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I’m a sucker for every kind of “Top Five” (or Top 10 or Top 20) list there is. I love reading them and I enjoy writing them. There’s just one thing I’ve learned, never take them seriously. They’re just a way to have fun. They never speak anything like the whole truth, unless they’re listing something based on quantity, like the five best selling brands of soda. Even then, pay attention to who’s counting the quantity. Pepsi would probably come up with a different list than Coke.

Then there’s that other great first, that first look at some of the great free and open source software that ships with Linux distributions, opening a world that had up until then been nonexistent. Remember the rush, when your first installation was complete and you watched your computer boot into the strange new world of whatever desktop environment was the default on your new chosen distro? How exciting it was, searching through the menu, clicking on this, clicking on that, having a first look at GIMP, AbiWord, Evolution, KMail, Konqueror, Galeon and more. Wow! How weird it was to discover browsers not branded as Internet Explorer or Netscape, full featured photo editing without the Adobe imprint, and office suites that had nothing to do with Microsoft or WordPerfect.

Speaking of Groklaw, it was déjà vu all over again this week, with PJ once again reporting on the case of SCO v. IBM. Yup, they’re back in court. We’re reminded of the early days of Saturday Night Live when week after week Chevy Chase on “Weekend Update” would reassure the audience that Spain’s late dictator Francisco Franco remained dead.

I first placed music online in 1996, a WAV file recorded through a microphone to promote the sale of an album I had under license on my indie BeanBag label featuring Georgie Fame and Van Morrison. I cheered for other music industry executives like Larry Rosen of GRP Records when he launched Music Boulevard online around 1997. I licensed songs by Jesse Colin Young (founder of The Youngbloods) to music publishing expert Bob Kohn’s eMusic.com for a cash advance against future royalties that had us partying like it was 1999.

Last week’s FOSS Force poll was only up for a few hours before we had to take it down. It dealt with the issue of community distros. If you’re interested, you’re welcome to take a gander at the article that accompanied the poll. Mainly, it sought to determine what you considered to be a community GNU/Linux distro. There had been quite a bit of discussion on the subject here on our site, so we decided to put it to you in a down and dirty poll, just to see if we could come to any kind of consensus.

It appears as if the folks in Redmond are being given the opportunity to learn some valuable lessons these days. For one thing, they’re learning that while owning 90 plus percent of the PC market is well and good, indeed it’s made them the big bad wolf that we all know and loathe, it also means the PC is theirs to lose.

I did a cursory search and was amazed at how easy it was to come up with search engines that don’t keep records or track their users. One of them, DuckDuckGo, I’d forgotten but had played around with it some time back and knew it had a good reputation among people I know in the San Francisco bay area.

Even within the tech industry, there are opposing views as to whether corporate surveillance is a good thing. The American story of the web begins with “Father Of The Internet” Vint Cerf when he was at the U.S. Government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He’s now Vice President and Internet Evangelist for Google and told Wired in an April 2012 interview, “We knew what we were unleashing on the world.”

According to our “Newbie” Distro Poll, someone considering moving from Windows or Mac to Linux should consider taking Linux Mint for a spin. The poll asked the question, “What Linux distro would you be most likely to recommend to a new Linux user?” Evidently this was a subject that interested many of you, because a whopping 1,339 votes were cast in this poll, making it the most number of votes one of our polls has ever received.

The Register’s story was almost believable and anyone who was taken-in by this telling could certainly be forgiven. The writer played straight into the paranoid fears of many in the GNU/Linux crowd and did a good job of seamlessly integrating his tale of Microsoft misdeeds into the facts as they are known. It was easy to read this and think you were having a genuine “aha” moment. All of us, or many of us anyway, had already been scratching our heads over GNOME. Some of us were surprised when they made big changes to the UI at all, especially following the grief KDE went through several years back with the advent of KDE 4.

About two years ago I posted an article recommending some WordPress plugins. Well, times change and two years is a long time in the world of tech, so I thought it might be good for us to take another look. Some of the plugins I recommended then I’m still recommending now. I’ve replaced a few, for one reason or another, with different plugins that serve the same purpose. There are others that fill new shoes that didn’t need filling back then.

"The reason I so vehemently dislike statements about Fedora being ‘just a testing ground for RHEL’ and ‘not a real community distro’ is that we’ve got an amazing team of volunteers who belong to the community outreach program, and when they hear that, it is incredibly demoralizing.

According to our Software Preference Poll, FOSS Force visitors will use commercially developed software, especially if it’s the best software for the job, but would prefer to use community developed, noncommercial software. Absolutely none of our visitors said they’d prefer commercial software.

It’s time for me to write a very few words about Aaron Swartz. When he died back in January, I didn’t write anything. I didn’t know him, but other writers did and they were busy grieving and sharing memories of him online and in print. I didn’t know much about him then. I know much more now.

Some features on the WordPress Jetpack plugin are duplicated by other plugins. However, if I need a function that’s available in Jetpack, I’ll try running that version first before installing another plugin to do the job. Why? I’ve already got Jetpack installed, so why install another plugin if it’s not necessary? If I’m not happy with the way the Jetpack version works–and sometimes I’m not–I can always go plugin hunting to see if I can find another solution.

I had to laugh at the notion that a Linux distribution operated by a multi-national for-profit company that’s pretty much wholly owned by a charismatic billionaire could ever be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, a community thing.

Most shared hosting packages and even most shared hosting reseller accounts don’t offer a choice of operating systems. When they do, the choice is often only between Linux and Windows, with Linux being whatever distro they have on their servers, which is subject to change without notice at upgrade time. However, when you step up into the VPS or dedicated server world, you’ll find yourself being offered a choice like the one we’re offering in our poll.

The choices offered on the poll were Symbian, Ubuntu, Android, Windows, Firefox OS, iOS, MeeGo, Mer, Blackberry 10 and Other. Voters were allowed to choose only one operating system and those choosing Other were provided a text box to enter their choice. Voters were blocked from taking the poll multiple times by IP address. A total of 238 people took this poll.

It’s not very comforting to realize that something I figured-out, as ignorant as I am, back in the 1990s is only now being understood by those who are being paid big bucks to protect us. It’s also not very comforting to know that the controls for nuclear power plants and the like are accessible by the same Internet that can’t keep credit card numbers safe despite draconian requirements by Visa and Master Card.

The other side of the coin, the bad players in the free software world, might be best represented by Oracle, who inherited a slew of important open source projects with their takeover of Sun Microsystems a few years back. As we’ve observed before, part of the problem with Oracle is that sharing and software freedom isn’t in the company’s genetic structure. Like many proprietary vendors, they believe in nurturing their clients by using the mushroom philosophy–that is by keeping them in the dark and feeding them plenty of malarkey.