I gave up on the mainstream media in 2002-2003, in the run up to the Iraq war. Every single channel in the USA was selling the prospect of war like a product, a new soap powder. I tried to find coverage of the over one million person protest march in London that I'd heard about via email, and it was barely mentioned. The last straw came when I got so angry I nearly threw a chair through my brand new plasma TV, which would have been an expensive outburst, but that's what you get for watching Fox News for longer than it takes to flip through the channels on the remote.

Microsoft recently released service pack two (SP2) for their flagship office product, Office 2007. As I'm not a user of Microsoft products normally I wouldn't have noticed, but Office 2007 SP2 had an important new feature for users of Open Source office productivity software that made me pay attention.

Ubuntu is Debian unstable with some of the rough edges smoothed over, some security features deprecated and some enhanced, the implementation of proprietary blobs made easier, a bit of polish, a different theme, and a lot less packages. Ubuntu is a clean and polished experience for those new to GNU/Linux, (although the 'release often release early' philosophy it has taken from other free software projects has created occasional stability issues).

Eduardo Reck Miranda (born 1963) is a Brazilian composer of chamber and electro-acoustic music. His interests in science and music are evenly balanced.

He studied in Brazil, England, Scotland and France and is currently Professor in Computer Music and Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) at the University of Plymouth, Devon, England. His music has been played in many countries, and his research in the field of human-machine interfaces is known globally.

One of the things about getting older is that you learn to ignore things until you have to do something about them. It's a learned efficiency I suppose, rationing your increasingly precious time out to the unceasing demands upon it. I finally realized I have to do some serious thinking about cloud computing.

"People have always made music. Once human beings had computers available, software became just like music. People create software the same way they create music. They really do. You don't do it because you get paid for it. You do it because it's fun. Samba is the equivalent of a garage band that made it big."

Meeks takes the view that OpenOffice.org should be developer driven, with less hands-on involvement from Sun staff. Successful developer driven projects, such as the Linux kernel, Samba or GNOME, tend to be open, democratic, noisy, argumentative, divisive, and chaotic, but are often highly creative and successful because they promote developer initiative and attract a greater number of developers. Organisations participate in such projects for selfish reasons, because it works, and because it brings twice the resources at half the price.

I didn't want to write this column. I live as Windows-free an existence as most people can these days. Of course I have to run Windows as part of my job, in order to make sure that Samba, the software I write, will interoperate correctly with all the multiple Windows versions out there. I also have to install some Windows applications using the Open Source Wine project, which emulates Windows on Linux well enough that some binary Windows applications will install and run straight off the DvD.

While pirates were once seafaring robbers, these days the more common definition is "one who infringes another's copyright or business rights or who broadcasts without authorization" – selling software, music or computer game CDs from a market stall in the East End or via P2P across the Internet.

One doesn't have to approve of illegal copying to realize that this definition covers a multitude of sins, some of which, paradoxically, work to the advantage of the owners of the copyright, and some of which reflect changing cultural perceptions of the ownership of ideas.

SuSE was founded in Nuremberg, Germany in 1992 when the Linux kernel was still almost new. by Hubert Mantel, Burchard Steinbild, Roland Dyroff and Thomas Fehr, with the objective of distributing Slackware (based on the earlier SLS Linux from Soft Landing Systems), in sets of 40 floppies, translated into German, with the approval of Patrik Volkerding, the guiding light and sole developer of Slackware.