El Mundo Libre

The age of format wars is upon us: OpenDocument Format vs. OpenXML, PDF vs. XPF, Ogg Theora vs. WMV (I wish), ... And now a clash of competing Web markup specifications is at hand. For years the W3C have been the guardians of web standards. Now WHATWG are on the prowl.

Cancel your appointments and update your IRC client, because the Ubuntu Open Week is back! So you think Ubuntu is the best thing since Benjamin Franklin flew a kite and you want to help make it even better, but don't know how. Then next week is exactly the thing for you. Just fire up Gaim, point it to irc.freenode.net and join #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat. The latter is for questions and chatter, the former provides the answers. Don't worry if you don't have any experience with IRC: the people on #ubuntu-classroom-chat will kindly help you out. And there is no such thing as a stupid question (as long as it has to do with the subject at hand).

Mark Shuttleworth has announced the successor to Feisty Fawn. This wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't for the fact that it will come in a new yummy absolutely-libre flavour. The non-free nature of Launchpad, the proprietary drivers discussion and the inclusion of Click-N-Run from nobody's favourite distro Linspire have left me questioning if Canonical's motives are really all that honourable. This announcement has restored at least some of my confidence in them.