TimburyDotOrg

I’m taking PCWorld’s new LinuxLink Blog under my wing. Being a mentor comes with great responsibility.

Linux is a joke. Well, that may be a bit harsh, but Ubuntu certainly seems to be all the excuse founder Mark Shuttleworth needs to make one bad pun after another. After Bill Gates’ performances with Jerry Seinfeld, one wonders if becoming a billionaire tech mogul alters brain chemistry. At any rate, Paul Rubens reports on the future of Karmic Koala and Canonical. (Hint: not as successes in show biz.)

MakeTechEasier: “Quite possibly the most distinguishing feature of Debian-based Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, Mepis, Knoppix, etc) is their package system – APT. Also known as the Advanced Package Tool, APT was first introduced in Debian 2.1 in 1999. APT is not so much a specific program as it is a collection of separate, related packages.”

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses. If you didn’t get to attend the event, don’t panic. Urlocker has written up a few key principles.

Have a confusing and entertaining Saturday

California Quantum: “As of writing this Fedora 11 has 37 which have already been approved, plus another 23 waiting to be approved any day now. That means in the end there should be ~60 approved features which make it into Fedora 11!”

Novell officials cited declining fortunes across its business yesterday “due to the slowing economy” as it summarized its first-quarter results of 2009. CFO Dana Russell said net revenue for the quarter was $215 million, compared with net revenue of $231 million for the first quarter of 2008. Net income was $11 million, or 3 cents per share, compared with net income of $17 million, or 5 cents per share, for the same period the year before, Russell said in Novell’s quarterly earnings report teleconference.

IBM earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year. IBM’s 2008 patent total is nearly triple Hewlett-Packard’s and exceeds the combined 2008 patents of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google. Samsung had the second most patents, with 3,515 issued last year, according to IFI Patent Intelligence. This is the 16th consecutive year IBM has led in U.S. patents.

The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit that keeps Linus in keyboards, and most recently, has been looking to glam things up a bit — earlier this month provided a first glimpse into its plans for the 2009 Collaboration Summit, to be held April 8-10 in San Francisco.

The bad economy may be a boon to relatively inexpensive open-source IP PBXs, which one study says already account for nearly 18% of all PBXs installed last year in North American business networks. Because they are generally less expensive, open source products may become attractive to more corporate users as their budgets are cut, laying the groundwork for a growth spurt, according to the recent study by Eastern Management Group.