Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman has got caught up in the politics of the Middle East, being forced to cancel some talks scheduled in Israel.

Is the Linux kernel really free, as in freedom? Or is it following the "open core" model defined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008, as claimed by Alexandre Oliva of the Free Software Foundation Latin America?

When you think of world peace, besides the obvious response by Miss Universe contestants, worthy Laureates come to mind such as Kofi Annan, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. Some sectors of the Internet would like to see Linus Torvalds added to the list.

When the two main desktop projects catering to free and open source software - KDE and GNOME - held their annual desktop summit at the same place for the first time, they probably expected nothing but messages of peace and harmony to emanate.

When Britain was the superpower of the world, there was one tactic which its officials used, with great success, to manage its colonies - divide and rule.

Microsoft's bid to dispel the patent fears surrounding the open source .NET clone, Mono, has met with little enthusiasm from free software advocates.

The Ubuntu technical board has announced that it sees no reason to consider a dependency on Mono as an issue when suggesting applications to be included in the default set included in the GNU/Linux distribution.

The next major version of the GNOME desktop environment, version 3.0, may contain more than the one Mono-dependent application than it currently does, according to GNOME Foundation member Dave Neary.

Should FOSS users be concerned about the software they use, in case it opens them up to copyright, trademark or patent claims? Or should such concerns be left exclusively to developers?

It's more than a bit ironic that the Linux Foundation, an organisation that drips with bizspeak, has chosen as the winner of its Linux promotional campaign an ad that espouses the virtues of freedom.