Via Digg and Slashdot comes the news from the Financial Express that Richard Stallman's recent visit to Kerala has "has inspired Kerala’s transition to free software." No more MS in the classroom, Linux only. Too bad we can't focus here in the US on the long term ideological and pedagogical benefits of such a move and advocate this switch along with instituting the OLPC here in K-6.

ArsTechnica has a summary of OSDL's Desktop Linux Client Survey which covers

• "Top reasons for deploying Linux on the desktop"
• "Applications critical to Linux deployment"
• "Browser applications and plug-ins that must be supported"
• "Top inhibitors of Linux desktop adoption"

Running Linux? Missing Windows viruses? You can always run Windows viruses under Wine. And here's an explanation of how they run. (I must admit. I find this slightly amusing :)

This interview with Microsoft Corp.'s chief Linux strategist surprised me because it's not full of FUD, but rather an insightful look at Microsoft's views of their competition than what we have normally seen in the past. Glad to see that Taylor has figured out that throwing FUD to the media is not going to help Microsoft compete with Linux. Note that Taylor predicts Novell will be their biggest Linux competitor with SUSE given their ability to port over NetWare suite of applications. I read recently on Novell's site that they intend to support their existing NetWare platform completely while offering the same services through SUSE. But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that their long term strategy is to eventually drop the existing NetWare platform line in favor of running everything off of SUSE.

This should make Microsoft and other software vendors happy ;) In a recent interview with Business Week Online, Linus Torvalds compares the production of open source software to the process by which science evolves. Proprietary software, to witchcraft:

I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things. I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it -- but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it.

Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in knowledge.

Good announcements on Slashdot today for the open source and Linux community:

• RealPlayer 10 has been released for Linux as a free download. Slashdot notes that it uses the GPL'd Helix Player and "has many new features including a Mozilla plug-in, so you can now enjoy all those embedded media clips, as well as the latest RealAudio 10, RealVideo 10, MP3, Flash, and Ogg Vorbis and Theora support."
• CNET reports that CodeWeavers's newest version of CrossOver Office will support iTunes (link via Slashdot).
• The NY Times reports that IBM is giving Cloudspace, a java-based database environment (similar to Oracle) valued at $85 million, to the Apache Foundation. As noted in these Slashdot comments, must be a good tax break for IBM while stimulating development in a lagging project.