expect for the amount of traffic we were having, but I chalked that up to the inconsistency of online advertising.

When IT-oLogy opens the doors to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh on October 23, the focus will be on open source in the enterprise. Every hour during the two day conference there will be six lectures or workshops with at least four of them tailored especially for the business IT crowd. There’ll be tech-centric workshops on Python, databases, big data, Github, PHP and more.

Steve Ballmer may be a lame duck CEO, but Microsoft is still up to its usual tricks. We learned last Friday from the BBC that the Microsoft store website is offering a minimum of a $200 Microsoft store gift card for “gently used” iPads. Covered under the deal are iPads 2, 3, or 4.

First you might want to get the “minimize, maximize and close” windows-buttons which aren’t default in Debian 7–only the close window-button is there. From the desktop go to Activities menu to the top left and select Programs >System Tools and the “dconf-editor.” There are a lot of menus here to open so look carefully. Click Org >Gnome >Shell >Overrides. To your left you’ll find the “button layout” row. Type “:minimize,maximize,close” without quotation marks and then hit enter.

When it comes to Oracle as caretaker of FOSS projects, users are voting with their feet.

The company that already very quickly lost control of OpenOffice when most of the project’s developers bolted, formed the Document Foundation and forked the code to create LibreOffice, is now in danger of losing another open source jewel it inherited when it took over Sun. LibreOffice, as you know, is now the defacto office suite of choice among Linux users and is rapidly gaining traction in the Windows world as well. OpenOffice is pretty much only a memory.

Ten or twelve years ago somebody noticed that no one except IBM ever entered into a partnership with Microsoft and survived. Since then a few got lucky, but not many, and one of them wasn’t Nokia.

In early September when the page was first removed, supposedly for “spamming,” Mr Kruse seemed confident the issue would be resolved and the page would eventually again be operational. As of yesterday, however, the page has completely disappeared. Visitors who attempt to visit the site are greeted with the notice: “Sorry, this page isn’t available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”

Just because software is free doesn’t mean it’s free software.

This may confuse those who only know the Windows world, where the software animal known as “freeware” is readily available but truly free software is a bit more scarce. They may be excused for thinking, when we Linux users talk about “free software,” that they use free software too. After all, doesn’t a free antivirus program qualify as free software? Or what about that gee-whiz free password manager that’ll generate and store five or six passwords–more if the “pro” version is purchased?

Social Fixer, a plugin that works with most browsers, allows users to change how their Facebook newsfeed and other pages are displayed and how they operate. Although very popular, the extension has always been a thorn in Facebook’s side. It’s not surprising that Zuckerberg and his minions would now find even less to like about the plugin, since Wall Street has been prodding them to get serious about monetizing the massive amount of traffic that flows through the social network.

The main reason I don’t usually pay any attention to these discussions on choice, however, is that I’m already firmly rooted in the camp that supports choice. Of course there are a gazillian distros. That’s the Linux gene pool. It’s a strength that helps keep Linux healthy and what keeps the operating system from being a one-size-fits-all solution that actually fits no one (like, say, Windows).

Today we are announcing the winner from a field of ten great blogs, all of which have already won our elimination round. Before that there were 19 truly great blogs in our competition, nine of which had been chosen by visitors to our site, the other ten being hand-picked by us here at FOSS Force as a way of getting things going. They are all winners just by dint of being in the running.

This really is a horse race now, with ten great blogs at the starting gate to determine who gets the bragging rights to claim the FOSS Force Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog–2013 prize. Unfortunately, more than a few really great blogs that were in the running in the second round of our competition are, sadly, now gone. Oh well, that’s the way it goes. Sometimes really good horses fail to win, place or show.