OSSPACK

I think it is time that Sugar Labs and Sugar developers to realize that the success or failure of Sugar does not depend on its ability to play YouTube videos. Not because is not important but because there is very little chance to penetrate this market dominated by Microsoft and Apple. Like it or not Sugar Learning Platform's success or failure lays on its 1 million users with XO-1 (and hopefully XO-1+). If they are successful and happy and the data pile in to support it, everybody will pay attention and traction will be gained even in the developed world. However, even then Sugar's aim should be the virgin markets.

Long-frustrated network neutrality advocates headed into 2009 with high hopes. After all, there was a new administration headed by a man whose campaign promises included the assurance that he would "take a back seat to no one" on the issue, a decidedly Democratic Congress and a general warming to the idea that unfettered access to content and applications on the Internet was somehow essential to the new economy and the sacrosanct rights of the First Amendment. In many ways, they weren't disappointed. But the gears in Washington turn slowly, and, for all the talk and proposals, 2009 saw little material action on the Net neutrality front. Next year will be different.

In part 3 of our gamers recommendations we present more strategy games, puzzles, card games, language skill training and more. To be continued..

A post on the Ubuntu Tweak blog points out that the new 0.5 version release should come today: I plan to make it online at the the last day of 2009: I don’t want to take this task to the new year, because I’ve been developed for them over half year! Ubuntu Tweak 0.5 will come with a redesigned UI (but version 0.6 will suffer major UI changes), XFCE specific features and most importantly: the ability to fetch online database to keep the ppplication information up-to-date. That means that you will be able to keep your applications and sources up-to-date without updating Ubuntu Tweak.

Linux Journal Insider is your monthly peek at what to expect from the new issue of Linux Journal, before it even hits the newsstands. Shawn Powers and Kyle Rankin give you the inside scoop on topics, articles, and geekery in general.

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Michael Widenius continues his campaign to keep Oracle from acquiring MySQL with a petition and a lengthy FAQ on what he sees the problems being. "If the deal is approved based on the fact that 'MySQL can be forked', that will be a big blow to open source Software. It means that open source software is not protected for anti-competitive measures and it will be ok for big companies to freely buy up their open source competitors and kill them. Note that not even PostgreSQL is safe from this threat! For example, Oracle could buy some companies developing PostgreSQL and target the core developers. Without the core developers working actively on PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL project will be weakened tremendously and it could even die as a result."

Free software made steady progress in 2009, even if it didn't have the excitement of previous years.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols lists his most popular and favorite Linux stories of 2009. "Before jumping into this, let me say that's what popular isn't the same thing as what's important. So, I'm giving you a twofer list. The first is the most popular of my stories, and then there are the stories, which I think are the most important for Linux's future."

It's been over a year since I wrote about my conversion to a Linux based digital media environment, and since it's the holiday season (or just after) I thought it was time to update the story, and describe some new Linux based devices I'm using that others might find useful.

richrumble writes "The OISF has released the beta version of the Suricata IDS/IPS engine: The Suricata Engine is an Open Source Next Generation Intrusion Detection and Prevention Engine. This engine is not intended to just replace or emulate the existing tools in the industry, but will bring new ideas and technologies to the field. This new Engine supports Multi-Threading, Automatic Protocol Detection (IP, TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, TLS, FTP and SMB! ), Gzip Decompression, Fast IP Matching and coming soon hardware acceleration on CUDA and OpenCL GPU cards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.