It seems we’ve been a bit out of touch. Rather than bore you with excuses, let’s cut to the chase. Over the last year, we’ve slowed down—and then stopped altogether—publishing articles in Red Hat Magazine. And some of you have been contacting us to ask why.

There’s really a couple of reasons.

First of all, we’ve been running Red Hat Magazine a long time—under the RHM banner since November 2004. Before that we were a monthly newsletter called Under the Brim.

Point is, things change. We were once a text-only, link-heavy monthly email. Back then, we didn’t write very much original content—well, except for Shadowman. He (and his third-person narrative) have been around a while. He’s seen us publish through email, on the web—we even tried an issue in print. In the last few years, we dipped our toes into the online daily news space with both excitement and apprehension. We launched videos. We recorded podcasts. Some stuff we kept; some stuff we moved aside.

And now it’s time for another change.

We’re sorry we didn’t get around to telling you earlier. But, truth is, we weren’t quite sure what we were doing next. Some planets had to align. Some realities had to be faced. And there’s still a lot of work to be done. But we didn’t want to leave you hanging any longer.

We haven’t forgotten you. We’ve been hard at work figuring out just where we go from here. The content we have is too good to leave languishing in a corner. Our writers are too talented to not see the light of day. We’re working on delivering the open source message in a different way. There will be more info soon, and you’ll be among the first to know.

In the meantime, enjoy our archives. We’ll keep them here for now. Watch the email list for announcements. It’s been a long, strange, and wonderful trip. And it’s not over yet.

Red Hat Magazine

• How will we get our media in the future? The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) may have something to say about that. From Newsweek.
• If you’re not following the Mars Phoenix on Twitter, you totally should be. Because a robot that celebrates Talk Like A Pirate Day… from Mars? Awesome.
• In honor of Richard Wright’s passing this week, check out this Pink Floyd / 2001: A Space Oddity synch in Wired.
• Keeping an eye on web stuff: Does the web need an indicator of its truthiness? Tim Berners-Lee thinks so. And, in other news, the Web 2.0 expo seemed to take place without much of a downturn, even with the rough US economic news. (Wired, again.)
• And to round out the Wired trifecta–and suggest a celebratory activity for this most festive (Arrrr!) day–we give you Pirate like a Pirate. Ahoy, matey, and set the sails for the weekend!

• A new Brad Sucks album is available. Don’t know who that is? We have a podcast interview with the man himself, and we’ve used his music in our other projects. Bravo for Creative Commons licensing…
• Speaking of CC, check this out. Attention remixers: Creative Commons and OpenSourceCinema are co-hosting a Call for Soundtracks for the movie “RIP: A Remixer’s Manifesto” a movie about the struggles to keep content free and open. Remixers everywhere are invited to download the movie clips linked to on this page and create music using Creative Commons licensed samples. The movie producers will select the best of those for use in the final version of the movie.
• “MixMatchMusic brings a new level of precision to the burgeoning field of online music collaboration. If you’ve been looking for a way to make music with people without being in the same room as them — and you already have your own digital audio workstation (DAW) software — this could be just the collaboration tool you’ve been looking for.” Read more.

Here’s a few things we spotted on the web this week. As always, if you see something neat, let us know.

• You know we love the watches from Tokyoflash. The new rogue design keeps us drooling.
• That’s not a walking spider… it’s a baby AT-AT!
• Gizmodo has an interesting piece on the birth of the OLPC
• I remember getting one of the space ice cream packets to sample in grade school. I might wonder if they’ve made improvements, but then I read this article on space cuisine from Discover magazine. So that’s a ‘no,’ then?
• In more little green laptop news, Amazon will soon be selling the OLPC.

