Play ball

Warning: Very little of this blog item deals with free/open source software. In fact, with the exception of some historical references or discussions in the periphery, there’s little here on FOSS. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it; on the contrary, you might welcome the break from my tilting at windmills and read something slightly more important.

This blog deals more with the human condition, or specifically Ken Starks’ human condition, and baseball, as well as why sometimes you need to step outside the proverbial batter’s box to get some perspective.

As many of you already know — and for those of you keeping score at home — back in the spring Ken and I planned to go to the Astros-Giants series in Houston at the end of August. Let me back up: Ken and I have been planning to go to a ballgame since 2008, since we teamed up to organize the Lindependence Project, and never got around to it until now. Last week, he and I went to Minute Maid Park to watch the three-game series and, as one might expect, the Giants swept.

That’s all the gloating I’m going to do. Honest.

As many of you also already know, Ken’s about to go under the knife for larynx cancer surgery, which many of you heard about through FOSS channels; and I would be remiss if I didn’t thank you for pitching in like most of you did. As far as the trip was concerned, we were touch-and-go on whether Ken was able to make the trip due to the fact that he may have had a quick reservation for a table for one at the hospital where his surgery will take place. But finally he was cleared for travel, and we ended up watching the series at Houston.

Let me tell you something about Ken that he relayed to me in conversation between innings, and I don’t think he’d mind if I mention it. I thought the topic was somewhat obvious to me, yet I think Ken may feel it bears repeating.

It is this: Some may be under the impression that he’s down for the count; that he’s lying in bed waiting for death. Clearly he’s not.

I got the impression that he finds it irksome that some may think he is somehow disabled or on the fast track to becoming an invalid. To say Ken has a lot on his plate at the moment is an understatement: In juggling the news of his possible mortality with negotiating the maze of the American health care system, all while continuing his day-to-day life, I think Ken wants folks to understand that he’s still standing.

Whether it’s just his Texan nature or just the fact he’s an incredibly tough guy (and I’d want him on my side in any fight), Ken’s continuing to do what he’s always been doing while he waits for the next step on his fight against cancer. Of course, that would include getting underprivileged kids computers with Linux on them, and promoting FOSS with the same passion and zeal, just as he has been doing all along. In short, he’s just getting things done; not for the accolades or for the fanfare, but because a.) it’s what he does, and b.) it’s the right thing to do.

No, he hasn’t got the strength in his hands that he used to, and there’s a self-consciousness about “the PVC pipe sticking out of my throat” that a bandana conceals. He speaks in a hushed tone now, or what he refers to as his “Godfather voice;” a voice that may even be more quiet in post-surgery. But with each time that Ken gets floored by chemo or radiation treatment — let alone by surgery — it seems he gets up off the proverbial mat, dusts himself off and is asks, “Is that all you got?”

Today, Ken blogged about the Linus Torvalds-Miguel de Icaza dustup when I’m sure he’s had some other, more weighty, things to think about. During my visit to Houston, we talked a lot about how many kids were being helped in Taylor, north of Austin, by Reglue (formerly the HeliOS Project) and how this is going to continue as he recovers. In other words, it was pretty much business as usual with a couple of hurdles in the near future to overcome.

Some of you already know this story: Ken and I would probably have never met, let alone be on speaking terms, if it wasn’t for FOSS. I wrote about it here before he and I actually met in Felton for Lindependence in 2008. Videographer Christian Einfeldt of San Francisco filmed much of Lindependence that year and did an interview with Ken and me that you can find on archive.org if you do a search for Lindependence, so you can see the Mutt and Jeff, the Laurel and Hardy, or the Abbott and Costello first-hand in unedited form.

I’m proud and honored to know Ken and I’m proud and honored to consider him a close friend and a teammate in the wide world of FOSS. And if he gets on base, you can bet I’m going to drive him in for a run, just as I know he’d do the same for me. It’s what players on the same team do.

Play ball.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Racing to insignificance

Bruce Byfield wrote a long and detailed piece recently about his take on the state of GNOME, and while long it does go into great detail what direction GNOME is taking — not an entirely healthy one, in his opinion — and what they might want to look at to right what Bruce thinks is a listing, if not a sinking, ship.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: When Bruce and I disagree, fur usually flies and a knock-down-drag-out ensues, usually for the entire 15 rounds before it’s normally called a draw. But this is not one of those times, because on the whole Bruce’s assessment seems to be pretty much right on the mark.

Until a couple of days ago, I would have thought that folks at GNOME — especially those in the marketing group — would have read this piece and said, “Hmmm, let’s take a look at this to see what’s right and what’s wrong about it.”

