Greg DeKoenigsberg set off what would become a firestorm of debate in the Linux community last week when he posted rant against Canonical for their low ranking on number of commits to GNOME, based on a recent census study. Over the weekend, DeKoenigsberg apologized for the rant and explained in a more measured tone why he lashed out in anger at the findings of the GNOME Census, then again later at Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth's response to the debate, a broader argument against tribalism.

After reading about the latest release from MeeGo and how it's designed for In-Vehicle Infotainment systems, I couldn't help download MeeGo for IVI V1.0, take some screenshots, and share some of my thoughts on the features of this new version.

An emergency out-of-band update for patching the critical LNK vulnerability has been released by Microsoft. "The vulnerability exists because Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts in such a way that malicious code may be executed when the operating system displays the icon of a malicious shortcut file," it says in the security bulletin.

As we mentioned in a previous article, Red Hat advocate Greg DeKoenigsberg claimed that due to the much larger amount of code it's contributed, Red Hat is a better open source citizen than Canonical, adding, "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization." A Computerworld blog retorts that that's no insult; and that marketing Linux could be just as important to the cause as contributing code. Updated

A recent vague announcement on osol-announce hints that something big is rumbling for OpenSolaris: "A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos, and we're just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public." They have a website, and they're going to be hosting a conference call on August 3.

We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy -- and there is no point in having free software if you can't own your hardware.

A few years ago, there was a website called Jailbreakme.com that enabled you to jailbreak your iPhone without iTunes, by just visiting a web site. But it stopped working with one of the OS updates, so people forgot about it. Well, it's back. I've actually been waiting to jailbreak my new iPhone 4 and for an iOS 4 jailbreak for my old iPhone 3GS, but after fiddling around with downloading big ipsw files from sketchy websites only to find they didn't work, I decided to wait for an easier option.

Tableau Software has created an interactive table/graph that examines data rates for the iPad, carrier-by-carrier. The results are interesting. As you might expect, data rates from AT&T in the US are near the top of the list, but those unlucky souls in France have to pay twice what AT&T users do. Residents of Singapore may not be allowed to chew gum, but they can pay as little as $.51 per Gigabyte for wireless data.

A provocative editorial at The Register makes this suggestion: "Microsoft should consider acquiring Novell's SUSE Linux business and focusing it completely on mobile. Novell has a seat at the Linux Foundation's MeeGo table, and Microsoft should embrace that operating system rather than its myriad (but universally unsuccessful) mobile variants of Windows."

AMD plans to start shipping the USB 3-equipped chipset in the fourth quarter of 2010, beating Intel to the post. Intel hasn't announced its official plans for integrated USB 3 support yet, but various sources say it's not expected until we're well into 2011.

Microsoft has released a free tool to bring newer security protections to older platforms and applications. The enhanced mitigation experience tookit (EMET) was announced at the BlackHat USA 2010 security conference in Las Vegas. EMET will be available from August and is designed to help block targeted attacks against unpatched vulnerabilities in platforms such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

As Nvidia falters, Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit is on the rise, spurred by "radical" shifts in the market, according to Mercury Research, which tracks the market for GPUs or graphics processing units.

Several talks at the Black Hat security conference this week in Las Vegas will focus on tools that could make software safer by automatically searching for bugs--and pinpointing the ones that could be most dangerous.

Richard Stallman, who's still taking on the role of the extremist who says extreme things so other Free Software advocates can look moderate in comparison, answers Reddit readers' questions. But there's some good stuff in there, and it seems he's dialed back the nutty a bit.