In just a few days, the FCC will close its deliberations on Net Neutrality to outside comment.
If the giant telcos, like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, get their way, the FCC will abandon Net Neutrality and allow them to play favourites with big online companies who are willing to pay them the biggest bribes for favoured online treatment.
This will mean that everyone who can't pay will receive prejudiced online treatment compared to those who can.
Here's the first cryptic crossword from Free Software Magazine. Most clues should lead you to words somehow associated with free software, but one or two "everyday" words have been slipped in to act as decoys :-)
We started Free Software Magazine about 3 years ago with two goals in mind: publish fantastic articles about free software, and pay people to write good articles. We believe we managed to reach the first goal. As far as payment, it took us a lot longer than expected.Our authors right now get a book from one of our sponsoring publishers. But, before now, we never managed to pay cash for articles.
This has finally changed.
Free Software Magazine now officially pays for articles. I shamelessly admit that I am writing this sentence with intense satisfaction.
Okay so our new forums are going well so far, but we decided we needed a forum dedicated to asking all those difficult questions. You know, the ones everyone has an opinion on. So here it is The big free software questions. Here's a list of the topics up for debate so far:
As you all know, we are now proud to have a Drupal 5 website, and we are happily installing features left, right and centre for your enjoyment. And our most recent new adventure in features is... FORUMS! That's right, ladies and gentlemen... want to know the answer to a free software question that's been bugging you? Want to help a newbie? Want to engage with likeminded individuals? Look no further than the third menu item from the left, just below the Free Software Magazine logo! It's that easy!
So, want to know what's on offer?
Dear readers,
We are developing a new, funky Karma module for Drupal. We are doing it for Free Software Magazine, although we will release it under the GPL.
However, we need help. Tony, who is programming the module, doesn't know anything about Javascript and the module really needs to have some basic Ajax abilities. Basically, users need to be able to rate a comment by picking an item in a select box, and the server needs to receive the information without reloading the page.
I’ve been telling Tony for a long time now that we need to be more transparent. You know... let our readers know what’s really going on behind the scenes. But he gets so busy with all his work (until recently he’s been working three full-time jobs... ah the life of a workaholic) and I’ve been reluctant to start something that will mean even more work for me (ah the life of a slacker). But there have been some negative—yet understandable—misconceptions circulating amongst some of our readers (in particular lately) and it’s probably time someone made it clear what we are all about...
Issue 16 of FSM came out a few days ago. The PDF version went out as well, but... out of the window! A lot of people, including myself, cried and asked for it to come back.
I am now writing this open letter to Tony, asking him to just discard many of the requests that wanted the PDF back.
I am the founder of Free Software Magazine. My role has always been important, but you must keep in mind that FSM exists thanks to several key people who worked hard on this project.
My latest editorial has received countless comments about us dropping the PDFs. You can see them yourself - some of them are reasonable, while other were along the lines of "I want a PDF version, and I want it right now. If not, I will never be back to this site ever again".
Dear readers,
As you know, we have been working very hard over the last 2 years todeliver the best magazine ever. Now, we need your help.
We are proud of what we achieved. We now have more than 750 articles onour web site, and all of them are released under a free license. Manyarticles are key references for Linux users and developers. Right now,we feel that we are flying.
However, as I said, we need your help. If you have a blog, or if youknow somebody with a popular web site, please ask them to have a look here.
Thank you!
This “thank you” is dedicated to all of the subscribers who are now reading issue 3 of Free Software Magazine. You have decided that it was worthwhile paying money for Free Software Magazine and have placed your trust in our project.
I appreciate your help, and I promise that we will do our very best to not disappoint.
This magazine was inspired by a conversation I had with a great friend of mine called Massimo. I said to Massimo “I think it would be great to start a magazine. It’s my ideal job, and I think I know what the world needs right now. It’s a pity there’s no money in publishing, and I’m not willing to run a magazine that doesn’t pay it’s contributors well...”. His answer was very simple: “Tony, there’s money everywhere, as long as you do something good and promote it well”. Well, seeing that he has a successful business, I thought I would listen.
I would have liked to start this editorial defining what free software is, but I found myself writing – and deleting – my sentences time and again.
The problem is that free software means different things to different people. To some, free software is a way to save money in licensing fees and technical support. To some, it’s a way of sharing their skills (which they do for different reasons: research, personal development, money, etc). And to others free software is a movement, a way of life.
This magazine was inspired by a conversation I had with a great friend of mine called Massimo. I said to Massimo “I think it would be great to start a magazine. It’s my ideal job, and I think I know what the world needs right now. It’s a pity there’s no money in publishing, and I’m not willing to run a magazine that doesn’t pay it’s contributors well...”. His answer was very simple: “Tony, there’s money everywhere, as long as you do something good and promote it well”. Well, seeing that he has a successful business, I thought I would listen.
Writing this editorial is much harder than I thought it would be. I made the mistake of leaving it last, and now the problem is that I have written so much over the last three months for this magazine (articles, emails, plans, business letters, personal diaries...) that I can’t think of anything I haven’t already said at least ten times.
Well, I have to start from somewhere, and I believe I ought to answer the most important question: what is Free Software Magazine?
Allow me to answer by explaining what Free Software Magazine is not.
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?
