Canonical's withdrawal of funding to the Kubuntu project apparently is not very important to the company's owner, Mark Shuttleworth.

Xerox PARC, Apple, Microsoft: these companies and more have contributed to the ubiquitous but evolving WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) user interface. According to Mark Shuttleworth Ubuntu is poised to revolutionise the menu this April.

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.

One of the big problems that any company faces when it decides to get into the GNU/Linux business is how to deal with users, a group who have an extraordinary sense of entitlement.

What's new about Ubuntu GNU/Linux? That is always the question that arises when the six-monthly release takes place and this time, with 11.10, the answer is probably best encapsulated by the project itself.

Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth plans to make an all-out effort to sell his company's copyright assignment policy - which applies to code contributions to the project.

Mark Shuttleworth has probably never heard of the concept of stability zones. That wouldn't surprise me, considering that the concept was advanced two years before his birth.

The next chapter in the three-cornered public stoush between the GNOME Desktop Project, the KDE Project and Canonical, the maker of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has just been kicked off by GNOME Foundation board member Dave Neary.

Was the Ubuntu GNU/Linux project set up because the founder had some kind of deep love for the FOSS community and wanted to become a folk hero of sorts?

Few people in the free and open source software these days have to put up with as much criticism of their motives and moves as the owner of Canonical, Mark Shuttleworth.