rants

I've always thought that pre-installing GNU/Linux was a difficult business choice for hardware vendors simply. Mark Shuttleworth explained in a few words what I considered the most important reason why we can't easily buy computers with GNU/Linux preinstalled:

we free software fans are a fussy crowd, and very hard to please. [...] we are not “Linux” users,[...] We want a specific distro, and in many cases also a specific VERSION of that distro.

I think he is totally right, even if we know there are hardware vendors that do offer GNU/Linux.

This is something worth announcing during FOSDEM :) In a chat with Gnash maintainer,  Rob Savoye, Peter Brown discovered that YouTube videos will soon be available for Free Software users and all free digital citizens.

It works in CVS as a "hack job" [...] I expect, that with community help for Gnash and support from the ffmpeg and Gstreamer folks, the next release will enable us to put an end to the number one bug report we receive - Gnash won't play YouTube videos.

This is good news.  Gnash is one of FSF's high priority projects.  If you wish to contribute go to  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/.