Yesterday it’s been Linux Day in Italy. Open source entusiasts all over the country organized happenings, one in each city. There’s been workshops, installation parties and general outing. This was the 6th yearly edition of this event and nowadays this is considered a solid tradition. I partecipated to all of the six and still I have lots of fun with it.

This year something new happened. For the first time ever, the most popular national TV news service talked about Linux Day in prime time. Good morning italian journalists! They took only 15 years to notice the open source movement. At least now they discovered us.

They said linux users are 29 millions. I wonder what’s their source for this number, anyway according to Clickz stats internet users add up to 1.2G, therefore linux would account for 2.4% of total internet users worldwide!

Today Steve Jobs announced the new amazing features of OSX 10.5 aka Leopard.

• they can run natively on Intel hardware (wow, I stopped using Intel in favor of AMD at least 5 years ago)
• they have the Time Machine, or they can apply versioning to files and directories (wow, I’ve been using Subversion for so long…)
• they have multiple virtual desktops (wow, we have had this feature since KDE 1.0)
• they can index files according to metadata

OK, maybe Spotlight is cool, but why so much fuss for such a simple new feature? When you talk with Mac enthusiasts they seem to imply 10.5 is a revolution and nothing will be ever the same under the sun. I don’t think so.

From http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/75560

In their recent plenary session, EU parliamentarians have voiced their support for an open information society. A text adopted by a majority of the EU parliament to implement the Lisbon program of the European Community under the motto “More research and innovation – investing for growth and employment” aims, among other things, to send a signal to the EU commission, which is constantly expanding intellectual property rights to the benefit of rights holders. The parliamentarians countered that the concept of “Open Innovation” is the best way to increase investments in research and development and attain the Lisbon goals. In these goals, the EU Plans to become the most competitive, dynamic
economic area in the world by 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Firefox is already a great web browser, and now they are very close to release the new version 2.0, expected by this fall. To celebrate this upcoming event, they decided to announce the world firefox day on September 15. If you can convince somebody to download firefox, you can have both your names listed in the next version. This is a great viral marketing campaign! Check out worldfirefoxday.com.