The Morevna Project: Anime with Synfig and Blender

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The Morevna Project aims to create an animated film in a modern anime-style retelling a very old Russian folktale known as “Marya Morevna”. It’s a free culture production project pushing the envelope in several ways — entirely using free software tools and releasing under the free Creative Commons Attribution license. The project is purely community-based, without any foundation funding, so they can probably use your help. Joining could be a terrific learning opportunity, whether your interest is in literature, music, animation, or software development.

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Save "Sita Sings the Blues" from the Flash format: can you convert FLA?

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Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues” is becoming a huge critical success, and may even succeed financially, which is unusual for any independent film, but virtually unprecedented for free culture films (“Sita” was released under the CC By-SA). There’s only one sad thing about this for free software fans, and that’s that “Sita” was made using proprietary software, and the “source code” is in a proprietary format: Adobe Flash’s “FLA” format, to be precise. Paley has posted these files on the Internet Archive, but she doesn’t know how to translate them into any free software friendly format (and neither do I). Can you help?

Linux performance: is Linux becoming just too slow and bloated?

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This is an aspect of FOSS that is regaining some measure of interest: for years, it was considered that writing production-ready FOSS meant lean and mean software. However, recent events have shown that, in the case of the Linux kernel, this is no longer exactly true: performance is dropping slowly yet steadily.

How come?

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The Open-PC: one step closer to open-hardware

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At the Gran Canaria Open Desktop Summit in July 2009, the Open-PC project was announced. The statement said the project aimed to “cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community”. Further this PC would use only hardware for which there are free software drivers available. This would be a PC with the minimal compromise required for running a free desktop. In January 2010 the project announced the launch of its first product.

Web code is already open - why not make it free as well

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Oh dear. After the debacle with Microsoft Poland’s apparent racist photoshopping, Microsoft China went and got the company in hot water for allegedly “stealing” code. Yes you read that right: Microsoft and wholesale “theft” of code from another website. Of course it’s not “theft” it’s copyright infringement but tomayto/tomarto. Microsoft confessed blaming a vendor they had worked with. No surprise really but the damage to their name may have already been done. There’s more to discuss here than Microsoft’s already tarnished reputation though. The issue raises some important points in favour of free software and points to why more if not all code should benefit from free licencing.

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Question Copyright's "Minute Memes" challenge copyright rhetoric

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How do you deal with an entrenched content industry that tries to pump its twisted values down your throat with ludicrously illogical emotional appeals? Well, one way is to fight fire with fire by making your own emotional appeals, and trust to the viral amplification of free culture distribution to get the message out. This is the essence of the “minute meme” idea from Question Copyright, and animator Nina Paley has fired the first volley with her one-minute animation “Copying Is Not Theft.”

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Book Review: Geeks Bearing Gifts

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The book Geeks Bearing Gifts, by Ted Nelson is a collage of computing history book. Not only does it directly cover computers, it also covers the origins of ideas that we see in computers. While short, it does go over many interesting things.

Ted Nelson is a writer well-known for promoting his ideas for Project Xanadu, a hypertext system that was designed before the Web. Nelson, a self-proclaimed visionary, has been treated as a fringe figure in the computing industry even though his ideas are well-reasoned and well-thought out.

Mastering a DVD using QDVDAuthor

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There are not a lot of free software options for mastering DVDs. One of the more complete solutions is QDVDAuthor, although it still has a number of rough spots. It’s a front-end to a collection of command-line free software tools that do each of the individual steps involved in going from a collection of digital video files, audio files, and images to a DVD with menus. As such, it’s quite complicated, and not as stable as some software. Still, it is a rewarding experience if you stick with it. Here I’m going to walk through creating a DVD for a collection of animated videos by my new favorite free-culture artist, Nina Paley (partly because the CC By-SA 3.0 license eliminates any questions about copying the material here, and partly because they’re pretty cool in themselves).

