Over the last few years, I’ve come to accept the fact that regardless of my attempts to quit this job, I am fundamentally a programmer. I wrote a book about security, I am the Editor In Chief of Free Software Magazine, but in the end I am still just a programmer. A lucky one, I must admit.

I had the chance to interview Thomas Hansen, who recently announced the Gaia Programming Contest (€10,000 reward). Here are his enlightening answers!

TM: Hello Thomas. Please tell us something about you and about the company running the contest!

Free software (eventually) works better than proprietary software; why?

Making dramatic statements always implies a need to “back” them (or “prove” them) with facts, data, statistics. However, a statement like “Free software works better than proprietary software” is so broad, anybody can prove it and disprove it at will. It depends on which angle you take, which area, and what your comparison terms are. However, I would like to add an important keyword to that sentence: “Free software works better than proprietary software”. That easily-missed word shyly hiding in brackets makes all the difference.

Before you start shouting at me, I know. Nestcape Navigator will soon be no more. After many years of faithful service, and before Firefox and Flock were a mere twinkle in a web developer’s glinting eye, AOL has announced that the browser will be retired at the beginning of February and put out to pasture in its nonage. You might be thinking that installing a browser with a death sentence hanging over its head is about as sensible as a portable defibrillator in a funeral parlour, but read on.

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!

Are you still using Microsoft Office 2003? If so, get ready to have problems opening older file formats with it once SP3 is applied: Microsoft has decided to disable file parsers for the older file types (Word 95 and older, Wordperfect, Lotus etc.) by default. Why? Security reasons.

Many moons ago I tried using Windows for a week to see how the other half live. Despite my thorough openness and fairness, I still got criticized! (Well, it wouldn’t be the free software community if people didn’t, I suppose!) So, when I needed I new PC I decided to take the plunge and buy one. For the first time ever I bought a PC from a shop, instead of building it myself. Consequently, it came with Vista pre-installed. So I decided to spend a week with it to see what had changed…

Jabber is the only mainstream free (as in speech) instant messaging protocol. Unfortunately, most Jabber clients for GNU/Linux only provide options for messaging and group chats, overlooking the audio chatting portion of Jabber (powered by the Google-funded libjingle). Enter Jabbin, the free Qt-based Jabber VoIP client.

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!

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!

Lately I’ve been working on an updated version of the comparison between Skype and Wengophone I wrote on June 2006 for Free Software Magazine. While I was working on it, I spotted a number of rather worrying signs:

I’ve mentioned before the recent move among UK charities to become more “professional”, which is often translated as “do what the corporates do” (particularly when it comes to IT). One reason for this is the dreaded bespoke friend-of-a-friend database. These “databases” (and I use the term loosely) are often written by a student, with tenuous links to the charity, looking for a final year project and usually in Microsoft Access and they are usually awful to maintain.

Anyone who runs more than one operating system has had to deal with GNU GRUB (the GRand Unified Bootloader). Grub is the tool that allows you to pick which operating system to book when you turn your computer on. But you can do a ton more than that by configuring it and derailing from the standard configuration. Unfortunately, until recently users were forced to open up cryptic config files in text editors and try and figure out what to do based on the comments (or, more diligently, by reading man pages).