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In response to Tristan's post which is in response to Aaron's post, the logo for Canonical is probably not accidental. Merriam-Webster defines canonical as:

of, relating to, or forming a canon

And a canon is:

a : an accepted principle or rule
b : a criterion or standard of judgment
c : a body of principles, rules, standards, or norms

But it also says canonical means:

conforming to a general rule or acceptable procedure

Which Canonical most certainly doesn't. Well, it may conform to free software, but certainly not to the widely accepted practices of proprietary software.

So, Canonical is a cannon designed to change/improve/destroy the currently canonical definition of how software is supposed to be created, sold and supported, thus forming the new software development canon? Sounds good to me.

It's nice to see Dell promoting Linux now that they are selling machines with Linux pre-installed. For a quick overview on what this Linux and Open Source thing is all about, take a look at this short video.

(Via: Joey Stanford)

It's happened! Dell has officially said it will support Linux! And what distribution will they officially support? Why, Ubuntu, of course. Details are still filtering out. Keep watching.

For details released before the official word, see this Desktop Linux article.

Woohoo!

UPDATE: More information on the Ubuntu site as well as the Dell site.

Mike Kruckenberg writes about a talk given at the 2007 MySQL User Conference. It seems the United States Navy is using MySQL running on four-node Linux cluster to handle operations aboard one of their aircraft carriers. Great to see Open Source getting its sea legs. Or is that improving its sea legs? Anyone know of other "nautical" Open Source applications or deployments?

Paul Graham says so. I'll not belabor the point, other than to agree, but when "up and comers" have no sense of "fearing Microsoft," and when those in the tech know-how are all using Mac and Linux, Microsoft is dead. The leading edge eventually becomes standard operating procedure, and Mac and Linux will continue to be adopted on a wider scale.

One of the touted benefits of Open Source software is the ability to "go in and fix it yourself" when your software isn't working the way you want. And while that is a great benefit, sometimes you don't have time to fully understand all the code and fix it on your own. That's when the other benefit of Open Source comes into play: direct contact with the developers.

Recently, I was setting up an instance of the Serendipity blog publishing software at work. Since we are in the process of migrating to MySQL5 from MySQL4, and since they are both running on the same database server, the way you reach the MySQL5 server is non-standard (it's running on a non-default port of 3307). There were two modules to access MySQL in Serendipity: the "old" mysql PHP module and the "new" mysqli PHP module (completely unrelated to the "old" and "new" database servers). I tried to specify the database host name as databaseserver:3307 (which is the usual way to do it), but using the mysqli module, it failed. With mysqli the host, db, user, pass, and port are all separate fields in the function call to connect, so you can't pass it databaseserver:3307. I posted about this error on the Serendipity user forums, and in two days (mostly because the author is about 10 hours ahead of me), we had debugged the problem, and he had written a few lines of code to change the mysqli connect call to handle the case of someone giving host:port as their host name. Pretty easy, but can you imagine getting a two-day turnaround from a commercial software vendor?

Shortly after this happened, there was a blog post by Giuseppe Maxia, a systems analyst and database designer, about a bug being opened in the MySQL bugs database and, with the help of two contributors from the MySQL community, that bug being closed just 11 hours later. Now that's the power of open source community.

Don't you wish Microsoft fixed bugs that fast?

Jon Bourne got to see one of his suggestions for Firefox implemented. It's always fun to see one's input used, especially in large projects like Firefox. May this be the first of many!