FOSS Week in Review
Oops.
FreeNAS Logo Contest: Okay, artists, get those colored pencils sharpened, those brushes cleaned and ready, because you have an assignment — that logo isn’t going to design itself. FreeNAS — “founded in 2005 on the guiding principle that network storage software should be available to the public at no cost and free of license restrictions” according to its site — has initiated a logo contest, urging the community to contribute artwork to become a part of FreeNAS history.
“It’s almost 2016, and with the revolutionary changes coming to FreeNAS 10, we thought it would be the perfect time to update our logo,” the announcement states. “We’ve always prided ourselves on being a community-driven project. Your feedback and contributions are the lifeblood of FreeNAS. So, what better way to continue that commitment than by asking the public to help with our new FreeNAS logo design?”
The guidelines for the contest, in the painfully minute detail typical of BSD documentation (not sarcasm — I mean that as a huge compliment), can be found in the link above. If you feel you can improve on the shark, then go for it.
Predictions for 2016: Opinions, they say, are like … noses. Yeah, noses. Everyone’s got one and most of them smell. In any case, kicking off a flurry of predictions for 2016 — the good news here is I’m not making any for 2016, and you’re welcome — FOSS raconteur Bryan Lunduke at Network World makes a set of predictions for next year which you may find, well, interesting. Of the eight predictions in the slideshow, my favorite is that we won’t be using Wayland anytime soon. “Xorg, baby!”
CentOS Releases 7 1511: Brian Fagioli at BetaNews wrote about the new CentOS release this week, with version 7 1511 rolling off the proverbial production line. According to the article, it may not be so easily found. “Sources will be available from vault.centos.org in their own dedicated directories to match the corresponding binary RPMs,” CentOS’ Karanbir Singh says in the article. “Since there is far less traffic to the CentOS source RPMs compared with the binary RPMs, we are not putting this content on the main mirror network.”
Meanwhile, on the Isle of Man …: Remember that annoying “feature” in Ubuntu where Unity would do online searches for you whether you wanted them or not, privacy be damned? Remember how next-to-impossible it was to “opt-out,” rather than having the search “feature” be opt-in? The good news here, according to PC World’s Chris Hoffman, is that Ubuntu 16.04 won’t be sending you search results by default — a feature that was slated for Ubuntu 8 (which apparently we won’t see for awhile) will be available in the next release. Thanks, folks.
But wait, there’s more. As many of you already know, UbuCon will be held at SCALE 14X in Pasadena next month. Swapnil Bhartiya in CIO thinks that Canonical should start hosting its own live events for logical and sensible reasons.
Bhartiya writes: “I am of the opinion that Canonical should support UbuCon from outside as a community event and start organizing their own events along the lines of SUSECon, LinuxCon, DockerCon, and so on. Events play a very important role in bringing different players together. For example, because UbuCon is a community event, Canonical can’t bring in their corporate partners. That leaves a very important piece out.”
However, Canonical Community Manager Michael Hall says that bringing developers together in person is a thing of the past. From the article: “I don’t think we are going to do in-person event for developer planning because we do it too frequently now,” said Hall. “Ubuntu Online Summit is going to stay for the actual development planning and might change to happen more frequently than just once every cycle.”
We’ll see you in Pasadena for UbuCon at SCALE 14X.
Only Nine Reasons? Over at Datamation, Bruce Byfield pens an essay regarding the Nine Reasons For Using Open Source, and we think they’re all good. We’d like to add a 10th: It’s cool to use FOSS.
Quick Takes: Speaking of SCALE 14X, the schedule is out for the four-day, first-of-the-year FOSS expo. Take a look … Hit backspace 28 times and hack? Sure, if you’re at the machine itself — and how often would this happen in your presence? For those prematurely dancing on Linux’s grave over this, you might want to reconsider as the major distros have already patched this. However, on this topic, there seems to be concern in Bitcoin circles over this … Softpedia is reporting that Solus is now a gaming platform, thanks to Steam running on it. If you’re a gamer, it’s worth a look.
See you next week.
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Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero
