There has been quite a buzz in the open source community of late, thanks to the announcement of a pure Linux stack tablet by Aaron Seigo, one of the lead developers of KDE. This new tablet is called the Spark, and aims to be completely open source from the hardware up.

As you can imagine, people have been excited by the news, and many are asking when the tablet will be available. While the Spark has not yet gone into production, the good news is that it is now available for pre-order!

At this stage it is not known which countries the Spark will be available in, but from previous blog posts by Seigo indicate that it will likely initially launch in Europe, but then become available in other countries in due course.

The Spark can be pre-ordered from MakePlayLive for a target retail price of €200 (final price will be determined by the region you reside in).

Just this week in the news, Jonathan Riddell, the leader of the Kubuntu project, announced that Canonical had decided to pull him off the Kubuntu project. Riddell explained that Canonical has decided to suspend Kubuntu's status as an official Ubuntu derivative, and to stop providing paid support for it.

This has left many Kubuntu users with a bad taste in their mouths, and wondering what will become of Kubuntu.

Most people I've met, when I talk about Open Source Software, have a hard time understanding why people would choose to give their software away for free. One of the questions I hear often is, "But then how do you make money?"

Actually, you have it all wrong. Very few applications written by developers today are ever sold. Most applications are "in house" - in other words, they are written internally by a business to fulfill the needs of the business, as opposed to being written to be sold.

Instead of me writing an article, I thought it might be time to ask those who read this blog about their church's open source usage. So, in no particular order, here are some questions:

• Does your church use open source software?
• Does it use OSS on Windows, or a full OSS stack (e.g. Linux/*BSD)?
• What open source applications does your church use?
• Does your pastor know he's using OSS?
• If you use OSS other than the usual suspects (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc), then what do you use it for?

At a guess, I'll say that most churches are probably in the "we use Firefox on Windows" category.

You might be thinking to yourself, "Why do we need to talk about security? Isn't open source software at odds with security because of its open nature?" The truth is, open source software tends to be the most secure software out there. For instance, there are studies that show that Microsoft's IIS web server is compromised up to 400% more than the open source Apache web server, despite the fact that Apache is used on around 70% of web sites, and IIS only around 20%.

This is the last part in the series, I promise! If you haven't done so already, I recommend you read parts one, two, three, four and five first.

In the previous 5 parts I have set out a rough guideline for how to introduce open source software into your church. Unfortunately, most of the time you won't be able to go all the way to a total open source setup, so be prepared for that. It will most likely take a few years to make headway beyond getting your pastor to use Firefox or Chrome.

The easiest way to introduce new software and IT systems would be if you are the IT director, or in some other position of influence in your church. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that if you don't have some sort of clout in your church, no one is going to listen to you. In most churches, getting into a position of influence takes a few years, so you'll need to have perseverence and a willingness to play a large role in helping out in your church.

If you are successful in converting your church to OSS, please let everyone know about it, especially us here at Christians in Open Source Software. Make sure you blog about it. We would love to hear about how your church is using open source software.

This is the fifth post in a series on introducing open source software into your church. If you haven't already, read parts one, two, three and four first.

The previous 4 parts of this series dealt with migrating to various pieces of open source software which runs on both Linux and Windows. In this part I'd like to deal with the final big thing: a full-on migration to Linux.

This is the fourth post in a series on introducing open source software into your church. If you haven't already, read parts one, two and three first.

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when migrating to open source software in your church is moving from one e-mail client to another. There are few things more challenging than getting someone to use a new e-mail client - the only exception I can think of is moving people away from Microsoft Office.

This is the third post in a series on introducing open source software into your church. If you haven't already, read parts one and two first.

Last week we talked about introducing open source worship presentation software into your church. Once that has been running smoothely for a few weeks, it's probably a good time to explain to your pastor what open source software is all about.