Sponsors

Sponsors


Premium Sponsors

Companies that make financial donations to FSM

Canonical (Ubuntu)

Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the best Linux distribution for the desktop users. Canonical has donated money to Free Software Magazine, effectively making it possible for us to pay our authors.

Packt

Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike. Packt believes in Open Source. When they sell a book written on an Open Source project, they pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our open source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the open source project the book was written on.

Other Sponsors

Companies that donate in other ways

Free Software Magazine owes thanks to its sponsors. They provide us with the resources that help to make Free Software Magazine possible.

General sponsors

3FN

3FN provides us with a _lot_ of bandwidth and a real server.

Linux Magazine

In Linux Magazine, you'll find the tools, tutorials, reviews, and concrete technical discussions you'll need to unlock the secrets of Linux - and not just from the server side. Linux Magazine brings you solutions for real users with Linux on real desktops. Each issue comes with a full Linux distribution or other valuable software collection on a bonus DVD. Our DVDs include full versions of major distributions such as Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, and Debian.

OpenHosting

OpenHosting provides fantastic virtual servers based on Linux. They provide us with support servers.

Publishers

The following publishers have agreed to donate their books which we use as payment to our writers.

Apress

Apress L.P., based in Berkeley, California, is the fastest-growing publisher of technical books in the world today. It is dedicated to meeting the needs of IT professionals, from novice to expert. Apress is dedicated to publishing titles of the highest quality and has compiled a team of authors that is a "Who's Who" of the high-tech industry.

Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall

Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall is a leading publisher of high-quality and timely information for programmers, developers, engineers, and system administrators. Our mission is to provide educational materials about new technologies and new approaches to current technologies written by the leading authorities. We are a division of Pearson Technology Group and our readers and authors benefit from our global resources.

O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media is the premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies. The company's books, conferences, and web sites bring to light the knowledge of technology innovators. O'Reilly books, known for the animals on their covers, occupy a treasured place on the shelves of the developers building the next generation of software. O'Reilly conferences and summits bring alpha geeks and forward-thinking business leaders together to shape the revolutionary ideas that spark new industries. From the Internet to XML, open source, .NET, Java, and web services, O'Reilly puts technologies on the map.

No Starch Press

Founded in 1994, No Starch Press is one of the few remaining independent computer book publishers. We publish the finest in geek entertainment ~@~T unique books on technnology, with a focus on Open Source, security, hacking, programming, and alternative operating systems. Our titles have personality, our authors are passionate, and our books tackle topics that people care about. At No Starch Press, quality and content still matter.

Please remember to support the companies that make Free Software Magazine possible!

Most forwarded

Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

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.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

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).

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

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.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

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.

Most emailed

Free Open Document label templates

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

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

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!

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

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?

Fun articles

Santa Claus - the most successful open source project

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.

Most emailed

Editorial

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.

Free Software Magazine uses Apollo project management software and CRM for its everyday activities!