July 7, 2025
Keeping tech free
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of June, 2015.
1. SourceForge Not Making A Graceful Exit by Christine Hall. Published June 11, 2015. We look at why many well known FOSS projects are fleeing a once popular code repository, and what this means for its future.
2. A Look at Mageia 5’s Magic by Christine Hall. Published June 22, 2015. A first look at Mageia latest and greatest release, and putting this release in historical context.
The Second Annual Fossetcon Conference, which is scheduled to be held at the Hilton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando, Florida on November 19-21 has announced its Call for Papers on the conference website. According to the site, the call is officially open until August 17, but might be extended if certain conditions, such as “speaker diversity, relevant content and or lack of submissions” are not met.
The website lists some specifics that the organization is seeking:
First of all, we’d like to thank the 49 contributors who generously contributed to our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign and to all who helped support and get the word out about our efforts. Special thanks go to Elizabeth K. Joseph, Todd Lewis and his incredible team at IT-oLogy and Ken Starks for supplying us with items to offer as perks during the campaign. We’d also like to thank Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Carla Schroder for writing articles for FOSS Force supporting our efforts.
At just before midnight pacific time Monday night, our IndieGoGo fundraising effort ended after a six week run. In the end, we raised exactly $2,300, or 38.33% of our goal of $6,000 (its nice to see that the folks at IndieGoGo are nothing if not precise when it comes to figures). The money is to be used to expand our coverage of FOSS and free tech by offering compensation to writers. Although this is not enough to fund our planned expansion for six months as intended, it is enough to get us started while we put “Plan B” into effect.
Today is the last day of our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign, which we at first called our “May Pledge Drive” until we extended it into June. At somewhere about a second before midnight tonight, the fine folks at IndieGoGo will pull the plug on our campaign and quit taking contributions. In other words, if you haven’t made a contribution yet, the time is now.
So far we’ve raised $2,225 of our $6,000 goal. While reaching our target doesn’t appear doable at this late stage of the game — that’s okay. The money that’s been generously contributed will get us started on our planned editorial expansion and you should see us ramping up our coverage considerably in about three or four weeks time, after we receive the funds from IndieGoGo and start putting our new policies in effect.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of April, 2015. 1. Announcing the Birth of Hurd by Christine Hall.…
Distros, News and Operating Systems
Mandriva S.A., the French company behind Mandriva, the distribution that long time Linux users will remember as Mandrake, died this week at the age of sixteen. The announcement came in the form of a notice posted by the company earlier this week. The cause of death was financial hemorrhaging.
The distro began life as Mandrake, but was forced to change its name due to a trademark dispute with the Hearst newspaper chain, which owned the rights to the “Mandrake the Magician” comic strip. Mandriva was a combination of the original name and Conectiva, a Brazilian distro the company purchased for $2.3 million in 2005.
Well, maybe we can’t call it our May Pledge Drive any more. We’ve extended our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign, which was scheduled to end a week from tomorrow. The campaign will now remain active until Monday, June 15. We’re doing this, of course, in order to have a better shot at reaching our $6,000 goal. So far we’ve raised $1,030. With the extension, we can do this, but much work needs to be done.
This is important. This money will be necessary if we are to live up to our name and become a legitimate force in the FOSS world (sorry, we couldn’t resist). For those of you who don’t already know about our campaign, all of the money will be used to pay the writers and journalists who get down in the trenches and get the story told — the stories that are important to the FOSS community.
If you’ve already contributed to our campaign, we thank you. If not, please know that we are depending on those who value our site to make a contribution, so we can offer you even more than we do now. As our writer Larry Cafiero said in a Facebook post a few weeks back: the time has come for us to ramp up our coverage.
If you visit our IndieGoGo fundraising page, you’ll see that we’re offering some pretty cool perks — so you can get something beyond the mere satisfaction of being a big help if you want. In fact, we just added a really nice perk today, and lowered the asking price on some others.
Although an excellent article by Linux pundit Carla Shroder, spelling out what’s wrong with what often passes for journalism on the Internet and explaining why…
Hmmm… Things seem to have slowed down during the second week of our May fundraising drive. As you might already know, on May first we…
They say that Friday isn’t necessarily a good day to start an Indiegogo campaign. But Friday was the first of May and we wanted our…
