Top 10 Free Software Daily stories this week!

Top 10 Free Software Daily stories this week!


Tue, 2008-05-13 06:58 -- admin

You get the best free software news at FSDaily... because YOU decide what's important. Here are the top 10 FSDaily stories from the last week as voted by the members. Don't like 'em? Think something's missing? Want to know more? Head to FSDaily and get voting!

Top 10 stories:

  1. gpl vs. skype back in court --"tomorrow the high district court of munich will hear skype argue against the validity of the gpl." Read more...

  2. 13 useful Ubuntu tips & tricks --1. Play youtube videos directly in Totem Movie Player (Hardy): Read more...

  3. Running Only on Open-Source Software --Open-source software has found increasing acceptance within IT for infrastructure application - but many may still wonder, 'Is it possible to run a company almost entirely with open-source offerings?' Read more...

  4. New Richard Stallman Video in Manchester --The newly formed Manchester Free software Group hosted Richard Stallman in Manchester or the first of May. Talking on the subject of Free Software in ethics and practice", RMS drew a crowd of more than 300 people to the event, run in association with the BCS and IET. Read more...

  5. Richard Stallman: Free Software in Ethics and Practice --"In 1984, Richard Stallman founded a social movement known as the free software movement. The free software movement fights for the ability to control our computers as a cooperative community (as opposed to being under the rule of software proprietors where users have only as much control over their computers as the proprietor allows). Read more...

  6. VIA Gives 16,434 Lines Of OSS Code --Back at the Linux Foundation Austin Summit, VIA had announced plans to develop a new open-source initiative in a similar fashion what AMD has been doing. However, in the weeks following that they haven't done much for the open-source community. Read more...

  7. The 25 Year Old BSD Bug --"A few days ago, Marc Balmer, OpenBSD developer, received an email from an OpenBSD user. [...] Despite his initial reaction, he decided to dig deeper into this case, and he uncovered a bug that had been sitting in the code of all BSDs (including Mac OS X), including a lot of old releases. He confirmed the bug was already in 4.2BSD, released in August of 1983." Read more...

  8. Gzip, Bzip2 and Lzma compared --There has recently been a discussion about GNU switching from bzip2 to lzma for their distributed tarballs. They still offer gzip tarballs as an alternative. However, Gentoo has been preferring the bzip2 tarballs mostly due to the improved pack ratio of bzip2. Unfortunately, the software for lzma is not (yet) as mature as some would like. Read more...

  9. Ballnux on HP Laptops: Fail --When Hewlett-Packard first announced that it had made SLED 10 its choice for a low-cost laptops, we were not very surprised because of the solidarity there is between Microsoft and H-P (Dell raises some doubts too). Read more...

  10. Debian GNU/Linux SuiteTelecentro: millions of users for the digital society every year --The Brazilian Debian GNU / Linux SuiteTelecentro benefits more than 4 millions users every year.

The Brazilian Debian GNU / Linux SuiteTelecentro is a custom solution which is currently being deployed in the Digital Inclusion Program of Banco do Brasil. SuiteTelecentro is used in approximately 2000 telecentres and computer rooms. Read more...

Thanks to cpoliticas, hotice, switchpin, timmydobson, can.axis, GadgetGeek, serdar, komrad, and andremachado for these stories!

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Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.

TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.

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Free Open Document label templates

If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.

Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!

So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?

More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.

When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.

Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?

Fun articles

Santa Claus - the most successful open source project

It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.

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Editorial

When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.

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