But apparently that’s not the case. Instead, we have borderline hysteria in the marketing group’s exchanges on the mailing list about how to address “trolls” like Bruce Byfield writing for online publications like Datamation which, according to contributors on the list, exist — like Phoronix — only for the sole purpose of bringing down GNOME.

Until yesterday I was a member of that mailing list — it was a holdover to the days when, as a Fedora Ambassador Mentor and keeper of the Fedora event box, I also kept the GNOME event box for an extended period of time and sent it along with the Fedora box to various events. When I was unable to keep using GNOME with the introduction of GNOME 3, I stopped using GNOME but never left the mailing list for a variety of reasons.

For having the unmitigated gall of offering some observations about Bruce’s article on the marketing mailing list, along with some of my own opinions about how GNOME is fostering a separate-but-(un)equal culture with its “Fallback Mode” — and note to GNOME marketing: Seriously, “Fallback Mode?” This is the best name you could come up with? — apparently I’ve been ushered out the door.

I’m OK with that, actually, because the last thing I need is more to read, especially when it’s whiny hand-wringing by some on a mailing list who wouldn’t know objective and rational thinking if it were dropped on them, let alone understanding historical comparisons when presented to them.

But I’ll bring up what I raised in that discussion, and it’s nothing you haven’t read on this blog before. It is this:

POINT: GNOME needs to have a better strategy in addressing people in the tech press who criticize it than calling them trolls, let alone being under the childishly misguided impression that on-line publications are out to get them. To be fair, I think some of the more thoughtful members of the GNOME marketing group understand this, though apparently some don’t. I would like to think some of the smarter, more rational people here will prevail in forming some sort of

POINT: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Having GNOME 3 and a “Fallback Mode” for those whose hardware cannot run GNOME 3 invites and forms a caste system, digitally speaking — providing benefits to a higher class of computer user and not offering the same to others. It is the digital equivalent of making some users sit in the back of the bus. Rational people understand this comparison: GNOME did not outwardly intend to make a desktop environment with the sole purpose of digital inequality, but arguably that’s how it ended up. It is a case of the best intentions backfiring; while it’s nice that GNOME is offering users of older hardware at least something, it’s still far too little in comparison to what others have. Some people find this comparison to a caste system or to “separate but equal” offensive, and if it offends your sensibilities, my apologies. However, the truth is still the truth.

I offered what I thought were some helpful observations to the GNOME marketing list, and I was shown the door. Again, I’m OK with that because as much as I’d like to see GNOME succeed, I can just as easily watch from trackside as they race toward the checkered flag of insignificance. Bear in mind that while once GNOME was all there was for the Linux desktop, today there are a healthy variety of desktop alternatives — many of which have surpassed GNOME in usability across a wide range of hardware.

This my-way-or-highway mentality encountered on this mailing list is the kind of behavior I expect from others, like the Ubuntu Apocalypse for example; where any remote deviation from the Ubuntu/Canonical party line is met with a kick to the curb by zombies marching, hands in front of them, toward a future dictated to them by corporate masters.

I expect better from GNOME, but that may be asking too much. Rather than making any further comparisons, let me just leave you with the final paragraph of Bruce’s article, which I hope thoughtful GNOME advocates will keep from being prophetic:

“Probably, at some point, something called GNOME 4 will be released. But if the early indications are accurate, by the time it appears, nobody will be left to care.”

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Playing catch-up

Until the apology earlier about not keeping up with Todd Robinson and his somewhat busy August, I realized there were a few other things that caught the old radar here in the hotter-than-average afternoon in the San Lorenzo Valley among the redwoods. So without further adeiu, here we are with a couple of items that may or may not require their own item:

GNOMEbuntu? Well, that’s what some are calling it. On a GNOME mailing list, discussions are being held and options are being bandied about regarding a GNOME-based version of Ubuntu, which I assume would be a version like Xubuntu (which uses Xfce) or Kubuntu (which uses KDE), and the gist of the discussion is what to call it. This comes from discussions at UDS in Oakland back in May, and apparently for several reasons Gubuntu won’t fly (too phonetically close to Goobuntu, which is Google’s version of Ubuntu). While some over in the GNOME camp are perusing the respin books at Ubuntu, another possibility is GNObuntu, or insert your favorite here.

Speaking of GNOME . . .

GNOME OS? Brian Proffitt writes an insightful article about where GNOME is heading — a direction that arguably is taking it on a different tack. Brian quotes GNOME’s Allan Day saying that it’s not going to be a separate distro. But it’s something like that, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. The article brings GNOME’s zeitgeist to the fore, for those who are wondering what’s going on there; that is, when they’re not discussing their Ubuntu spin.

