Bruce Byfield

The Internet has a habit of making anything you say obsolete as soon as you say it. No sooner had I compared the future of the GNOME and KDE desktops than GNOME announced that a version 3.0 would be released after all. Because of the announcement and the subsequent discussion, I immediately had to reconsider […]

Pundits and business executives alike are predicting gloomy economic times for 2009. But when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and […]

“Put not your trust in princes.” ~ Psalms 146:3 So Microsoft and Novell are extending their two year old partnership. Is anyone really surprised? Similar, if smaller, deals are announced by other partners on an almost daily basis. The truth is, the deal is not nearly as insightful as the reactions to it in the […]

UPDATED: For several years, Ubuntu has been synonymous with user-friendliness. A Web search quickly unearths dozens of articles that suggest that Ubuntu is the distribution you should give non-technical people to introduce them to GNU/Linux. It even won a “Most User-Friendly Linux Distribution” award, which you might think confirms its status. However, like all conventional […]

The story of how Ian Murdock developed Debian while a student at Purdue and named the distribution for his girlfriend and himself has been told countless times. Many people, too, know that Debian is not only one of the largest distributions, but also the basis for countless other GNU/Linux distributions — including five of the […]

“You must be mad,” Gary Trudeau says in a self-interview in one of his Doonesbury collections, when he raises the subject of political predictions. “I only do post-mortems.” As a journalist, if a very different kind from Trudeau, I appreciate the sentiment. Looking back at 2007, who could have predicted that, after all the posturing […]