Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One of the major advantages of free software is that the community protects users from malicious software. Now Ubuntu GNU/Linux has become a counterexample. What should we do? Proprietary software is associated with malicious treatment of the user: surveillance code, digital handcuffs (DRM or Digital Restrictions Management) to restrict users, and back doors that can do nasty things under remote control. Programs that do any of these things are malware and should be treated as such. Widely used examples include Windows, the iThings, and the Amazon "Kindle" product for virtual book burning, which do all three; Macintosh and the Playstation III which impose DRM; most portable phones, which do spying and have back doors; Adobe Flash Player, which does spying and enforces DRM; and plenty of apps for iThings and Android, which are guilty of one or more of these nasty practices.

Canonical may have ultimately changed its mind about "Avoid the pain of Windows 8" -- the slogan that accompanied the original launch of Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" earlier this fall, but like so many deeply compelling notions, it seems to have staying power here in the Linux blogosphere. That indeed is why more than a few Linux fans have viewed Windows 8 with jubilation rather than dread.

We are now more than a decade into the technological revolution that turned the music industry upside down. Initially, it felt like there was so much possibility, that the internet might be the great democratizer, that it could empower artists to take more control over their careers, and ultimately allow them to see more of a percentage of income from their music. There have been some success stories, but it seems the vast majority of artists today are struggling even more, making less money yet paying more middlemen.

An Intel developer has proposed a migration tool based upon LLVM's Clang tooling library to auto-convert C++ code to take advantage of new C++11 features in an automated manner...

The recently released update for the free DNS server closes a security hole that could be exploited for Denial-of-Service attacks. The only servers that are affected use DNS64, an option intended to help with migrating to IPv6

Today, Mozilla and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center are pleased to announce the recipients of the first-ever Open(Art) Fellowships. Together, these creative technologists will be exploring the frontier of art and the open web as part of our new Open(Art) program.

Vaadin, the company behind the GWT-based web framework of the same name, has published a report on the future of Google's Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based web framework that includes a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. Google had appeared to scale back its own GWT development efforts following its shift in focus towards Dart as an alternative to JavaScript and, earlier this year, had promised to create a more open development process. This resulted in the formation of a steering committee, which includes Google representatives as well as developers from Red Hat and Vaadin and which will be responsible for the future development of GWT.

Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: "one of our flagship puppies".

Let's say you're a big company in a competitive industry. One who innovates and succeeds by creating software. Not extending COTS, not adapting existing code. Generating fresh, new code, at your full expense. The value the company receives by investing in the creation of that software is competitive advantage, sometimes known as the profit-motive. You’re an executive at this company. Creating the software was your idea. You are responsible for the ROI calculations that got the whole thing off the ground.

If you're starting a new open source project, or open sourcing some existing code, you'll need a publicly accessible location for the version control system holding your code (if you're not planning on setting up a publicly accessible VCS, reconsider; no public source control is a red flag to potential contributors). You could set up your own repository hosting, but with so many companies and groups offering existing setups and services, why not use one of those and save yourself some time? Here's an overview of some of the more popular options.

Two years ago, I met some open data advocates from Brazil and Ottawa, and we schemed of doing an international open data hackathon. A few weeks later, this blog post launched International Open Data Day with the hope that supporters would emerge in 5-6 cities to host local events.

Every few years, it seems as though yet another hardware vendor tries its hand yet again at building and releasing Linux hardware. The latest entrant is the Dell Sputnik laptop, aka Dell XPS 13 'inch developer edition. The Dell Sputnik uses Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (no 12.10 here). It's a beefy beast with an Intel i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. Going beyond having just Ubuntu Linux installed on top end Dell hardware, Dell has also included a pair of community projects on Sputnik as well. The Profile Tool provides easy access to github projects enabling users to setup development environments with ease.

Last month, Jos Poortvliet's job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle. He was chosen to lead a discussion on open governance at the Summit of New Thinking in Berlin. The open innovation concept is what got him interested in free software communities while studying organizational psychology, and it's an idea he tries to merge into growing the openSUSE community.

Open source as a buzzword has lost much of its buzz. It’s not quite as dead as "SOA," but it’s definitely been supplanted by today’s favorites: the Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. Open source's demise as a hype label was inevitable—it’s hard to fake giving away your software for free (although there were more than a few companies over the years that were called out for being "faux-open source" with their freemium models or commercial licenses to the code). Thankfully, "open source" has outlived the hype to provide real value to the industry and to customers.

With all the drama and pathos that plays out each and every day here in the Linux blogosphere, the temptation to equate the stories of today with classic tales from the world of literature can sometimes be overwhelming. Take the world of Linux desktops, for example. For years the users lived happily under the reign of GNOME 2; suddenly, Unity and GNOME 3 appeared on the horizon.

Failure in Freiburg, success in Munich. Experiences with open source software in the public sector couldn't be more different. If there's a lesson to be drawn from this, it's "go the whole hog or not at all". At first sight it looks pretty straightforward – a licence for Microsoft Office Professional 2010 costs just under €400. Add that up over 10,000 workplaces (as is the case in Munich's city administration) and it comes to more than €4 million. For open source alternatives OpenOffice and LibreOffice, by contrast, licensing costs are zero, so you've saved at least €4 million. In view of the state of public finances, you'd think that would be the end of the discussion..

If you are a Linux user, or a webmaster managing your own website (which is probably hosted on a Linux server), you will surely come across a situation when you try to upload a file or modify a document and receive the error “You do not have the permissions to upload file to the folder“. And after some googling, the solution is often as easy as setting the file permission to “775? or “777?. So what exactly does “777? mean? And why must it be ’7?, and not ’8? or ’9??

H. Peter Anvin has been involved with Linux for more than 20 years, and is currently one of the x86 architecture maintainers. During his work on Linux, one of his areas of interest has been the generation and use of random numbers, and his talk at LinuxCon Europe 2012 was designed to address a lot of misunderstandings that he has encountered regarding random numbers. The topic is complex, and so, for the benefit of experts in the area, he noted that "I will be making some simplifications". (In addition, your editor has attempted to fill out some details that Peter mentioned only briefly, and so may have added some "simplifications" of his own.)

Mozilla engineering manager Josh Aas has announced on his blog that the organisation is joining the Internet Society (ISOC) as a Silver member. Aas points out that Mozilla has already been involved in several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups and that supporting ISOC is a logical next step.

Martin Gräßlin, the well known KWin developer, has written a new blog post explaining why if you're wanting to play Valve's Source Engine games or the other new native Linux games you should be using KDE Plasma. "If you want to get some of the now finally available games for Linux, KDE Plasma should be your primary choice to enjoy the game. I have also heard of users switching to KDE Plasma because we still provide non OpenGL based setups," Martin explains in his Fallback mode in KDE Plasma Workspaces blog post.