LWN.net has the text of a speech Tony Stanco of FreeDevelopers.net gave recently at a LUG meeting. He explains, “It is fundamentally about why this movement is about free software, not
open source.

FreeDevelopers is about being the guardians of the world’s freedoms, not
just the freedoms of developers. And certainly not about just efficient
and better software.”

– by Tina Gasperson –
Nothing much has been said lately about the old Hatfield vs. McCoy rivalry between desktop suites KDE and GNOME. But word has come through the KDE promo mailing list that one certain (unscientific) poll is getting a lot of hits on the KDE side.Texstar’s PCLinuxOnline.com is a typical Linux headline news site; the site links to various topics of interest, like NewsForge, Slashdot, LinuxToday, and lots of others do. It appears PCLinuxOnline hasn’t been around a long time, because there are only 24 registered members.

The interesting thing about PCLinuxOnline is the current survey. An impressive 2,773 votes have been cast. The question: What is your primary desktop window manager? Every Open Source answer that comes to mind is an option here — there’s even an “other” option in case anyone wants to vote for MS Windows or something else that’s not on the list. What’s really surprising is that a whopping 2,504 of the votes have been cast in favor of KDE 2.

One might immediately cry “ballot-box stuffing,” but the fine print at PCLinuxOnline says “one vote per day allowed.” We tested that rule, and it does appear to only count one of our votes. Webmaster “Texstar” says that the poll is not rigged, but he thinks that news of the poll was posted on The Dot, the KDE news site, and that is why the results are skewed.

The survey hasn’t been around long — the first comment about the survey was posted May 22.

A look at the stats page on PCLinuxOnline shows that almost one-third of the 13,249 visitors for this month blew through using the Microsoft IE browser. Zero, as in none, were using Konqueror, according to the stats page the first time NewsForge visited.

Slashdotters discuss a new FAQ about the GNU General Public License posted at gnu.org.

Anthony James writes, “I recently read an article on linuxplanet.com which I found through linuxtoday.com,
and it had a fairly simple question on it; or is it simple?

The question was, what would it take to get these users to migrate to Linux?
First off we need to clarify what users we are talking about. I am talking about everyday home and office desktop users.
It might seem like a fairly simple question, but is it really?” The

story is at Pinehead.com.

“Palm is attempting to clear its huge inventory of unsold PDAs by flogging them off at
a huge discount to developers, according to an email seen by The Register.“

Wired: “Everybody talks about spam, but nobody ever does anything about it. What if the spammers could target their material, and not inundate the uninterested? That’s the main topic at the anti-spam conference in San Francisco.”

Wired: “A recent report predicting that the European Union plans to archive all phone and Internet transmissions for seven years may have been a bit reactionary, but that doesn’t mean the EU’s stringent privacy laws aren’t causing alarm.”

CNET: “Many people
are concerned that CDDB–maintained
for the last three years by Gracenote but
built from individuals’ submissions–can
be owned.

The issue is central to a lawsuit that could affect a variety of communities throughout the
Internet, from so-called open-source programming projects to comments archived on online
bulletin boards.”

The Register: “The Windows Media Player ASX (Active Stream Redirector) processor contains an
unchecked buffer susceptible to an overrun which could enable an attacker to run
arbitrary code on a machine with the victim’s level of permission, a Microsoft
security bulletin warns.”

Wired: “Viruses and e-mails get all the attention and fearful reaction, but hidden programs known as Trojans can be far more devastating — to computers and lives. Two new ones are on the loose.”