maddog looks at the progress Linux has made in the past 12 years and considers what it would take to move Windows XP users to FOSS.

We talk with Jean Hollis Weber, a volunteer with ODFAuthors, the LibreOffice Documentation team, and the Friends of OpenDocument Inc.

• Zend Studio 10 Announced
• Django 1.5 Released
• Tizen 2.0 Now Available
• Ruby 2.0 Released

Jailbreak Spat

• White House goes on record in support of freedom to jailbreak cell phones
• News Bites

10 RHEL 6.4 Released

• Yahoo ends telecommuting,
• Canonical UDS
• LG purchases WebOS from HP

11 Passwords Passé

• FIDO alliance seeks new authentication methods
• Largest Mersenne prime discovered

Like any self-respecting Linux journalist, I’m often predisposed to take Microsoft to task. For the record, I do manage to spread it around, with occasional reflections on Apple and Google, because I truly believe our universe has room for more than one evil empire. But Microsoft is still the easiest mark. It used to be easy to make fun of Microsoft because they were so formidable and vast. Now it is easy to make fun of them because they get it wrong so often, and it is downright amusing to see so much hype and media attention going to such inelegant products.

Simon is a sophisticated speech recognition tool with easy access to two powerful speech recognition engines, Julius and CMU Sphinx.

A closed-source code base is a huge, ever-fading inertial mass. When it begins, with those first exhilarating lines, or even up through the first few releases, you can truly say that you are writing it. But after a while, it is more like you are tending it – or feeding it. It becomes an investment, an asset, a castle you are protecting, which means all your strategies are defensive and your dreams will not stray far from your spot of holy ground.