Jul 20, 2010 GMT
The Free Software Foundation’s Women in Free Software has published its recommendations for encouraging women’s involvement in free software. I admit that I am curious to see what reactions it invokes – or, for that matter, whether it gets noticed at all outside of feminist circles.
The analysis of Women in Free Software is not particularly new. It notes the barriers that many others, including me, have commented on in the past, noting... more »
Jun 30, 2010 GMT
This may be one of my blinding flashes of the obvious, but it occurs to me that I look at new applications from two perspectives. The first is that of any other user, looking for whether I might want to use the application. But the second is that of a potential reviewer -- that is, from the viewpoint of looking for a possible topic for an article that will intrigue me as I write. It suddenly occurs to me that these two perspectives are incompatible, and that the second one may influence my reviews too strongly.
This is a disturbing possibility, because I have always seen... more »
Jun 25, 2010 GMT
The older I get, the more certain I am that most discussions consist of arguing over half-truths. In fact, the more strongly everyone argues, the more likely that nobody has the complete truth. And nowhere does these hard-won truisms seem more accurate than in the age-old argument over whether the operating system we all live by should be called Linux or GNU/Linux. Yet that does not mean that you should necessarily avoid taking a position, and, in my case, I have come down -- with some reservations -- on the side of using GNU/Linux.
This argument recently flared up again... more »
Jun 17, 2010 GMT
If a government proposed a pro-free software policy, who would you expect to object? Probably, proprietary software companies and conservative business interests. But in Norway, among the first to object are members of the local Free Software Center. To say the least, their position raises several political issues for advocates of free and open source software (FOSS).
I don't speak Norwegian, and I am relying upon my shaky grasp of related languages and online translation to translate the more »
Jun 09, 2010 GMT
Except maybe for Pysol and Battle of Wesnoth, Amarok is my favorite leisure application. In fact, I frequently use it while working to play songs that have no lyrics to detrain my thoughts.
Not can I be the only one who rates Amarok highly; Amarok 2.3.1 was in the Debian Unstable repository within hours of being released (by contrast, KDE 3.4 took six or seven weeks).
But, at any rate, my interest was so strong that I was investigating the new features less than a day after the new release was available. I found them... more »
May 31, 2010 GMT
Icons have always intimidated me. Except for the mouseover help, two-thirds of the time I would have no idea what function they represent. Shrink them so that they fit on a toolbar, and the obscurity is compounded by illegibility. On the free and open source software (FOSS) desktop, icons seem to be one of the last holdouts against usability, with neither of the two main strategies for designing icons being particularly successful.
Admittedly, icons on the FOSS desktop have come a long way since the early years of this century, when GNOME's logout button looked like an... more »
May 21, 2010 GMT
Recently, I installed Joomla! as a local web server so I could develop a site for a friend. Almost at once, I ran into the problems that plagues most free software documentation. The problem is not a lack of information, but too much information, much of it obsolete, and little of it covering the most common situations on a modern desktop. Nor was most of it succinct.
In fact, the process was not difficult. What was difficult was finding the relevant information. In the hopes of saving other people a few hours, here's my summary of the process:
more »Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
ack is a grep-like, command-line tool that has been optimized for programmers to search large trees of source code.
New features in SUSE Studio 1.3 include enhanced cloud integration, VM platform support, and lifecycle management.
The Linux Foundation recently announced that the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
Open source version of LiveCode is now available for developing apps, games, and utilities for all major platforms.
OpenDaylight is an open source software-defined networking project committed to furthering adoption of SDN and accelerating innovation in a vendor-neutral and open environment.
The new Gnome release includes privacy and sharing settings, allowing more user control over access to personal information.
Mozilla is collaborating with Samsung on a new web browser engine called Servo.