It’s the end of the week, and here’s a few stories that caught our attention:

• Google wants to free the airwaves. The FCC is about to decide what to do with all the leftover radio white space, and this petition/drive could influence the decision. Check it out.
• And speaking of radio, it looks like some of the predicted results of the copyright fees levied on internet radio stations are about to come to pass. Wired is reporting that Pandora is near-failing, with almost 70% of their profits going to pay the fees. Sad news.
• We would be remiss without at least one Olympics-related item. So, here’s your obligitory gold-medal geek moment: the Wall Street Journal investigates how the DiveCam follows the athletes from platform take-off to splash-down. How does it work? The simple answer… is gravity. Mmmmm, physics.
• Last week brought news of a a legal win for open source licenses. See what the Red Hat legal team had to say about the ruling as well.

Here’s this week’s list of what we found interesting. (And don’t forget–if you see something you think we should see too? Let us know about it.)

• Red Hat’s channel is a “multi-billion dollar opportunity” (Matt Asay for CNet)
• Sun’s Barton George talks to Max Spevack
• Geek of the week: Linus Torvalds
• How software piracy hurts open source
• Veteran developer ditches Microsoft for open source

What’s the word in open source news this week? Here’s the roundup.

• The Free Software Foundation listed a much-linked-to list of 5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G, which led to articles like “Does open source have a new villain?” And along with a lot of customers, Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani sat on the fence between Freedom and iPhoneLove.
• First Radiohead joined the pay-what-you-wish club with the release of In Rainbows. Now they’re inviting you to play with their latest video.
• Event: OSCON is happening in Portland next week. Visit the Fedora booth.
• John Halamka, one of the keynote speakers at last month’s Red Hat Summit, wrote an interesting post about open source medical records.
• Not open source, but still interesting: Five ways technology will change the Beijing Olympics

Remember Barton George? If you kept up with our Summit posts, then you’re familiar with Sun’s Linux guy, who was all over Boston blogging, podcasting, and interviewing. He’s back home now, but still putting together podcasts from his trip. Catch the two newest ones: Talking with Zmanda’s CEO, Chander Kant and Chattin’ with The Linux Foundation’s Executive Director, Jim “Led” Zemlin.

Also just in from the Red Hat News blog: One of our legal counsel penned a reader’s guide to the Firestar settlement. Totally worth reading if you’re at all interested in IP, licensing, and–in particular–the defensibility of the GPL.

Just a couple things this Friday, that we noticed in the news and want to share with you:

• Ever wanted to automate your home? Ever wondered if you could do so with open source tools? Wired tells you how.
• And of course we couldn’t miss this: The announcement that Microsoft is adding ODF support to Office. The great irony? Office doesn’t support OOXML, their proposed “standard.”
• A fun article on Digital image forensics from Scientific American.
• Also, a note of good news from a contemporary: Cory Doctorow’s new book Little Brother has been on the NYT best-seller list for 4 weeks in a row. This is the first creative commons-licensed novel to afford that honor. Congrats, Cory!
• More from Germany: Max Spevack’s last LinuxTag post.

And, dear readers, if you have a minute? We’d love for you to pick your favorite talks from our upcoming Summit schedule. Let us know what content you’d most like to see, so we know what to video-tape while we’re there.

Mark Cox, security guru and star of our recent video series, posts his yearly, official risk report, a comprehensive evaluation of the metrics, vulnerabilities, and best practices surrounding Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 security. Did you know he also writes other updates? We didn’t either, until he emailed us to share a link to this six-month update, posted on his blog: 26 May 2008: Enterprise Linux 5.1 to 5.2 risk report. Enjoy, and thanks to Mark for sharing it with us.

We also wanted to pass along what’s up with on another voice that’s been quiet of late–former Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack. His travels have landed him in his new home/office, but this week he’s off at LinuxTag. You can follow his adventures in Germany at his blog, and see pictures of the event here or here. (He promises to post some pictures later.)

And if you’re ever curious about what many of our developers, Fedora project members, and other assorted geeky friends are up to? Add planet.fedoraproject.org to your blogroll. You won’t be sorry.