Free Software Magazine will go blank on the 18th of January
Free Software Magazine will shut down on January 18th to protest against SOPA. We am not sure what we will be putting on the site yet. However, the contents won't be there.
Announcements
FOSDEM 2012, Hardware Security and Cryptography, Call for Papers
FOSDEM 2012 will take place in Brussels, the heart of EU.
This is a call for talks and presentations that will take place in the Security devroom at FOSDEM 2012. Do you develop software that can do HTTPS queries? Can it use keys and certificates on a smart card? Does your service use RSA keys for signing? Can it work with hardware keys? Are you interested in protecting your private keys like Three Letter Organizations or do you want to roll your own proper PKI with a smaller than five or six digit budget? How can we make cryptographic hardware Just Work with any application that uses crypto? The devroom is the place to share experiences and learn.
Let us Pray: Yea Verily, Filesharing is a Religion. Official.
You've just got to love those crazy Swedes. Liberal, progressive, cool and politically correct. What's not to like? They've excelled themselves this time though. As dedicated filesharers they applied, and succeeded at the third attempt, to register filesharing as a religion.
Allwinner A10: A GPL-compliant computer for $15
This is getting seriously ridiculous. Relative to the power and feature sets computers are getting cheaper and cheaper. But they don't come much cheaper than the Raspberry Pi, a $25 computer designed specifically to encourage children to program. My colleague, Ryan Cartwright wrote about it right here on FSM.
Raspbery Pis are in the oven!
Following the news that the Raspberry Pi foundation was auctioning 10 of the beta model B boards on eBay comes the news a lot of people have been waiting for: they've started manufacturing the production models! The Raspberry Pi blog has all the details.
Hackerspace Global Grid to make an Uncensorable internet in space?
The wilder shores of the internet are awash with bizarre stories but the one I'm about to relate just has to be one of the most extraordinary things I have ever heard in relation to FOSS. You will have heard about SOPA and the reaction against it in the open source community including petitions, boycotts of GoDaddy etc. Look, that's small potatoes. What these guys are plannng is out of this world. Literally. Read on.
Free Software Magazine is more exciting now
If you happen to be around here a lot, you probably noticed that things have changed a little: last month, we released our new web site (which is the one you are looking at right now) with a much more friendly look. If you happen to have a phone or a tablet, you would have also noticed that Free Software Magazine is now very phone and tablet friendly.
That's the dress. What about the magazine itself?
Nominate your favourite free software project for Packt's 2011 Open Source Awards
The great guys at Packt Publishing just released the details for theirs 2011 Open Source awards.
We will forgive their embracing of the term "Open Source", especially since they've given _more than $100,000 for their awards.
The categories are:
What's happened to the Bizarre Cathedral?
As you know I draw/produce the Bizarre Cathedral cartoon strips for Free Software Magazine. Lately you may have noticed it's slowed to a bit of a crawl and almost a halt. This is just to let you know that tBC has not ended and is forthcoming. Unfortunately I've had some personal stuff which has taken up more of my time than I wished.
FOSDEM 2011 - A Personal Account (with all personal details withheld)
FOSDEM - a geek trip to Brussels. Going abroad to experience different cultures. Or at least, a chance to eat chips, suffer rain, and watch American TV in a different country.
If I had to sum up this year, then the theme was Annoyances. Having been every year for the last ten, maybe I’m just too old and crabby for these things now. But it seemed like the zealots, the idiots, the chavs, and the social retards had all teamed up to irk me at any point in the weekend when I was beginning to find some peace.
But let us begin at the beginning.
Free Software News like never before: 24 September 2010 to 4 October 2010
Seabird is a new phone concept. Its main aim is to show you how a really cool video about a really amazing device that doesn't exist yet can be used to talk about a very amazing browser, Firefox Mobile for Android, that doesn't exist yet. What's left to be seen, is whether you exist.
Free Software News like never before: 17 September 2010 to 23 September 2010
Seabird is a new phone concept. Its main aim is to show you how a really cool video about a really amazing device that doesn't exist yet can be used to talk about a very amazing browser, Firefox Mobile for Android, that doesn't exist yet. What's left to be seen, is whether you exist.
Microsoft's Live spaces bloggers will become Wordpress Apparently, the import procedure might consist in a few people working overtime for one day at the most, to move the few dozens users over from Live Spaces to Wordpress.
Free Software News 9 September 2010 to 16 september 2010
The free software news review for people who just don't have time not to laugh.
You can unsubscribe from this at any time, by replying "Mercy on me". Or, you could send me a good RSS source of news to make fun o^H^H^H^H^Hreport.
Magento is now officially available in their Magento mobile version. Magento is very powerful, but it's also the best way to turn a server into an overloaded, underpaid slave if you are not careful with the specs. Their mobile version is reported to respect your PDA's worker rights. In the meantime, for the sleepless, learn how to manage orders using Magento.
Newsletter, 3 September 2010
Dear Readers,
As you are subscribers to Free Software Magazine, chances are you already know my name. Up to this point, I made sure I would send "newsletters" that were always articles that I considered important and that felt I wanted to share with you. This time, I have three things I really wanted to say:
Packt launch the fifth annual awards for free and open source software
Packt publishing is now organising the 2010 Open Source Awards. The winning projects will actually get a monetary prize (which I am sure will be most welcome).
I am always a little skeptical of these awards. However, I have to say that Packt really have proved themselves here: they started with the Open Source CMS Award a few years back, and they have now expanded it to several different categories.
Go and check out their web site, and make sure you nominate the projects you think should win!
Italian Free Software Conference
The fourth Italian Free Software Conference will take place in Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) on June 11-12th. The main language of the conference is Italian.
The Call for Papers is due to expire on April 30th. Please find it here.
Whether you are attending or not, please help us and spread the word.
FOSDEM Diary - 2010
FOSDEM 2010 - A Personal Account
(with all personal details withheld)
FOSDEM - a geek trip to Brussels. Going abroad to experience different cultures. Or at least, a chance to eat chips, suffer rain, and watch American TV in a different country.
Cheap SCALE tickets: a present to Free Software Magazine's readers
Hello everbody. The title says it all. The good people at SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo offered our readers a super-discount: just mention the coupon code FSM8X and receive a 40% (forty percent!) discount on your SCALE tickets! Merry Christmas, and enjoy SCALE!
Update on the Italian Perl Workshop 2009
As recently announced, the fifth Italian Perl Workshop will take place in Pisa (Italy) on October 22nd and 23rd. 120 people subscribed already, and more are expected by the first day of the Workshop. A full list of the accepted talks is available.
Atlanta Linux Fest 2009
I interviewed Nick Ali, one of the great minds behind the Atlanta LinuxFest 2009. See what he has to tell us, and why you shouldn't miss it if you're lucky enough to be nearby on September 19th, 2009!
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Most forwarded
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.
Most emailed
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?
