Almost four years ago searching for "Libervis" on Google yielded a page describing "Latinvlo: A Latin-Based International Auxiliary Language" on the first page of search results which in its adverbs section defines the word "Libervis" as meaning "most freely". I made this search query in order to test the uniqueness of the word I just coined as a slogan between "Liberty Vision" (LiberVis). Finding that it actually has a meaning in a Latin derived language which implies maximum freedom I have found the name I was looking for.

Think gOS. It might not be such a bad advice after all. It's been hyped up, but it sold out. And there may be lessons in its deployment and success for all of us Free Software and GNU/Linux advocates!

First of all, what is gOS? Well, it is a light operating system based on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. It uses a polished Enlightenment E17 GUI interface and integrates deeply with various web services and applications most of which are from Google. The "g" in gOS apparently stands for "green" which does make some sense considering that it can run on PCs that consume very little resources and hence essentially save up on energy, which is environment-friendly.

Whether you believe in Christmas and what it commonly stands for it is there. If you were to live alone on a tropic island you probably wouldn't experience christmas at all and would soon remember it as a fading memory. This is because holidays like this one are all about us, the people, and what we make of it. Just going out to a crowd on 24th December, the Christmas eve, you can easily pick up the feeling, as if it was in the air, the people are different. There is an increased percentage of kind spirit because, well, "it's Christmas eve!". Shoppers greet you with smiled faces and give you kind blessings. People in trams talk about snow that just started falling with excitement. And everywhere you see something is glittering.

It's important that we remember what makes the Internet so interesting and unique. There are two crucial characteristics:

1. It's fundamentally decentralized, meaning you can cut out any part without affecting the rest,
2. It allows freedom of access, meaning you have the same ability to access and write it as anyone else.

Because they permit extraordinary flexibility and rapid growth, both of these characteristics have brought the Internet way beyond any other network. Today, they are endangered. How come, and what can we do about it?

As Apple's Steve Jobs is announcing that they suddenly "want native third-party applications on the iPhone", something its users have been yearning to have ever since they started buying these phones (even if it meant hacking them), Steve justifies their prior resistance to this kind of openness by security threats. As he says, they are "trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once — provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc."

Now it is time consider what does "open" here really means and what exactly are these security threats he talks about stemming from. "Open" here does not mean "Open Source" and certainly not "Free Software". It means simply letting developers other than Apple write software for iPhone, be it proprietary or Freedomware, just the way Microsoft allows others to write third party software for Windows (which ends up boosting its perceived value quite a bit - no good third party applications equals a not very desirable operating system). Of course, just as Apple fears viruses on iPhone, Microsoft has been and continues to be ridden by them on Windows.