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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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!
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?
It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.
When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.
Comments
Pretty straightforward
Okay. This should be easy... What's your favourite? Feel free to suck up :) . We don't mind we are definitely biased on this one. If your favourite hub isn't listed and you choose "Other", don't forget to let us know in the comments. And please let us know why you've voted the way you have too.
FSDaily
FSDaily, for now. I'd like some more discussion, but that's not FSDaily's fault (it's the users' fault). Newsvine.com is probably my favorite news hub, but it doesn't have a huge fs section.
--
Andrew Min
http://andrew.timstown.net/dock.htm
I enjoy
I enjoy http://debianlinux.net/planet/ for reading Planet blogs too.
What choice do we have :o)
"Feel free to suck up"? - not much choice there really. None of the others (that I am aware of) are exclusively Free Software news sites and thus FSD wins by default.
Okay, okay it is also very good as well.
How's that for sucking up? :o)
Yeah that's the spirit
:)
Not Free Software?
Excuse me, LXer isn't about Free Software? I beg to differ. LXer is my favorite by far. Then again, I am biased because I am a contributing editor over there :-)
I did say exclusively
I did say "exclusively free software". LXer by it's own strap line is about
"GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source Software".
Okay so it is about Linux but I was referring to the fact that FSDaily is the only one that is (supposed to be) about free software alone. Not open source and not just GNU/Linux (but of course it features heavily.
I like LXer (really) but my point was that the poll is a little loaded.
i love free software
i love free software magazine
Well...
Thanks. You really are getting in the spirit. :)
not very unbiased :)
Not that polls matter very much but it is not very unbiased if the site you're reading is one of the options that can be voted... :)
being a pedant
[pedant mode]
It's not. FSDaily may be run by the same people but it's not the same site.
[/pedant]
LXer!
LXer!
Voting
Well I dont know about voting, but LXer is by far my favorite.
Missing sites and one bad one
I'm sorry by fsdaily has to be one of the WORST sites for news. News is news... and shouldn't be buried by opinion.... go to digg for that.
I guess all of the highly opinionated people from fsdaily are voting it up here... sigh. We live in a society where truth has been exchanged for whatever we think should be truth.
Maybe freesoftwaremagazine should be here instead??
Meaningless poll so far...
Definitely LXer!
Definitely LXer!