Pigs Flying, Popular Licenses, and LibreOffice 4.3.4

Jon maddog Hall today said that it'd be "when pigs fly" when Microsoft really embraces Open Source. In other news, Rob Zwetsloot is back with Part 2 of his top 10 Linux desktops and Jim Lynch reviewed Trisquel 7.0. LibreOffice 4.3.4 was released and Stephen O'Grady looks at the most popular Open Source licenses. Phoronix is reporting that Ubuntu will probably adopt systemd next release and Carla Schroder has some tips for KDE 4 productivity.

Jon maddog Hall today commented on Microsoft's latest attempts to appear Open Source friendly, even opening parts of their .NET framework. He said of Microsoft's latest overtures, "My feelings run somewhere between 'When pigs fly' and 'When Hell Freezes Over' will Microsoft embrace the true spirit of Open Source, much less Free Software." He then relates several incidents that happened or he observed personally over the years, making it hard for him to believe the horse has changed any colors. He concludes, "If all you want to do is try to re-establish yourself as a mainstream platform provider, to once again try to tell end users when to upgrade, what architectures they can use and how many people that can use your software, what better way than to stick your middleware between the applications and a real operating system?

Steve O'Grady today blogged about today's popular Open Source licenses and how this has changed over time. According to his graphs borrowed from Black Duck, the various versions of GNU GPL is the most popular today. But O'Grady said Apache and MIT licenses have gained the most ground in the last five years because they are more permissive. He said, "What will be interesting to observe moving forward is whether these trends continue, or whether further corrections are in store."

Jim Lynch reviewed Trisquel 7.0 today. Of it Lynch said, "I was very pleased with Trisquel 7.0 . I found it to be incredibly stable and fast. Trisquel 7.0 is pretty much what a desktop Linux distribution should be. I highly recommend [it]."