Hello readers, and welcome once again to Free Software Magazine 's fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software... AND the top 10 FSDaily announcements for this week! Enjoy!
General announcements
Top ten Free Software Daily stories this week
Heretic and Hexen liberated! --After several years of trying, members of the Doom community have succeeded in getting the source code to Heretic and its sequel, Hexen to be re-released as free software under the GNU General Public License. Read more...
GNU Planet! --"You can keep up to date with all your favorite GNU projects, via their individual RSS news feeds, but if you'd prefer to see a wider view, be sure to check out the new GNU Planet..." Read more...
When RFC's Attack - More Laughs From Cyberspace --How to bypass your firewall by making any session appear to be http. A joke, but also real ;) Read more...
Mombuntu - Ubuntu For Your Mom! --You might be wondering why I am suggesting an Linux distro for your mom. Well Linux is no longer the stronghold of geeks. Distros like Ubuntu have made using Linux as simple as using Windows. Here are reasons why Ubuntu will be perfect for your mom, who's needs are basic. Read more...
Learning the craft --Jeremy Allison of Samba on learning the craft of programming Read more...
Free media and free software help keep you free to run your life --"Dave Cross encourages the dependence upon proprietary software by complaining that the Free Software Foundation’s recent 25th birthday video should have been distributed in non-free formats so people could see the video..." Read more...
Large Hadron Collider - powered by Linux --The most powerful physics project in the history of the known universe - The $10 Billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC)- shot its first light speed beam this morning around its 27 km circuit. Beyond the 20 years it took to build and half of all the world's astrophysicists, it also takes another key ingredient to make LHC work -- Linux. Read more...
Why Mozilla is committed to Gecko as WebKit popularity grows --In the wake of Google's release of the new WebKit-based Chrome browser, some technology enthusiasts are beginning to wonder if the days are numbered for Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. Read more...
Acer in Australia: Dirty Microsoft Tricks Against GNU/Linux --The Australian authorities appear to be manipulated into exclusion of GNU/Linux in schools. Read more...
The way that will bring more users to GNU/Linux --How the documentation is important to the GNU/Linux world? Why we need a documentation? Basically this is crucial point for any project. The documentation is something like a gate to the project, new users go through that gate to enter in the project and if that gate is broken the user could go in the wrong direction. Read more...
Thanks to C733tus, can.axis, eggixyz, giantrobot, cendrars, switchpin, komrad, and Mark for these stories!
Latest content
pam prevention with Exim and greylistd - Part 1 --By Ryan Cartwright. Traditional methods of spam protection involve using Bayesian detection rules (usually via SpamAssassin) on messages after they have been accepted by your server. Read more...
The Bizarre Cathedral - 22 --By Tony Mobily and Ryan Cartwright. Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. Read more...
** The Large Hadron Collider switches on. If it's the end of the world, it will be powered by GNU/Linux** --By Gary Richmond. You know a science story is big when an experiment gets first or second billing on the main evening news—and it’s not even a slow news day. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is up and running as I write and as far as I can tell I’m still here, so it looks like the doomsayers were a little premature. Read more...
Copyleft has no impact on project activity?! --By Terry Hancock. Recently, I collected some data from Sourceforge, hoping to find evidence for the importance of copyleft. But I found something surprising: although there’s plenty of evidence that many developers believe in the power of copyleft, the one measure I could derive of how much copyleft actually works showed that copyleft made no difference whatsoever! If true, this means a lot of free software’s social theory is wrong and many things will have to be re-thought. Read more...
Stephen Fry wishes GNU/Linux a happy 25th birthday --By Terry Hancock. I was surprised and delighted to find this video presentation by one of my favorite performers, Stephen Fry, called “Happy Birthday to GNU”, on the GNU project homepage. Read more...
Linux: has the horse bolted? --By Laurie Langham. Richard Stallman wants to popularise the term GNU/Linux instead of using the currently popular term Linux. He correctly states that the term Linux, besides being thoroughly inaccurate, totally fails to introduce new users to the legal and philosophical concepts that underlie the basis of the GNU/Linux OS; but is it feasible to make such a change at this late stage? Read more...
The Bizarre Cathedral - 21 --By Ryan Cartwright and Tony Mobily. Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. Read more...
Six impossible things before breakfast --By Terry Hancock. Most of the assumptions on which our present economic system is based are based on nothing much better than “conventional wisdom”: which is a fancy way of saying “no basis at all, really, it just sounds plausible”. But sometimes conventional wisdom is wrong, and that’s what this series has been about: six things that ought to be impossible if conventional wisdom were correct. Read more...
Google's Chrome, Mozilla, Explorer, rendering engines: let the war begin --By Gary Richmond. Chrome is in fact a reference to the imminent release of Google’s entry into the browser market. Apparently, the launch was accidentally “leaked” by a Google employee who was a little piggy fingered with the send button on his e-mail client. Read more...
Reminders
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