We’ve written a lot lately about serious, geeky topics, like virtualization.  But we here at WorksWithU also like to have fun from time to time.  To prove it, here’s a look at some of the hilarious–or at least amusing–Easter eggs and other jokes hidden in Ubuntu that you may never have heard of.

Carla Schroder of Linux Today published an essay recently dealing with the low level of female participation in open-source projects.  Although the article doesn’t deal with Ubuntu in particular, it nonetheless prompted some thoughts about the role of women in the world’s most popular Linux distribution.

Launchpad, a Web application developed by Canonical for managing software development, was finally open-sourced last week.  But with a number of its other products remaining proprietary, what are Canonical’s real intentions towards living by the free-software ideology that drives projects like Ubuntu?

The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization created in 2007 to promote Linux, recently assumed control of the linux.com domain.  This is a good move, as it helps consolidate the image of Linux, making it easier for new users to find and understand the operating system–in other words, it brings greater centralization to Linux, which is badly needed if free software is to become ubiquitous on the desktops of the world.

I wrote a post a few days ago about the bits and pieces of proprietary software that are still a necessary part of my technological life.  As a follow-up, I thought it might be interesting to look at the other side of the coin, by considering how many people would be able to survive without free software.

Someone on the Ubuntu forums started an interesting thread today asking, “Can you manage to use only free software on your pc?“  It got me thinking about my dependency on proprietary software, and whether I’d ever really be able to get it out of my life entirely.

Earlier this year, madwifi.org, which had previously been home to the madwifi project, was “hijacked” (for lack of a better word), leading to much confusion for Linux users looking for wireless drivers.  This unfortunate event highlights the legal and organizational vulnerabilities of free-software projects, which need to take steps to prevent such abuses if they want to be perceived as serious and reliable.

I wanted to view the Wikipedia article on OpenOffice recently, so I googled ‘openoffice’, correctly assuming that the link I was looking for would be near the top of the results.  While doing this, I noticed that a Google query for OpenOffice also turns up a couple of paid ’sponsored links’ on the right side of the screen leading to websites offering dubious downloads of what purports to be OpenOffice, or something close to it.  Here’s a screenshot:

As Bruce Byfield notes in a recent essay, there’s been a bit of discussion lately about the presence of ‘binary blobs‘ in the Linux kernel.