Weekly news wrap-up: Less Stallman, more Red Hat vs. KDE

You might be hearing less of Richard Stallman in coming days. Tina Gasperson reports that the Free Software Foundation is increasingly using other spokespeople and focusing more on its message than the man who founded it.

It’ll be interesting to see how that strategy works. Stallman often inspires strong feelings, which makes for frequent publicity, if nothing else.

In a related story, Robin “Roblimo” Miller responds to critics who say the GNU General Public License is “viral” by saying that borrowing code from “Proprietary Licenses in General” can get programmers in a lot more trouble.

Still more of Red Hat vs. KDE

LinuxPlanet offers an “exclusive preview” of Red Hat 8.0 and its Bluecurve desktop, coming out this week. We were kind of expecting a review, but the article is more of a talk with Red Hat about why it’s creating its own desktop, which has been in the news for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, KDE developer Bernhard “Bero” Rosenkraenzer said he was quitting Red Hat over the company’s decision to “cripple” KDE in the new release.

If you can’t beat ’em, lobby them out of existence

Wired.com looks at lobbying efforts against Open Source, in particular how the Microsoft-backed Initiative for Software Choice is attacking Open Source-in-government pushes.

Also this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer acknowledged the threat Linux is to his company during a speech at a Microsoft Most Valued Professionals conference. (Gee, why do I never get invited to these things?) Ballmer seemed disappointed that Microsoft couldn’t run Linux into the ground like it’s done with some other competitors, saying Linux started off bankrupt, in a way.”

Success story of the week

Salon.com had an interesting story this week (on its free section, even) about how a group of anti-globalization activists in California are recycling old computers, loading them with Free Software and sending them to South America.

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