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"Geen Stijl" is a highly controversial weblog in The Netherlands with a right-wing affiliation. Recently "Geen Stijl" published an entry on Linux, saying that "Linux is a kind of communist Open Source Operating System and Hugo Chaves, dictator of Venezuela, understands this". Later on it states that "Everyone who uses Linux supports terrorism, atomic weapons, high oil prices and the destruction of the earth".

Linux munchkins are a mixture of hardworking programmers, fanboys and trolls and they will do everything to debunk your article with varying degrees of politeness. Let's make it clear that I don't want to deny anybody the right to comment on an article, especially when he is right. But I doubt the usefulness of some comments.

If you happened to have read the update on my previous blog, I was contacted by KDE4 developer Aaron J. Seigo. In the following screencast he provided you can see how you can create desktop icons in KDE4 and judge for yourself whether you need to be a rocket scientist or not (as some people have claimed) to get your "Old Skool" desktop back.

There are some disturbing developments and they are happening in the key components of our systems: the desktop. KDE has spawned a new release. People are not only complaining about its instability, but also about its direction. Gnome is in trouble as well. There is the Mono controversy and some people feel it has become a dead project, because it has ceased to be "exciting and innovative".

You know what the difference is between a professional blogger and amateurs like us? They write about the community and we are the community. We can write about things they will never be able to cover properly: our own experiences. A view from the inside. Usually, it doesn't take too much effort to write a blog entry like this, because I love writing about what I do.

It is a natural process. Whenever groups are formed, fractions will emerge. And when those fractions unify for one reason or another, there are others who won't agree, stay behind and found new groups. In Open Source, nobody owns anybody. If you can't find what you need, if you don't agree with somebody, you make your own.

In his article "Why the Linux world should embrace the BSD's", Steve Lake proposed a closer cooperation between Linux and BSD. Although I have the utmost respect for BSD and what its developers have accomplished, I don't see what good it would do. I think his reasoning is flawed and the arguments he uses are - at least partially - invalid.

People want to get the job done. They don't have or take the time to learn a new tool, even if this investment makes them more productive in the long run. That behavior is one of the most important obstacles in the adoption of Open Source products. People are only willing to change if their applications don't change.

Classifying people is dangerous. The best and the worst have tried and failed. Classifying people has been one of the core evils in human history. It has been used as an excuse to murder, deport, mutilate, enslave, exile and torture people throughout time. It's what I've been calling "labeling" all the time.

Sometimes you stumble across an article that makes you wonder whether people are spreading FUD or whether they are really that ignorant. When you take it down, bit by bit, it becomes more and more obvious how ridiculous their statements are.

The fallout from my blog entry, “Conspiracy theorists and free software” continues. With all the people baying for my blood – some of whom, frankly, sound disingenuous in their demands for proof – the entry could easily take over my life, so in the last couple of days, I’ve withdrawn from active discussion of it. Frankly, the discussion is not that interesting to me.

I expect people of the free press to defend the right of free speech, not to call for its restriction or abolishment. If free speech disappears, what does free software mean? "Free" like in "free beer"? If you express an opinion there will always be someone who doesn't agree with you. That comes with the trade. That is professionalism. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

There is a lot of respect among the people that form the community. Disqualifying entire parts of the community by suggesting they are fruitcakes is unheard of. You may expect such a thing from a rogue FOSS fundamentalist, who cherishes each and every pure GPL line, but not from someone who made it his profession to give the community a voice.

It's about the name-calling these Microsoft fans do. I heard 'zealots', 'bigots', 'advocates', the whole lot. What may be not too clear to these Microsoft zealots is why I am a fanboy. It's not because I really dig this "free the software, free the world" ideology. That came much later. It's because I like this "gimme the source" idea.

It is the dilemma of every single FOSS developer. Sure, you want as many people as possible to use your software but you also want to acquaint them with the advantages of FOSS as well. But that puts us developers into an another painful dilemma. In order to provide these packages we have to have access to these platforms. Well, there is a solution but it has it's drawbacks too: cross compilation.

Playing Al Gores 'An inconvenient truth' adds to the problem it is trying to solve, because the hardware burns 25 to 30 percent more energy than it actually needs to. Why? DRM. Who pays for all that? You, the consumer. Microsoft - and all its DRM buddies - continue to claim up to this very day that DRM won't affect the consumer too much. However, behind closed doors the bird is singing quite another song.

You want it the easy way. You want to come home, plug in your computer and play some lame game right away. You don't want to spend an hour installing an OS and think before you click a 'continue' button. And because you've been doing that for the last ten years, you don't want to study some manual and learn a new program. You're so lame, that you are even prepared to fork out your hard earned cash from your wallet in order to stay lame.

The last decades a little war has been fought in the small town of Fuddenheim. A group of private citizens decided some 15 years ago to introduce free public transport in order to combat air pollution and congestion. Donations allowed them to buy a few buses which were operated by volunteers. The free transport slowly became a hit and the commercial operator, Omnifast, couldn't ignore it anymore.

A lot has happened since I debunked Alan MacCormack's research. First, a very clever attack from some "Rufus". I have contacted Rufus through email, but have not received any response yet. Maybe what "DB" wrote isn't too far from the truth: "Looks like Microsoft are reading this too. And if this was an exploratory survey they wouldn't be trumpeting it as the real thing." Of course, I tried to comment on the eWeek article, only to find that I was banned.

The recent survey of Associate Professor Alan D. MacCormack proves again statistics are lies with his study "Developers Do Not Want GPL 3 to Police Patents". Still, eWeek found it important enough to mention. Knowing a thing or two about statistics and how to manipulate them, I thought let's see how well the professor does.