An article in ITBusiness.ca by Sarah Lysecki discusses the Linux lab we reported earlier.

Ed Montgomery, a computer science teacher at Monarch Park Collegiate, said in an e-mail to ITBusiness.ca that he was given a note in May, telling him that the Linux lab would be dismantled and replaced with a Microsoft-based Classroom Migration Technology Initiative (CTMI) lab.
...
Montgomery sent a letter to The Canadian Association for Open Source (CLUE) last week asking for help. Russell McOrmond, an Internet consultant who is also a policy coordinator at CLUE, received the letter.

Many people have been asking for for more details on the high-school teacher who had his Linux Lab dismantled. Mr. Montgomery has offered to do a question-and-answer with us.

Each time I see a MacBook Pro or black MacBook, I want one. Then I sit down at my Linux desktop machine and do a little research about OS X and Apple and I always come to the same conclusion: choice on Apple hardware is limited. It would seem others are beginning to come to the same conclusion:

I've been seeing an increasing number of comments suggesting that Microsoft is moving ahead with tools designed to reduce the numbers of unauthorized copies of Windows out there. Blogs such as this one on ZDNet do a good job of describing the possible implementation of this program, which has the potential to shut down a lot of copies of Windows deemed to be illegitimate.

A newsforge article by Bruce Byfield includes:

We talked to representatives of two coalition members about the status of DRM in Canada: David Fewer, staff counsel at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), Canada's leading legal technology law clinic, and Evan Leibovitch and Russell McOrmond of CLUE, an open source advocacy group.

It is great to see that some members of parliament are taking the time to learn more about FLOSS. While this introduction to the event focuses on using FLOSS to save money, it also provides an opening to discuss some of the policy issues facing our part of the software sector.

Virtualization is one of the two really hot topics in IT today (the other being SOA). However, virtualization can mean a great many different things, depending on your point of view. For me, being basically an operating system guy, it means running multiple operating sytems on a single physical piece of hardware.

When it comes to virtualizing operating systems, this is nothing new. In fact, the first hypervisor was IBM's CP/67 back in 1967! This tool is the ancestor of today's z/VM hypervisor for IBM's System z mainframes.

Today, there are a great many different hypervisor solutions for x86 servers, including VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, SWSoft Virtuozzo, and of course the open source Xen project.

I wrote the following as a reply to an ITBusiness.ca article written by Shane Schick titled Truth, justice and the open source way which discussed FLOSS and the patent system.

I believe that FLOSS is to software what the patent system was for tangible inventions of physical things in the past.

Historically we had limited communications technologies and mobility slowing down collaboration. Inventions of tangible things took a lot of time and energy to move from design to prototype to distributable product. Within this context patents solved important problems. Without governments granting a temporary monopoly to the first inventor there would be too much risk to trying to develop ideas, and too much of an incentive to keep the ideas secret. Far too many inventions were kept secret and lost with the death of the inventor. A patent filing required a full disclosure of the invention such that someone skilled in the art could study, replicate and improve upon it, with the 20 year monopoly representing the slower realities of the day.

Ten years ago, on July 8th, 1996, the PostgreSQL project went on the Internet via a small web server in Toronto. To commemorate that event -- as well as offer a chance for many members of our community to meet for the first time, in person -- we will be having a small conference from July 8 to 9 in Toronto, Canada.

This 2-day event will feature numerous presentations and community sessions to let community members share their knowledge. Many major contributors to PostgreSQL will be there, and most of them will be speaking or leading coding sessions: Tom Lane, Bruce Momjian, Tatsuo Ishii, Gavin Sherry, Neil Conway and more. At the event we will also discuss and coordinate community advocacy and fundraising efforts.