Who's to say what was more uncivil about December's WSIS meeting in Geneva, Richard Stallman's sticking his tongue out when taking his security ID photo, or those who sought, and succeeded in, muddying the waters against official support of Open Source/Free Software?

Evan Leibovitch, president of the Linux Professional Institute, lets you decide, in his thought-provoking post-mortem of the December summit in Geneva.

Meanwhile the irony about governments and the glacial speed of UN bodies to endorse Open Source as a way to achieve the goals of a truly global information society becomes clear this week in our companion piece about the current wave of Open Source/Free Software research. Let the anti-Open Source lobbyists take up bats, hammers, and any other objects that go smash in the night, the momentum and energy of the global Open Source community is deafening. And influential organizations are supporting research to find out more.

Check out the current run of important studies that move on up from philosophical tracts to reports with quantifiable answers about how Open Source developers work, why they work, what they contribute, and their links with vendors.

For these stories, just click on http://www.open-mag.com/cgi-bin/opencgi/email/redirect.cgi?Open0114

Regards,

The editors of Open magazine