These are good times for Linux users. Ubuntu's 8.10 release recently went live, Fedora's 10 release is coming up in mere weeks, and openSUSE will finalize its 11.1 offering in December. Even if none of these distributions are your first choice for daily use, they are popular and are frequently worth checking out on liveCD, even if you plan to continue using your current distribution.

This is where I admit I've been remiss. Taste aversion is a funny thing, and a few previous experiences with Fedora left a funny taste in my mouth. I have not seriously sat and looked at a Fedora release since FC2. As Fedora's new release started to take shape, I was hearing a lot of positive things -- comments about how good it looked, and how fast and solid it was. It seemed the right time to overcome the mental block I'd developed, and see what the fuss was about.

Dana Blankenhorn makes some good points in a post from today titled Open Source in a Time of Recession. One of the better points is that, despite the incredible turmoil in global markets and economies, we actually haven't met the official definition of a recession yet here in the U.S., which would be two consecutive quarters without economic growth. Nevertheless, the financial gloom and doom we're seeing will cause constricted business spending on software, and open source stands to benefit from that in several ways. There may also be some unexpected events in the works.

Joe Brockmeier has an interesting piece up on the differences between paid and volunteer open source contributors. In it, he cites this post from former Debian Project Leader Martin Michlmayr, and a paper by Evangelia Berdou. "Berdou finds that paid developers take up key positions in projects, while volunteers often work on the periphery." Kristin also had some good  thoughts on the topic on OStatic this morning. I'm a believer that the combination of these two types of contributions can be very powerful.