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Apple is doing it again: they are releasing an app store for OS X on the 6th of January. Just like the iPhone app store, and the Android app store, this is going to be a hit: the OS X ecosystem will get a giant boost from it, and we are left — once again — with a lot to learn. Before you mention that GNU/Linux doesn’t need an app store because it’s free software, and before you even say that GNU/Linux already has an app store through one of the many software managers (Synaptics, Ubuntu Software Center, apt-get), please read this article.

Since I started using computers and since I abandoned the choppy waters of Windows for the safe harbour of FOSS, the internet has experienced huge change and rapid growth. Better web browsers, file sharing, iPhones, iPads and other touch screen tablets too. The one thing that has not changed much though is that GNU/Linux always seems to breast the tape second. It seems fated to forever be behind the curve. I can live with that as long as I’m using my software my way. Free and open. However, that has implications for freedom and privacy that I don’t like living with—and neither does Tim Berners-Lee. Specifically, he has been venting about those very things in respect of social networks and how they threaten that freedom and privacy. Read the article at Freesoftware Magazine.

There has been a lot of talking, lately, about Google’s Chrome OS. People didn’t take it too seriously initially; then, last week, Google started sending out demo netbooks which ran — hear hear — Google Chrome OS. Google Chrome OS is based on Google’s browser, Chrome — hence the name. The idea is that all you run on your laptop is your browser — that’s it. But this raises a lot of questions. In this article I propose a possibly interesting solution to Google’s issues, and how a possible (and not-so-painful) merge with Android should be possible. Read the article at Freesoftware Magazine.

The internet has been awash with the fallout from Oracle’s stewardship of OpenOffice.org and Ubuntu’s announcement that Xorg would be replaced by Wayland and Unity would be the next desktop. The F-word was used. A lot. No, not that F-word. The other F-word. Forking. OpenOffice.org has already forked to LibreOffice and I’ve no doubt that Unity haters will fork off to Gnome Shell 3. Fair enough. It’s all about choice in the end and choice creates competition and competition often creates innovation and cross fertilization (as well as fragmentation). Read the article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Having established the motivations for fair payment on a “commercial free culture project” in the previous column, I’m still left with the question of what exactly “fair” means. The problem is that there’s more than one way to determine fair shares on a project like this. The organization is necessarily loose, and so there’s no really clear and unambiguous way to determine fairness. Nevertheless, some plan has to be chosen, and in a way that is at least defensible. Read the article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Recently two pieces of first class anti-free software diatribe hit the headlines. The first is Microsoft’s “please don’t use OpenOffice.org” video and the second is Steve Jobs’ anti-Android rant. Both are pretty shallow attempts at deflection and have been rightly called out as actually endorsing the subject of the attack as a valid opponent. In both cases it does seem to say that Microsoft and Jobs are concerned enough about OpenOffice.org and Android respectively that they need to tell the rest of us how bad they are. Read the article at Freesoftware Magazine.

As you may know I was quite keen on the ideas and potential of Google’s Wave project and like many thought it a bit of a shame when they closed the project. When the creator of Wave Lars Rasmussen left Google for Facbook, Wave seemed finished before it had started. At the time they pulled the plug Google said the project would live on but details were scratchy. Now we know more and the good news is that in yet another kudos point for free software and the development models around it, Wave will rise again and this time maybe even stronger but certainly with greater freedom. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

We all know that Google is huge and there are more than enough examples of people crying the end is nigh regarding the seemingly insurmountable rise of the one-time search engine. But are they really that big? Do they have that much of a hold over us and should we be worried? Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

I’ve been trying to zip together what I know about free online collaborative projects (like free software) and commercial free culture projects (like the just-released “Sintel” from the Blender Foundation or “Sita Sings the Blues” from Nina Paley). It’s easy to get lost in the logistics of such a production. One of the questions I’m bound to be asked is “How do I know I’m going to get paid?” Artists have a strong fear against being “exploited”, though they’re often less clear on exactly what that means. A little bit of examination, though, shows this may be a strength of the “Creator Endorsed” free culture approach to marketing a work — it makes fair payment a matter of personal financial interest to the publisher, as I hope to explain here. Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

