Tag: FOSS

The end of the 21st century's first decade is shaping up to be a period full of portentious software fruition! The year 2008 saw the release of WINE 1.0 after an epic 15 years of development; in 2009, after only 13 years, VLC reached 1.0; and then, earlier this year, Foobar hit 1.0 after a meager 7 years. Today, PDFCreator adds itself to the open source hall of fame, with version 1.0.0 now ...

In an exalted, excited and exclamation-rife blog post, Joomla's development coordinator Sam Moffatt has just announced Microsoft's official status as a Joomla Contributor. He makes it sound like Microsoft has never been involved with GNU GPL work before, but, while nothing could be further from the truth -- have you ever seen CodePlex? Nevertheless, Microsoft's involvement with the second ...

If you've visited WhiteHouse.gov since its change of ownership back in 2009 you'll hopefully have noticed some very cool changes. The site itself was jazzed up -- CHANGE! -- and, as best befits this 'information age', accessibility has been greatly improved for all citizens and denizens of the USA. What you may not have noticed, however, is that the entire site runs on a customized version of ...

The open source initiative needs a catchphrase. 'If you can dream it!', or something. 'Build it and they will come!' -- seriously, the audacity of FLOSS developers, combined with a (surprising...) amount of free time to develop crazy-ass inventions, never ceases to amaze. Case in point: take a look at the Firefox Nintendo Wiimote driver. Watch the video (it's after the break). Cool huh? It ...

You've probably heard all about Google's shipping container server farm. Over capacity? Just plug in another container! Now you, as an end user, can enjoy a similar service direct from NASA itself. NASA's Nebula platform provides a cloud of processing power much like that of Amazon's EC2. A brief look at the details of NASA's cloud suggest that this is a much more low-level solution: while ...

Samsung, JVC, Best Buy and 11 other consumer electronics companies have just been smacked-down for their continued breaching of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has just filed a lawsuit, stating that the companies have had plenty of time to respond to repeated requests of compliance with the GPL. Now their fate rests with the justice system... and I ...

Getting on the Free Software Foundation's page of acceptable Linux distros isn't the easiest task in the world. Stallman and Co. have very particular requirements about what can and can't be included. A first glance at the page might put you off -- there aren't any big name distros like Ubuntu, Suse, or Fedora. Trisquel, however, is definitely worth a closer look. It's Ubuntu-based and ships ...

This weekend I finished setting up a fresh triple-boot install on my MSI laptop. With my operating systems ready to go, the time had come to start reinstalling applications. While it wasn't a conscious decision, I noticed that the majority of my apps were Open Source - so I decided to keep the ball rolling. Even if you haven't just gone through a reformat, these are great applications and well ...

I've written about plenty of great software, but I'll probably never create any on my own. I'm no programmer, unless you count the projects I used to cobble together on our Commodore 64 and Apple IIe when I was in middle school. That's why I like the idea of bitloot. It's a simple concept. Submit your idea for an application and it's added to bitloot's listings. Once some financial contributions ...

We've covered many, many Explorer replacements here in the past, so I was a little surprised that MuCommander hadn't been written up yet. What makes MuCommander stand out is that it is free, open source, and cross-platform. The author's web site provides downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux (.tar.gz) as well as a Debian package, portable version, and a Java Web Start package. It's actually the ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Download_Squad_Interview_Free_Software_Foundation_s_Peter_Brown'; As we mentioned on Monday, the Free Software Foundation's Defective by Design campaign against DRM paid the U.K. a visit yesterday with protests outside the BBC's London and Manchester locations against the use of Microsoft DRM technology in their highly debated iPlayer software. The ...

In their ever-continuing quest against security flaws in Firefox, the Mozilla Corporation has just updated Firefox to the awkwardly numbered version 2.0.0.5. Eight flaws are fixed in this release - three of which are marked as critical. Those of you wanting to know exactly which vulnerabilities have been fixed might want to check out the Vulnerabilities page at the Mozilla homepage. If you're ...

Fortune Magazine has a detailed article examining Microsoft's relationship to free and open source software. Although the story reads mostly as a history of Microsoft, Linux, and GNU, there are a few interesting new tidbits, including the number of patents Microsoft claims Linux and other free software infringes on: 235. Microsoft holds thousands of patents for its software, and won't say exactly ...

Linux.com is running a great article Easy video creation using only FOSS software--FOSS, of course, meaning Free and Open Source. It's not a comprehensive tutorial--you're still going to have a lot of learning to do--but it does tell your best options for creating and editing video without spending a dime. The short version is like this: Cinelerra - Non-linear digital video editor and ...

User groups, for all their pedantic and geeky reputation, are a source of tremendous power and motivation in some communities, and it seems the more remote the community, the more robust the local user group. The island nation of Trinidad and Tobago are no exception to this rule. The TTCS OSS/Win CD is a user group produced and maintained disk of over 100 free and Open Source programs and ...