And speaking of GNOME again . . .

Ubuntu’s top desktop environment is . . .: Unity? Nope. KDE? No. Xfce? Unfortunately, no. It’s GNOME Classic — whatever that is (and I’m assuming that it’s GNOME 2.x) — which is used by a total of nearly 60 percent of Ubuntu users, according to an article on an Ubuntu Apocalypse fansite called Ubuntu Vibes. In what is either an enormous failed attempt at humor or complete incompetence in reading their own chart (or, as a third possibility, getting the data wrong in the chart and having their own self-fulfilling prophesy try unsuccessfully to match what they posted), they put up a chart of desktop environment use based on an opt-in program called Popcon. “In all total,” the article states, “2,381,625 machines are submitting installed packages details to Popcon,” and they came up with a chart that shows that most people are using GNOME Classic to the tune of close to six out of ten, although less than 30 percent have installed it in the past 30 days (because, maybe, they’re not installing Gutsy Gibbon?).

My guess is that whomever made this chart read the Popcon data wrong and made the chart accordingly with the faulty data. One might shrug, but to those who have seen this before, it appears that this Canonical/Ubuntu-based site can’t get its facts straight. It will be interesting to see whether someone with some level of responsibility at Canonical/Ubuntu — whether in corporate or on a community level — takes this person aside and say, “Um, this is more than likely wrong, so can you fix this?” But I’m not holding my breath.

Yeah, I said that. So? Rikki Endsley wrote a pretty good piece that, she says, was scooped by someone else, so she posted it on her own blog here. She does a great job, of course, and in the I say something that is not quite . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? . . . evangelical. That’s it: It’s not evangelical. But nonetheless it’s true. Here’s the entire paragraph lifted from the blog item:

“Let me say that you only get one chance to make a first impression,” says Larry Cafiero, a software developer and Fedora fan. “I’d stay away from distros either based on Unity or GNOME 3 because they’re going to be foreign to what the Windows user is used to. That pretty much leaves Linux Mint with their GNOME 2.x-like desktops.” Still, Cafiero thinks that anyone who isn’t willing to put in the small amount of effort required to learn a new system might as well stick with Windows.

Fedora fan? Yes. Though I don’t use Fedora as my primary distro — that honor now goes to CrunchBang Linux, a Debian derivative — I still appreciate highly Fedora’s contributions to FOSS and, having a history with that distro, I like most of the people who are involved in that particular community. I said this and mean it: Anyone who doesn’t want to put the effort into learning Linux or FOSS might as well stick with Windows. It’s the old “leading a horse to water” paradigm — we can tell people how great Linux and FOSS are, but they have to want to try it and use it. The learning curve is now so easily negotiable that anyone with with more than two IQ points to rub together can do it, so frankly I don’t have time for the ones who don’t want, or are too lazy, to use it. For those who have been slamming me because of this quote, that’s what I meant and I stand by it.

“There’s a new sheriff in town . . . :” Speaking of CrunchBang, I’ve been involved in that growing and friendly community for about a year now. Since I’m such a forum denizen over that time, they’ve given me a badge and I’m now one of the forum moderators. I’m honored and humbled at being asked, and I know with great power comes great responsibility (I seem to remember that popping up on Debian installs). I’m working my hardest to be Captain America and not Barney Fife (though out of the proverbial starting gate, I seem to be the latter).

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Keeping up with the Robinsons

. . . Or not keeping up with the Robinsons, as the case may be.

I know what Karlie Robinson is up to, thanks to Facebook. But poor Karlie: Todd has his nose pressed to the monitor all month, walking the walk of the talk he talked last month, when he said he was putting out a distro a day for the month of August. Like clockwork, Todd is putting out a distro each day and has done so, so far this month.

Allow me a white-flag, hands-in-the-air moment: I surrender! I give up. I can’t keep up with Todd’s herculean project. Rather than sample each distro every day as I had planned, I am going to go about this as if the 31 Days 31 Distros project is a buffet, taking the ones I think I would like and going back to my table to enjoy them.

[Confession: I've only tried 00 SING and 01 UNITE so far. So shoot me.]

Nevertheless, here’s the menu so far, taken from Todd’s page on the daily releases (also, you can download the ISOs from links on Todd’s page):

00 – SING (SING is Not Gnome): This pre-event release was built to be used to create the 31 Flavors in August 2012. Although it resembles Gnome 2 in layout, it’s designed to give speedy access to the functions that will be used most when creating custom operating systems.

01 – Unite! SOHO: Release #1 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Unite! SOHO. Like Unite, it’s sort of Windows 7ish on the desktop. This desktop will run on as little as 256MB of memory, however 512 or more is recomended.

