Free as in Beer, SUSE News, and 7 Years Uptime

Today in Linux news Jack Germain reviewed Makulu Cinnamon Debian and said it can give Linux Mint Cinnamon some competition. Bruce Byfield said free as in beer has slowed the adoption of Open Source software. The SUSE parent company Attachmate and Micro Focus merger is now complete and Sam Varghese has several interviews from SUSECon today. Neil McGovern will probably get take-down notices for his adaption of Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer and Alexys Jacob ruined a seven year uptime.

Bret Fitzgerald today posted of the completion of the Micro Focus and Attachmate merger announced last September. Spokesmen from both entities have reassured customers and users that the operating systems will not be abandoned. In related news, Sam Varghese today filled several posts speaking with SUSECon attendees. Dominique Leuenberger is a newer contributor who maintains the numerous GNOME packages for openSUSE, "something that consumes all of his working hours." Varghese also spoke with Vojtěch Pavlík, SUSE "kernel guru." He leads a team of 50 developers who work on "the kernel, toolchain, compiler and now Samba." He throws in this story of an "attendee's tale" too.

Bruce Byfield today said, 'From the beginning, free pricing has affected how outsiders regarded free software. "You get what you pay for," outsiders often say.' While acknowledging that being free of cost has helped proliferate the usage of free as in speech software, he thinks it has simultaneously has hurt its expansion into high-tech industries - losing out to proprietary alternatives. Byfield said Microsoft is adapting to free software and the cloud, but Linux almost missed the boat on the cloud. He concluded, "While free prices may not be a defining point of free software, they have affected its fortunes over the years more than most advocates imagine."

Seven years is a long time if you've been suffering bad luck or have suddenly developed an "itch." It's even longer for a computer to stay up and running these days. So it's with a tug of sadness that I report Alexys Jacob's blog post today saying he's just taken down his old server that had 2717 days uptime. This server, named ns2, ran Gentoo Linux for those seven (and nearly a half) years. If you have a longer uptime, post the output in the comments below.

In other news:

* Barbie the Debian Developer, (another one)

* Kubuntu 14.10 review

* Cinnamon Desktop Spices Up Makulu Linux

* Six Clicks: The six fastest computers in the world (run Linux)