Tag: FREE SOFTWARE

If you've ever ventured into the world of music notation, you'll know that to produce musical scores there's normally a large amount of expense involved to pick up the relevant application (either Sibelius - my favoured application - or Finale).That's not an ideal situation if you're short of the (hundreds of) dollars required to grab a licence, and whilst the developers of Sibelius and Finale ...

Love Ubuntu, but concerned that the open source Linux distribution isn't open source enough? One of the great things about Ubuntu is that it has broad support for a wide variety of hardware and software. But that's partly because it uses proprietary drivers and plug-ins. Responding to complaints from some in the free software community, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced the launch of ...

Giveaway of the Day is a site that offers instruction on brain surgery and building nuclear-powered devices. Okay, not really. Pretty predictably, Giveaway of the Day is a site that gives something away every day, and that something is commercial software. Over the last few days, copies of EasyDVDCopy, iPod AudioBook, CDuke, LoadScout, and Frigate3 File Manager have been given away. The plan at ...

Ah, software patents. They're not the hot topic they were a year ago, but that doesn't mean they've gone away. Free Software Magazine's Pieter Hintjens has penned an editorial titled What's wrong with software patents? "from a different angle, one based more on economics and less on emotions." It won't surprise you that Hintjens' conclusion, based on economics though it may be, still does not ...

There's plenty of free (as in beer) software out there, but finding what you need can be almost impossible if you just head out, unarmed, into the wilds of the Internet. Enter MacLibre. If you've used Linux, you're probably familiar with package managers. You may have even used Fink on Mac OS X. If so, MacLibre is old news to you. But for plenty of people, it can be a serious time saver. ...

Could serving ads to desktop applications really work? Will it not be annoying to the user? Well SpiceWorks launched a software product that monitors networks. Not only does this product have a simple download, it's free. And how does their company sustain and make some cash? By serving Google ads. The administration console of SpiceWorks actually has Google ads. When the software is being ...

As reported last month, this year will see the first update of the GNU General Public License—the license employed by, depending on who you ask, half to three-fourths of all free software—since 1991, and the Free Software Foundation has posted the first draft of the new GPLv3. It's no easy read, but luckily there's a Rationale Document that describes all of the changes in the new ...

The Participatory Culture Foundation has launched a new site called Bounty County where they list coding bounties for free and open source software. The current bounties are everywhere from $30 to $4,500 for tasks great and small and can be navigated by project, bounty amount, and platform. New bounties are added every day. ...

Once you've sorted out gifts for your family, friends, and favorite bloggers, why not give a bit back to the people whose free software you enjoy (and depend on) all year 'round? Devanshu Mehta has put together a great list of free software projects and organizations that depend on your donations and involvement to keep producing great products. Among his picks are the Mozilla Foundation, the ...