02 – Debina Live VTWM: Release #2 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Debian Live VTWM. There was a time when the VTWM was as exciting as a new smart phone operating system is today, perhaps even more so. It’s huge feature was a desktop that could be configured to be several times the size of the of the screen (in this install 6 x screen size).

03 – Debian Full House: Release #3 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Debian Full House, a live Debian release with all four major desktops installed (Gnome-2, KDE-4, LXDE, and Xfce), along with their standard desktop apps.

04 – KDE3 Reborn: Release #4 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is KDE3 Reborn. This is a remake of the original Karlie custom release using the same visually stunning red graphics as the original. KDE3 Reborn has been re-made with the newer TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment) version.

05 – Eazel Imagined: Release #5 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Eazel Imagined. Eazel was working on a desktop surrounding the Nautilus File Manager which they created. Their business plan involved selling online storage services to be accessed by Nautilus. Yes they were ahead of the cloud computing times, but it failed when venture capital ran out. This release is what I imagine a modern file-centric clean Eazel desktop to be like.

06 – Child-Proof: Release #6 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Child-Proof. This release is for children ranging from 3 to 10 years old. It features a few learning game suits, as well as child safe browsing.

07 – Xfterstep: Release #7 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Xfterstep. This release was designed as a gui-configurable Afterstep alternative. The very first window manager I used on an open source desktop was Afterstep. It drew me into a world of alternatives and imagination that was severely lacking under Microsoft Windows and the MAC desktop. If you like the Afterstep window manager, you sould like Xfterstep.

08 – Lubuntu Google Kiosk: Release #8 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Lubuntu Google Kiosk. Per request, this is a release featuring a Google Kiosk login where the browser brings all the google services together while remaining somewhat bullet-proof. It’s ideal for public situations and can run entirely from a CD, and can be optionally installed. An administrator login is also included.

09 – Spaceman: Release #9 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Spaceman. This is a Lubuntu 12.04 release with all updates applied, and SpaceFM installed as the default file manager. Anyone who appreciates a file manager that can be configured to do just about anything should love SpaceFM.

10 – Desktop Development Center: Release #10 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is the Desktop Development Center. The DDC is a full desktop operating system complete with an extensive list of office software, the Webmin Control Panel, and a fully functional web server complete with PHP5 and mysql integration. The is the release I would use if I were primarily doing web development work.

11 – Wheezy Live LXDE: Release #11 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Wheezy Live LXDE. This is a requested Live Debian Wheezy (-testing) release. Wheezy has become quite stable, and is scheduled to become the new -stable release in Feb. 2013.

12 – Enlightened Libre: Release #12 in the 31 Flavors of Fun is Enlightened Libre. This release is something truly special. A completely Libre release with the Enlightenment Desktop Environment. It’s built from Trisquel as a base, and using the Trisquel repository to make sure to keep it 100% Libre. Then Enlightenment was added and Libre graphics used to create a visually stunning release.

Keep up the great work, Todd. More on this as the month continues.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

Crazy, but in a good way

Todd Robinson is crazy. But he’s crazy in a good way.

According to the post on the WebPath Technologies page, Todd, “completely un-assisted, will to attempt to create, and release, a complete desktop operating system each and every day for the period of 31 days, to demonstrate the huge advantages of using open source (shared knowledge) solutions in real-world situations.”

So now we have the “31 Flavors of Fun” experiment.

Thirty-one days in August.

Thirty-one new distros.

Wow.

First things first: I have a history with the Robinsons. Todd and Karlie won’t remember this — obviously with the ton of orders they’ve gotten over the years — but I bought my first distros from On-Disk about six years ago (distros plural because I didn’t know what I wanted and, heck, their prices were pretty cheap — still are). Further, I have kept in touch with Karlie on Facebook while she systematically extricated herself from day-to-day FOSS participation while maintaining a life (imagine that!), and I’ve always found her business advice (and pointers to where to go for business help) to be very helpful.

As you see on the WebPath link above, Todd’s got the reins on this project, but he’s also going to need a little help. As for me, I would like to help where I can, and also I’m going to try out what he produces, writing about the 31 distros as often as possible here on this blog — save for a caveat later in the month of August where I’m going to Houston to take in the Astros-Giants series with Ken Starks (but you can be certain that between innings banter will probably be about this, among a lot of other FOSS topics).

Regular readers of this blog know that I clearly advocate the position that more distros are a better option, and let the invisible hand of the market decide which ones stay and which ones don’t. Chances are that most of the 31 distros Todd comes up with won’t be pressed into common use on a regular basis. It’s like the laboratory-induced elements at the tail end of the periodic table that exist for an instant, and are then gone, only to exist in scientific papers.

