Top 10 Free Software Daily stories this week!

Top 10 Free Software Daily stories this week!


Mon, 2008-04-28 02:40 -- 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. Open Source ERP Grows Up --ERP has been a kind of final frontier for open source software. But now more IT leaders at midsize and smaller businesses are saying yes to open source software for ERP systems that pump the very heart of the business. Read more...

  2. Sun wants to free up the rest of Java, have it ship with Linux --Sun says it is looking to open source a few remaining Java components so it can ship unencumbered with Linux, and hopefully encourage more Linux developers to use Java. Read more...

  3. Alex Brown Admits "Microsoft Office 2007 Fails OOXML Conformance Tests" --This takes the cake. Alex Brown has just admitted on his Griffin Brown blog and further to ZDNET UK's Peter Judge that Microsoft Office 2007 has failed two OOXML conformance tests he ran. First ZDNET: Read more...

  4. South Africa adopts ODF as a national standard --The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO. Read more...

  5. Bill Gates Ridicules the GPL While Novell Mops Up with Software Patents --There is no substantial news here other than development of discussions, which seem to spread fairly fast from one blog to another blog and soon onto the press. To repeat criticisms from yesterday about Novell’s announcement on China [1, 2], Novell and Microsoft keep spreading software patents to all parts of the world (never mind the legality), using SUSE Linux (Ballnux). Read more...

  6. Green PCs: CPU frequency scaling in Linux --Electricity bills got higher again? Does your computer waste too many power cycles? Or perpahs you just don’t feel green enough? In any case, this article is for you! You’ll learn how to save energy and CPU cycles with your Linux box, no matter how old it is. Read more...

  7. 20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia --"Wikipedia is without a doubt, one of World Wide Web’s wonders. I myself used Wikipedia to search information on many things, from education to entertainment. There are many cool things that you can learn from the vast amount of information inside Wikipedia. Thus in this post, I have listed down 20 little known ways and tools to use Wikipedia..." Read more...

  8. How Microsoft and Novell Make GNU/Linux More Expensive to Purchase Than Windows --Novell’s recent news about China [1, 2, 3] is pretty significant because this shows what tricks Microsoft and Novell hope to make more widespread and prevalent around the world, not just in Asia. It’s a symbolic start that illustrates just why Novell has become dangerous to GNU/Linux adoption (contrary to common belief). Read more...

  9. Geneva Schools will Switch to Linux and Open Source Software --About 70,000 students and their 7,000 teachers in the Geneva school district will gradually be moving to Open Source. The decision to move to Open Source was taken by the Geneva Public School District in March 2006. Eventually all teachers will be supplied with laptops running Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Read more...

  10. Open-source films attack Hollywood --The Star Wreck Studios team, based in Tampere, Finland, has built a virtual studio for Iron Sky and an open-source platform that gives anybody the chance to make a film at no cost. They have recruited American Stephen Lee as managing director, and the chairman of the board is John Buckman, mostly known as the founder of Magnatune, a record label he created in Berkeley, Calif., in 2003. Read more...

Thanks to estherschindler, ilamont, bogdanbiv, mark, komrad, extra, can.axis, JRepin, and giantrobot 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).

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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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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.

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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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