Top 10 Free Software Daily stories this week!

Top 10 Free Software Daily stories this week!


Sat, 2008-01-05 04:36 -- 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. GPLv3 - The Year in Review --The Year in Review Report is intended to give you a summary of what has happened to the GPLv3 over the past 6 months, and review some of our highlights for the year. Read more...

  2. 2008: The Year that MS Loses the Notebook Wars? --Face it, now that the dam has broken with the OLPC, the EEE PC and now the prospect of Everex’s Cloudbook coming out in January at CES, Microsoft is really feeling the heat from Linux in this market. It also doesn’t help that people have reacted to Microsoft’s UMPC hardware offering with either loathing, disbelief ($1100 for THAT?!) or just plain ignored it. [Read more...](http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/2008_The_Year_that_MS_Loses_the_Notebook_Wars

  3. 3 down, 1 to go: Warner Music Group drops DRM --Warner Music has bent beneath the force of the anti-DRM winds sweeping the globe. The label will now offer its complete catalog, DRM-free, through Amazon's new MP3 store. Read more...

  4. Why are people still installing Windows on the EEE PC? --If it’s easy to learn and easy to use, how come people are still installing Windows on the EEE PC? Read more...

  5. Happy Public Domain Day! --via digitalcitizen => Public Domain Day challenges: what effect does copyright power have on us socially? Read more...

  6. Has GNOME finally killed off KDE in the Ubuntu interface wars? --Things are not looking good for KDE, following the news that KDE will not be getting long term support (LTS) whereas GNOME will according to Canonical. Read more...

  7. Ogg Theora+Vorbis as default for <video> scuttled in HTML5 spec. Who benefits? --"...'Ogg' is a wrapper that ties together 'Theora' encoded video and 'Vorbis' encoded sound. Together, Ogg Theora+Vorbis give users a way to see movies on your computer. Ogg Vorbis+Theora are not known to be encumbered by any patents (the only applicable patent on Theora’s predecessor, called 'VP3', was licensed for everyone to use in any way they want). Ogg Theora+Vorbis are implementable on nearly all modern computers. There is free software (zero-cost and freely to sharable and modifiable) to make and play Ogg Vorbis+Theora movies. Ogg Vorbis+Theora are a great basis for interoperability and a fine choice to recommend in any standard that uses multimedia files precisely because everyone can use Ogg Theora+Vorbis..." Read more...

  8. Universities Worldwide Offer Free Open Courseware --Boston, MA (AHN) - More than 100 universities worldwide - including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame - have joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in a consortium of schools promoting open courseware. Read more...

  9. Liberating Macbook Pro --I’ve always wanted to install Ubuntu on my Mac. So I decided to give myself little christmas present and finally get it done. Here’s my experiences with running Linux on Intel Mac. Read more...

  10. Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software, MacArthur-Certified Genius, BY MICHAEL GROSS, Interviewed in 1999 --"Richard Stallman was reading computer books before he'd ever seen a computer. When the Sixties Revolution was running out of steam, he was liberating MIT computers from behind locked doors and helping set off the next great Boomer movement. Though he disdained hippies and radicals in his youth, today, as the leader of the Free Software Movement, he's a long-haired rebel coder-writer with a cause, and an idealistic thorn in the side of the cyber world's killer-app capitalists..." Read more...

Thanks to peacemaker, switchpin, C733tus, sendar, can.axis, greengrass, sharkswithlazers, and bluecheese 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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