But regardless of whether any of the 31 distros become a permanent fixture in the FOSS universe, this is an outstanding project, Todd.

Watch this space, all.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

The vision thing

The Linux Foundation posted this on Facebook this morning: “TODAY’S NEWS: Torvalds, Shuttleworth and other Linux/OSS visionaries to be in Barcelona Nov 5-7. Will you be there?” Of course, it links to the press release here.

I would grant you that Linus Torvalds is a visionary — perhaps, arguably, an accidental visionary in the sense that he never expected the kernel he developed would grow into what it has become. But fortunately for everyone involved, Torvalds is a visionary who has kept a significant degree of humility amid the vast contribution to society he has made.

Looking at the lineup in the press release, I would have put Marten Mickos on the release as a “Linux/OSS visionary” instead. Mickos is the MySQL guy, despite the fact that it has gone through a couple of, um, changes since he sold it to Sun in 2008, and is now in the evil clutches of Oracle. Regardless of what it has become now, MySQL is an important piece of FOSS history, and Mickos deserves the visionary label, along with a degree of gratitude for fostering such an important project.

But Shuttleworth? I’m not so sure how he ranks as a visionary. Doing great work in promoting Linux/FOSS in financially backing Ubuntu is commendable and worthy of praise, but this is hardly “visionary.” Add to this going off on his own to develop things that are generally not used by the wider FOSS community — Unity and HUD come immediately to mind — and arguably he has done more to stifle progress in the wider FOSS world rather than contribute to its advance. How this is visionary remains to be seen.

Further, I think I can put Shuttleworth’s contributions to the wider FOSS paradigm better in perspective with a little help from The Oatmeal here. If Linus Torvalds is Nikola Tesla, then Mark Shuttleworth is Thomas Edison.

No, Linux Foundation, I won’t be going to Barcelona for the European version of LinuxCon. But thanks for asking.

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)

O’Reilly, you missed two

I don’t want to take anything away from the winners of the O’Reilly Open Source Awards for 2012, given out at the big corporate FOSS Kumbaya in Portland known as OSCON this past week. All are very deserving of O’Reilly’s accolades — especially Elizabeth Krumbach, whose work I see on an almost regular basis — and I won’t go into listing the winners or their accomplishments here because O’Reilly has seen to that already.

But there are two — at least two — that were nominated and that O’Reilly missed. The misfortune that these two have been omitted arguably borders on tragic, too, because each of the following folks mentioned below have made significant contributions to FOSS in ways that equal, if not eclipse, those made by some of the this year’s recipients.

Here are two you missed, O’Reilly. Maybe next year you can rectify this.

The first O’Reilly oversight is Bill Kendrick. If you have children, you have probably happened upon Bill’s software opus Tux Paint somewhere along the line. If you don’t, then you may have seen it anyway. In its 10th year, Tux Paint is an award-winning art program for K-6 kids that not only teaches art, but also computer literacy. A long list of schools use it. It’s been open source ever since its inception, and is made for a variety of platforms — the usual suspects of Linux, Mac and Windows. Tux Paint alone should garner Bill the award, with an oak-leaf cluster, but he is even more deserving of the award for developing other educational software like TuxTyping — helping kids learn to type — not to mention Tux, of Math Command — which “lets kids hone their arithmetic skills while they defend penguins from incoming comets,” according to the website. Or, in other words, think of the ’80s arcade game Missile Command, only with math problems instead of incoming nuclear missiles.

[Blogger's note: Bill Kendrick straightens out the personnel lineup for the aforementioned projects here, and a full list of authors and contributors can be found here and here.]

The second oversight is Ken Starks. As those of you who regularly read this blog know, Ken and I go back a ways, back to the days when Ken successfully — miraculously — raised enough money to get Tux on the nose of an Indy car at the Indianapolis 500 back in 2007. The car crashed early in the race — irony of ironies for Linux — and finished last. As long as I’ve known him, Ken has been the most tireless advocate for Linux and FOSS for years. With the HeliOS Project — now REGLUE, an acronym for Recycled Electronics and Gnu/Linux Used for Education — Ken and his merry band of fossketeers get refurbished Linux-based computers into the hands of underprivileged kids in the Austin, Texas, area. Ken was also one of the co-founders of the Lindependence Project, which brought Linux to a small town back in 2008. Currently, Ken’s battle with larynx cancer is limiting his activity, but he is still doing what he can with the hand he’s dealt.

So, how about it, Tim?

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)