A little more than a year after The Document Foundation was set up to look after LibreOffice, the fork of the former OpenOffice.org project, it seems that Oracle did the users of the latter office suite a great favour by neglecting it.

The executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, Bradley Kuhn, says that enforcing the GNU General Public Licence is a means of defending software freedom.

It's been some time since there was a good old-fashioned verbal spat in the free and open source software community.

A company named Zinstall is attempting to plug a product by the same name which is used for PC migrations in businesses. But in the accompanying document, which provides details of the process, there are surprising lacunae.

Last year, in its annual budget, Linux Australia allocated a sum of $5000 for media training. The entire amount was unspent.

Software that controls vital human functions should always be open source, else it could prove to be a danger to one's existence, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation says.

Proprietary social media platforms are used heavily even by those attending a conference meant for free and open source software users and Bdale Garbee used this fact to kick off his talk on FreedomBox at the 13th Australian national Linux conference in Ballarat today.

Microsoft has made it clear that it will use the secure boot feature available with Windows 8 to lock out other operating systems from ARM devices which are running this version of its operating system.

Bruce Perens looks a bit disoriented as he comes into the hotel lobby, looking for me. "Anyone here called Sam?" he calls out. The tiredness is evident on his face after the long haul from the US to Australia.

At the 13th Australian national Linux conference that begins in Ballarat on Monday, all presentation material has to be suitable for people aged 12 and above.

Tomorrow's first AdaCamp is a ground-breaking event engineered by the two founders of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit group that aims to increase the participation of women in free and open source software and culture.

Two months back, Red Hat developers Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers proposed a fundamental change to the structure of Linux in the shape of the Journal daemon, meant to replace the venerable syslog.

The 13th Australian national Linux conference, which begins next week in Ballarat, will be a bit short on original presentations as the organisers have decided to have a "best of" selection for most of the final day.

A British community interest company, Rhombus Tech, is part of the way towards developing a micro-computer on a circuit board, much like the Raspberry Pi.

An adviser of a non-profit group that aims to increase the participation of women in free and open source software and culture has quit, describing the group as having achieved little since it was set up, despite spending nearly $US100,000.

When it comes to software patents, Melbourne developer Ben Sturmfels is sure of one thing: his campaign to end them in their entirety will succeed in the long run.

How the mighty have fallen! Bill Gates, once the most sought after figure in the tech world, now can't buy an interview.

Thirteen years have gone by since the first Australian national Linux conference was held, but the event is still driven by the same category of people: volunteers.

A non-profit group that aims to increase the participation of women in free and open source software and culture will hold its first camp in Melbourne on January 14.

For as long back as I can remember, GNU/Linux distributions have resembled Windows in one respect - that start menu at the bottom of the left side of the screen.