Well, that’s really not the question. Most of you probably don’t have a web server. If you do, you very well might be using something that’s not on our list. There are some great distros, known to make dependable and trouble-free servers, that aren’t listed here. The most glaring omission is probably Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), considered by some to be the Cadillac of server distros.
Posts published by “FOSS Force”
Friday FOSS Week in Review
Google drops open Talk for closed Hangouts
There’s been a lot of back-and-forth going on now that Google has announced intentions to replace Talk, the open standards supporting instant messaging service, with proprietary Hangouts. While Talk works with the XMPP industry standard which allows cross-platform use, Hangouts will be completely closed and proprietary. In other words, if you want to talk to someone on Hangouts, that person must be using Hangouts as well.
The votes have been counted and most of you want Ubuntu on your smartphones, according to our unscientific poll. This doesn’t come as a surprise, since an earlier poll showed a preference for Ubuntu on tablets as well. Not bad for an OS that’s not really available yet on those hardware platforms.
Some of the biggest and most important FOSS projects are controlled by big business. Rarely does corporate ownership of free and open software work out completely in the interests of the user base, since corporate owners absolutely always have an agenda of their own. However, it works out better in some cases than in others.
Friday FOSS Week in Review
Where has Redmond’s moxy gone?
It wasn’t that many years ago that even a giant OEM like HP wouldn’t dare release a non-Windows product if the device type was Windows supported. If this were five years ago and the tablet boom was in full bloom as it is now and Windows was tablet ready, as it supposedly is now, the HP brass wouldn’t even entertain the thought of releasing a tablet running anything other than Redmond’s finest OS–apps available or no.
You may remember that back on March 22, Christine Hall penned an article here on FOSS Force concerning worries expressed by Alex Limi, a project design strategist at Mozilla, over configuration issues with Firefox. It seems that Mr. Limi expressed concerns on his blog over the fact that was possible for a user to “render the browser unusable to most people, right in the main settings.”
Ms. Hall agreed that it was certainly possible to “break” Firefox while attempting to configure it, but expressed concerns that the Mozilla development crew would overreact by taking control out of the hands of the user. Such actions she deemed unnecessary and explained why:
You might’ve noticed, we’ve been busy making some changes to our home page. If the page looks a wee bit fuller than usual, that’s because…
Friday FOSS Week in Review
Will appeals court ruling mean death to software patents?
Absolutely no one knows what a ruling handed down last week by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals will ultimately mean–but it might be very good for those of us who’ve been arguing against software patents. Indeed, the ruling had PJ at Groklaw throwing out three separate “OMG”s in her article with the announcement. In other words, she was euphoric:
Back in March and April, when the Java browser plugin was getting hammered with security holes that were being exploited in the wild, we conducted a couple of unscientific polls here on FOSS Force to determine how our visitors were handling this security crisis.
To call the problems that Java was experiencing at the time a “crisis” is not an exaggeration. If you’ll remember, the situation was considered so serious that here in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security was urging everyone to disable the Java plugin.
These two Java polls were among the first we conducted on FOSS Force and received about the fewest votes of any polls we’ve conducted so far. Undoubtedly, this was partially due to the fact that we were just beginning to conduct polls on the site, and so polling here was something new to our visitors. Also, our articles on Java security issues received a smaller number of page views than most articles we publish. However, low readership notwithstanding, we will continue to cover serious security issues, because we think it’s important that we do so.