Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

Android's market share climbs to 64.1%– up 20.7 percentage points from 2011.

Free Software licenses could face legal challenges in some European jurisdictions.

Although the developers of GIMP version 2.8 have not achieved all their goals, they’ve awakened great expectations with some impressive new features.

• Red Hat Addresses Secure Boot
• FSF Addresses Secure Boot
• Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

Since they print my picture with this column, I have little hope of concealing my age, so I’ll just come out and say that I remember Ronald Reagan’s first year in office in 1981 – in fact, I was already a young adult at that time and was living in Reagan’s home state of California, working my first professional job after college. Reagan became known as “the great communicator” for the hypnotic optimism with which he could render his own point of view. In a speech somewhere around that time, the new president made a comment that was something like “We have come a long way since before we knew we had a problem with racism.”

Partnership
• Red Hat and Dell combine for hard/software IT solutions
• Fedora 17 released
• News Bites

A little over a year ago, I wrote a column about a Nokia memo that appeared a little over a year ago. The famous “Burning Platform” memo made the case for Nokia bailing out of the open source MeeGo project as a last-ditch effort to save the company.