The rise of web applications and Chrome: it's all about timescales

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The significant thing about Chrome is that it sets a new way of thinking. It does not mean Chrome will dominate the world. Open standards mean that other companies could provide similar services. It’s the 80% scenario. 80% of what we do could be web based and probably will be in the future. It is near 100% for 80% of the population. It does not then make much sense to have everyone running a desktop OS just in case they might happen to want a specialist application that is dependent on that technology. Some people will still need this, but not the majority.

Cheap SCALE tickets: a present to Free Software Magazine's readers

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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!

Open Science and climategate: The IPCC/CRU needs to take a leaf out of CERN's Book

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This is not the place to debate the immense subject of climate science but it is necessary to say something about “climategate” in order to explain what happens when scientists and politicians collude to distort, hide and even destroy critical (raw) data and methodologies which, unlike the output of CERN, have absolutely colossal financial implications for every man, woman and child on this planet.

Chrome OS and the death of the Free desktop: a response

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The article “Google Chrome OS. Or, how KDE and GNOME managed to shoot each other dead” is intentionally outspoken and controversial. It invites comment and criticism - one can hardly declare two of the best known and most widely used Free Software projects to be “dead” without causing uproar.

A key part of the author’s argument is that Google Chrome OS is likely to be both valuable to the public, and also very widely used. I’d like to contest the first part of this assumption.

Some of the ideas of Google Chrome OS interest me too.

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When Javascript became the world's new CPU

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The computing world is always very unpredictable. That must be why there is a small number of people who make large amounts of money from it: they are in the right (unpredictable) place, at the right (unpredictable) time. Who would have ever guessed that Javascript, a simple scripting language initially thought as a simple means to make web pages “cooler”, would become… drum roll… the world’s new CPU?

I doubt anybody expected it. Even after seeing AJAX (which was ironically started by Microsoft…), very few would have bet that Javascript would become quite so important. Javascript is the only really widespread, multiplatform solution the modern IT world has seen. And yet, it made it. Google Documents is an office suite which runs in your browser — and it’s not even the best one. And that’s only the beginning: the world is absolutely full of software — and I am talking about full blown software — which will run for you wherever you are.

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A talk with Brandon Whichard about Zenoss, the cloud, Amazon's EC2 and more

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The recent announcement of Zenoss of their new EC2 module got my attention. Everybody talks about the cloud, complain about it, fear it, snub it… and then some companies (and people) write free software that works with this cloud and spin some amazing things.

I talked to Brandon Whichard at Zenoss about it, and we ended up having a very interesting conversation about monitoring, the community, the cloud, and the future.

EC2 stands for “Elastic compute”; think of it as a normal Virtual Hosting system, with a difference: you pay according to how many resources you actually use.

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Interviews

Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

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

TM: Nice meeting you Dave. Please introduce yourself to our readers…

Hi Tony, nice to meet you too, I am Dave Mohyla President and founder of dtidata.com, Inc

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.

Interview with Fuat Kircaali, CEO of Sys-Con

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

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Mark agreed on releasing an interview about anything and everything

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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.

The interview

Tell us about your early days Mark. You started Thawte, which eventually became extremely successful and was bought by VeriSign. Well, what was the most exciting moment for you, during the development of Thawte?

Most emailed

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

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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 strippers in Perth, strippers in Sydney, strippers in Brisbane, strippers in Melbourne. Yes, I would classify the link quite work-safe.

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

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

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Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. 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, Super Shareware, 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).

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

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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.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

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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.

Top 10 Free Software Daily stories this week! Plus a SNEAK PREVIEW of FSDaily's new site

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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!

Zenoss: a great system monitoring program which tries to do everything right

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I was happily hanging out in the sysadmin room of a major ISP around here in Western Australia (no, I wasn’t meant to be there, if you really want to know!). Steve, the senior sysadmin in charge of the place, showed me a computer screen (running Vista, but I won’t comment on that) and said “Oh yeah, I’m sure you know about this…”. “Yeah, I know Google maps” I answered. He looked at me embarrassed. “Err… actually, we use Zenoss server monitoring here… look close. That’s our VPN!” It was a map of their server in Australia. There were green lines between them.