The free software world is experiencing another legal storm. This time, the trouble doesn’t involve a big company attacking a free software project—this time, you could probably call it a “civil war”. A former contributor to Pligg (a very important free software content management system for creating digg-style sites) intends to take Pligg’s developers to court. I managed to talk to Eric Heikkinen, the co-founder of Pligg, and ask him a few questions…

TM: Hello Eric. Please tell our readers a little about yourself and Pligg.

The powers that be at Free Software Magazine decided to be a media sponsor of LinuxWorld Expo UK at Olympia, London held on the 25th and 26th of October. As I make a habit of going to that expo, and I also write for the magazine when I remember to hand articles in, I was contacted and discovered I was to be handed a “press” badge for the event. So, on the day, I set off early from Cambridge to enjoy the privileges of my new super-status.

I was lucky enough to interview Jon “Maddog” Hall, one of the speakers of the upcoming LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in London.

TM: Your name is so well-known that you don’t even need an introduction. How are you keeping yourself busy these days?

There is a tradition amongst computer game aficionados which may be little known to people accustomed to proprietary games. This activity is called mod’ing—making small changes to a game to customize the play experience. Without a game’s source code, such changes are extremely difficult to implement. Games licensed as free software, on the other hand, are quite amenable to mods. This article presents two example mods for single-player games and proceeds to discuss mod’ing in general.

It may be news to you that it is usually easy to tinker with the source code for games

A new, full-featured free software application pops its head into the VoIP world, and it nominates itself as the most serious competitor of Skype. Its name is Wengophone.

What is Wengophone?

Figure 1: Wengophone “NG” 2.0 beta running on a Debian testing

In short: Wengophone is a communication-over-IP application. With Wengophone you can:

• place voice calls to other Wengophone users
• create audio conferences with up to three users
• place video calls to other Wengophone users

Kevin Carmony is the president and CEO of Linspire. Kevin kindly agreed to answer a few questions, and talk about his new project: Freespire.

In Free Software Magazine, we choose to use the terms “free software” (rather than Open Source) and “GNU/Linux” (rather than Linux). However, this is an interview and answers will be left unedited.

TM: Thanks for the interview Kevin! Well, first of all tell us something about you and Linspire…

“Former Soviet Union” is a term that often makes people think of a somehow original concept of freedom and democracy. You can observe some heritage looking, for instance, at the facts of today’s Belarus [1,2] and Turkmenistan [3,4].

Anyway, even there, people always have had the will to express their ideas and opinions. Think, for instance, of the samizdat [5], or of the dissidents.

Free Software Magazine is obviously about free software. Many readers may also know that we create our magazine using free software. But, not only do we use free software, we also develop it.

I have developed the LaTeX class that we use to typeset the individual articles and each complete issue. Even though the class isn’t very well written (it is getting there!), whenever someone asks me to provide our LaTeX class, I do send a complete starter’s kit for turning LaTeX into a magazine typesetter; well… sort of.

Yes, I am a big LaTeX fan.

It might surprise you, but there is a time limit on free software. Clause 3b of the GPL states that the written offer of source is good for three years. However, there is no dictate on the turn-around time between the request of source code, and its deliverance. Has anyone spotted a problem yet?

Free software, not just Linux, is a major problem for Microsoft. It’s a big mistake thinking they don’t understand free software, or its mechanics.

They understand it all too well, and they don’t like it - not one little bit!

The problem Microsoft has with free software is that it benefits the customer directly, not the software IP holders. The ways to make money from free software are:

• to use it (Google, Amazon etc.);
• to service the guys using it (RedHat, IBM, SuSE etc.);
• to include it as part of your product (Linksys etc).

Fuat Kircaali is the founder and CEO of SYS-CON Media, the company which publishes “Linux Business News” among its 16 i-technology titles.

I am upset. If you write quite a bit, you learn a rule: you must never, ever write when you are upset. In such a state, clarity simply goes out the window and what you think is a masterpiece turns out to be… a pile of incomprehensible, misspelled crap.

I am doing it anyway. A disclaimer: I’m publishing this article “as is” - no spell check, no Dave Guard turning my atrocious English into… well, English.

(Actually, this article has had minor editing after publication - D.G.)

I am deeply upset and saddened by O’Gara’s article on Pamela Jones of GrokLaw.

Tony Mobily was recently interviewed by Aaron Klemm at NewsForge.

You can see his interview here. The interview explains important points about Free Software Magazine.

Enjoy!

All major Linux distributions include a lot of free software applicationsand libraries, which turn Linux into a powerful desktop or server.

Red Hat in particular has done a great job in including numerous applications and libraries which work right out of the box, without much tweaking required.

This is a screenshot tour of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0.

Enjoy!

Terminal Server Client

Terminal Server Client for connecting to Windows Servers

Software patents are the software project equivalent of land mines: Each design decision carries a risk of stepping on a patent, which can destroy your project.

This article will try to give you some guidelines on writing articles. It is not meant to set down laws about how you must write; they are just recommendations. This article might be particularly useful for people who are new to writing for a magazine.

It is good to keep in mind the criteria that the editors follow when revising your article.