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The Freecode site has been moved to a static state effective June 18, 2014. Freecode has been the Web's largest index of Linux, Unix and cross-platform software, and mobile applications. Thousands of applications, which are preferably released under an open source license, were meticulously cataloged in the Freecode.database

After a few months I wanted to demonstrate my Raspberry Pi to a friend of mine, so I started up LibreOffice. Nothing. I rebooted it. It came up, but with errors. Fortunately ssh was still working, so it was not too big a problem. Until another reboot several months later when it just showed the dreaded kbd> prompt. That was no good.. I started googling and found out I had become the victim of "SD card corruption".

Judge Chris Hensen, who ordered the Dutch Pirate Party to censor all links to The Pirate Bay recently, appears to have quite a bit of dirt in his baggage.

In the first post of these series I've shown you it's possible to make Coherent 4.2.10 run under the newest version of QEMU. Now it's time to take it one step further: try it yourself!

The Dutch Piracy organization "Brein" has decided to sue ISP's UPC, KPN, T-Mobile and Tele2 after their recent victory in court. I really don't understand why. First of all, blocking a handful of IP addresses hasn't had any effect at all. But most of all, if you really want to fight piracy you got to have support from the public. And that support is crumbling with each and every effort to enforce compliance to that 10 minutes of pesky messages you get when you insert a "legal" DVD.

Coherent is a full fledged Unix that runs on a simple 386 with a few megabytes of memory - incredible, but true. The kernel is just a few hundred KB, so it boots in an instant. But the best thing was its price: only $100. With every new release of QEMU or VMware I tried to reinstall it - with little result. That is, until QEMU 0.14 was released.

In the US we have SOPA, PIPA and ACTA and in the Netherlands we have judges like mr. P.H. Blok, mr. R. Kalden and mr. M.P.M. Loos. They decided not only that IP addresses 194.71.107.15, 194.71.107.18 and 194.71.107.19 had be blocked by ISP's, but also gave BREIN (the Dutch equivalent of the MPAA) the authority to add any IP address they want to that list, which means that in principle they can take out any website at will without ever having to go to court again.

GPLv3 was created to defeat any attempts to make free software less free. A new license may prevent governments and the industry to make the Internet less free. Simply don't allow them to use our software anymore. Change the license.

A popular Dutch weblog has uncovered piracy at that a collection society, Buma/Stemra. They scanned the IP range of Buma/Stemra's HQ and found pirated material. The tool only covers about 4 to 6% of what's available on the networks it tracks, so it's possible that there's a lot more evil piracy going on from their offices as well. Despite pirates among their own ranks, organizations like Buma/Stemra feel that the Dutch policy of downloading from unauthorized sources for personal use being legal should be altered.

Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.

Carrier IQ’s support software has been monitored closely by Android security watchdogs for the last few weeks. After an embarrassing public relations snafu, the company stated that their software does not record personal information, despite the findings of an independent security analyst. But The Register reports that same analyst has now shown the Carrier IQ software logging keystrokes in real time, and transmitting them over an unsecure wireless connection. Carrier IQ is, in a word, busted.

Qi Hardware, the company responsible for the Ben Nanonote, has created a USB dongle offering wireless networking on open-sourced hardware conforming to the 6LoWPAN standard from as little as £25 assuming you can get driver software and don't mind being unable to talk to anyone else. 6LoWPAN isn't as fast as Wi-Fi, or as ubiquitous as Bluetooth, but it is free from royalty payments.

When the "Save as WWF" campaign was launched, WWF Germany created a Facebook page. I guess they never expected that it would cause so much controversy, because initially critics could vent their objections freely and add all the links and pictures they wanted. Being one of the opponents in that controversy myself I was about to experience their social media tactics first hand. This is my story.

TEONW is a relatively small BASIC program, just 13 kB source, but is such an awful mess that I was barely able to understand and code the entry of the basic parameters: yield, height and population density. If I ever wanted to convert this thirty year old spaghetti to Forth I needed some help. Badly..

A user asked me whether a Windows port of the .wwf tools was possible. MS-DOS batchfiles are so crippled that converting them was not an option and I am unfamiliar with the newer Windows scripting facilities like PowerShell. So I asked myself the question, can I run the scripts within Windows?

This week I promised myself to put the .wwf format to the test. So, I sent a .wwf file to my girlfriend at work and I distributed all documents at work that I didn't find worth printing in the .wwf format. These were the reactions I got.

The WWF must have understood by now that you cannot enter the realm of software development without finding the FOSS community on your way. For example, the French April organization, dedicated to the promotion of FOSS and open standards, sent a letter to the WWF, voicing its objections to the WWF format in general and the use of DRM in particular. As if that is not enough, the software itself is giving the WWF headaches as well.

What really baffled me the last few weeks is why the WWF insisted on using their driver, although I demonstrated more than once that print-disabled PDF's can serve the same purpose. The driver does not just disable printing is also adds an extra page to the end of the document. They say it's there "just to inform the receiver", but I don't buy it.

The 'save as WWF' campaign launched by WWF Germany this month has caused a rift within the environmental organisation. An email, allegedly sent by WWF International director of corporate relations Maria Boulos to WWF Germany executive marketing officer Dirk Reinsberg on 10 December, warned that the campaign was "misleading".

I heard about the new .WWF format this morning. It is an initiative of the World Wildlife Fund to prevent people printing .PDF files. As a matter of fact, it is a .PDF format, but slightly modified and with the "no printing" flag enabled. But I don't like it when people are forbidding me something. It is sending the wrong message. So I set out to crack it.