After installing Ubuntu 10.10, I had a strange feeling I was seeing something that was already old. Yes, Ubuntu is a fantastic desktop system, and yes it’s better than Windows. But today, in 2010, that’s almost a given. And that’s not enough. The IT world is changing, and PCs themselves as a whole are getting old. The mass is moving towards tablets, mobiles machines, and netbooks. Ubuntu, the way it is today, might be the best choice in a dinosaur world. I can’t read Mark Shuttleworth’s mind, but I can only guess this is exactly what he felt when he decided to switch to Unity (for the UI) and Wayland (for the graphics architecture). Let me explain what all of this means. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Multi-touch is the future of computing – from phones to tablets. And the future is almost here — or, maybe, it’s already here. But what free software platforms can provide a viable alternative to catch up with and rival Apple? Since 2001, Microsoft has been trying to sell Tablet PCs running the same Windows XP user interface as ordinary computers but they never really took off. What Apple has shown us with the iPhone and iPad is that only a user interface designed from the ground up for touch screens can live up to the expectations we have of tablets: intuitive, fast and fun. But a couple of free software platforms are shaping up to become viable alternatives to Apple’s walled garden. I’m going to look at Android, Ubuntu’s Unity and MeeGo. Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

I guess everybody has heard that a majority of the key developers in the OpenOffice.org community decided to set up the Document Foundation: an independent foundation to continue and manage work on the Openoffice.org codebase. If you’ve not, then I can recommend Terry Hancock’s piece as a starting point (and a good summary of why forking is vital). To recap: Oracle are not behind the move so the foundation temporarily named their product LibreOffice. It was not, we were told, a fork. Oracle were invited to the party and asked if they would consider donating the OpenOffice.org brand to the foundation. After the mess with MySQL, here was an opportunity for Oracle to vastly improve relations with the free software community and their own reputation. In short Oracle missed their chance like an English footballer taking a penalty.

One of the most controversial freedoms of free software is the right to simply take the code and go make your own competing project — what is popularly called a “fork”. It’s controversial because it seems like a betrayal of the original developer; because it distributes resources into competing groups, which may waste effort; and because it may create confusion in the marketplace of ideas that is free software distribution. But it is a critical freedom to have, and the recent fork of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org, like the fork of X.org from Xfree86 years ago, shows why it’s so important. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Most of us will install our GNU/Linux system once or twice and then use the excellent package management systems to upgrade when new releases of our chosen distribution come out. Users of Debian and Debian-based systems (such as Ubuntu) will be quite used to the idea that you only need to install it once. But what happens when you want to replicate one Debian system on another machine? Do you use cloning tools? Yes you can but only if the hardware is similar on the two machines. What if one has an Intel Pentium-based processor and the other has an AMD64? In that case what you need is some way to replicate the package selection but use the appropriate ones for the new architecture. Enter dpkg. Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Ryan Cartwright has written an article on how to backup Gmail with Getmail. It is an excellent piece, but Getmail is a command line program, and while most readers of FSM will doubtless be at home there and in configuring XML files, we also like to behave like electric currents and take the course of least resistance to get from A to B. Besides, using the Thunderbird (or Evolution) e-mail clients to backup Gmail has other advantages too. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Net neutrality has been a hot and persistent topic on the internet for some time, so I’m not even going to attempt to summarize the debate here. Anyone who values their personal and online freedom knows it’s a crucial issue. Regardless of your operating system or the software we use it will affect each and every one of us. However, if you use GNU/Linux you’re already tech savvy and familiar with the politics and philosophy of free and open software, so you’ll be particularly sensitized to the impact of threats to net neutrality on free software. Rea the article at Free Software Magazine.

I am currently in that level of hell reserved for people who upgrade their GNU/Linux system too quickly. I have for some time now been happily using KDE 4 with the plasma desktop enjoying the cute little animations and eye candy, and learning to use the task-bar and widgets. Then my bliss was interrupted by a simple mistake. I decided to upgrade. I forgot that my /etc/apt/sources.list was set to load experimental versions of the software, and now my X-server system is broken. It is only now that I am discovering that there is no apt-get undo. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

In the past few years we’ve seen a lot of hardware-based innovation (or at the very least expansion). New products and markets have arisen built around hardware and its use. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks and gaming systems are all examples of markets that have expanded and some if not most of the products make use of free software. This is great but why does it seem to be that the free-software products are second-generation, playing catch up. Where is the device innovation driven by free software? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

If you haven’t heard, Google have announced they are pulling the plug on Wave, their interactive, real-time communication product. It’s a shame but I can understand why. It never really took off. Google have blamed lack of user adoption for the poor showing, and maybe that’s true, but in the end if people aren’t using your product: it’s not their fault - it’s yours. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

People have been talking about “micropayments” since the early days of the world-wide-web, so I’m always skeptical of micropayment systems. Flattr is an interesting variation on the idea though. It’s a voluntary system, without the overhead or chilling effects associated with “pay walls” and it puts donors in control of how much they spend, allowing them to split their donations among beneficiaries based on a monthly “pie” model. The greatest asset of Flattr is its simplicity of use — similar in many ways to the various social networking services that abound on the web today. Flattr may well succeed, and it may fill a niche of financing small projects from free software to online videos Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.