FOSS Week in Review A few months back I was thinking that reporting on FOSS wasn’t as fun as it once was. As a matter…
Posts published by “Christine Hall”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
First it was the NSA, the FBI and every big city cop shop on the planet insisting we need legislation to force safe, secure and for their eyes only back doors in damn near every device on the planet, presumably including light switches, garbage disposals and dishwashers. Eventually they came to see that doors, hidden or not, are merely temptations for hackers to break on through, and just decided to go on the down low for a while so they could pull a sneak attack later when we least expect it, which is a favorite trick of government types.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
In its quest to become the Microsoft of the Linux world, Ubuntu and Microsoft are expected to announce today that Ubuntu will soon run on Windows 10.
Holy crap!
In Friday’s Week in Review I jokingly opined that I wouldn’t be surprised to see “Ubuntu for Windows” as a move by the folks at Canonical as part of their plans for world domination. Guess what? It’s really happening.
In an article published Tuesday, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that “[a]ccording to sources at Canonical” a deal has been worked out between Ubuntu’s parent company and Microsoft that will lead to the GNU/Linux distro being able to run alongside Windows 10. According to Vaughan-Nichols, “This will not be in a virtual machine, but as an integrated part of Windows 10.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
In recent years, it has become common for the terms “open source” and “FOSS” to be used interchangeably. While it’s true that all FOSS is also open source, it’s also true that being open source doesn’t necessarily mean it’s FOSS.
In the early 21st century, practically anyone using GNU/Linux knew the difference between proprietary, open source, and free and open source software. In those days distinguishing between proprietary, freeware, shareware and truly free software was a piece of cake. This was in large part due to the fact that open source was a relatively new concept, with the term first receiving widespread use in 1998. There were other reasons as well, mostly having to do with the Linux users of the day.
Hardly anybody installed Linux without doing some research first, and very few installed Linux expecting it to look and act like Windows. Although Windows 95 had been out five or more years, most users making the leap to Linux were people who cut their teeth on the command line and who remembered when 640 KB was the absolute amount of RAM in an “IBM compatible,” an ancient name for the PC.
They also weren’t strangers to configuring their systems. Many users of the day could still remember installing “expanded memory” on MS-DOS machines to allow RAM to be increased above the 640 KB memory barrier to a full megabyte, “extended memory,” which allowed RAM to be extended beyond that newly established megabyte absolute, or DriveSpace to encrypt on-the-fly and nearly double the amount of data on the hard drives of the day that might be as small as 40 MB.
A majority of users could remember when home computers were rarely networked, with those that were by way of “walled garden” services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, America Online or private bulletin boards.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
FOSS Week in Review
While Facebook and Google work to better identify you by your typing skills and Red Hat counts the bucks from its best ever year, Ubuntu finally makes it possible to launch from the bottom.
If you depend only on mainstream tech media’s coverage of FOSS, you might be excused for thinking that the biggest news of the week revolved either around Ubuntu’s new summer home in the world of BSD — which isn’t a Canonical project by the way — or Microsoft’s open sourcing of every scrap of code it can find that might benefit Microsoft if it were open sourced.
In my not-so-humble opinion, both of these stories were yawners. Of course somebody’s attempted to create a BSD *buntu. There are already Ubuntu flavors for every single desktop environment known to mankind, as well as a few DEs that are figments of Canonical’s imagination, so where else was there to go but to another operating system? What’s next? Given the way Ubuntu has been cozying up to Microsoft, I’m expecting Ubuntu for Windows.
As for Microsoft’s continuing open sourcing? There’s nothing new here, move on. When Redmond loves Linux and open source enough to quit suing open source projects over patents it claims it has — that will be news.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Dell has been quite successful recently selling a line of computers preinstalled with GNU/Linux. So much so that the company posted a blog on March 10 extolling the fact that Precision 5510, 3510, 7510 and 7710 mobile workstations are all available worldwide with Ubuntu preinstalled. What’s more, the company doesn’t hide Linux availability in the fine print or make potential customers find a special page to order from, which had once been its practice. Just go to the page for Precision laptops, find the one you want and tic the Ubuntu Linux option in the Operating System box in the Build My Dell section.
Here’s the big surprise, especially for those of you trying to stay on top of the Microsoft tax: Choosing Ubuntu over Windows comes with a $101.50 reduction in price. That’s quite a discount — much, much more than I remember back in 2007 when Dell made its first foray into offering Linux.
Dell isn’t targeting the everyday consumer with these offerings, but has its sights set on the developer set, which is fair enough given that many Linux users ply their trade in IT. Indeed, as Agam Shah pointed out Friday on CIO, the company sees its Linux line as an opening “for the open-source community to develop tools, drivers and software for laptops, tablets and other emerging form factors.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
FOSS Week in Review
While New York State contemplates offering a tax break to open source projects and Massachusetts prepares for LibrePlanet 2016, Opera adds built-in ad blocking to its browser.
It may be a digital world, but the weather is still analog.
Around my parts, this is the time of year when the weather can’t seem to decide whether to act like winter or spring. In other words, it’s a couple of days of tee shirts and shorts followed by a couple of days of dressing in layers and running the heat. Last week it was in the 80s, but next week they’re saying to expect frost and maybe freezing rain. I’m not complaining. This is still better than the dog days of summer.
We’ve already covered quite a bit of the FOSS news this week. Here’s some items left uncovered:
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
There are plenty of reasons to be anticipating the arrival of GNU/Linux phones and tablets. Verizon Wireless has given us another.
On March 7, the FCC slapped a $1.35 million fine on Verizon in a privacy case, a move that’s being hailed as a victory by some privacy advocates. If so, it would seem to be a hollow victory. For starters, the fine is too low to be much of a deterrent against a company which last year had annual gross income of over $63 billion. But there is much more wrong with the agreement the carrier reached with the FCC than merely the price tag.
The case revolves around Verizon’s use of a supercookie — a cookie that uses a variety of techniques to make it nearly impossible to remove or disable — which the carrier began placing on its customers’ phones in 2012. The cookie gathered information that combined a person’s Internet history — whether through browsers or apps — with their unique customer information. The company ran afoul of the law because of the way it shared the information it gleaned with third parties.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Although the second Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta comes a full two years after GWO number one, the wait doesn’t seem to have spoiled the fun.
If there was ever an open source conference that doesn’t need any help from the press, it’s this year’s Great Wide Open in Atlanta. In spite of getting very little media attention, IT-oLogy, the nonprofit behind the event, was able to announce nearly two weeks ago that tickets to the second day of the two day conference were already sold out, with less than 200 remaining tickets for day one. Day one was Wednesday, and as logic would dictate, day two is today.
This comes as something of a surprise, as this isn’t an established conference with a history like, say, OSCON, SCALE or even All Things Open, which these days is probably the flagship event of the same IT-oLogy that’s putting on this show down in the land of magnolia blossoms.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
In 2006, Oracle began trying to abscond with RHEL’s paying user base. On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it’s now going to give Oracle a similar treatment. What’s that they say about paybacks?
Microsoft has declared war on Oracle, which is the type of story I wish was on Netflix. If it were, I’d make some popcorn, mix it with some M&Ms, sit back and binge watch. As it is, I’ll have to watch it unfold the old fashioned way, as it happens.
Some of you might remember the hostilities which broke out between Red Hat and Oracle after Red Hat acquired JBoss. Until then, the two companies had worked hand in hand in something of a partnership which saw Red Hat helping its customers get Oracle’s business stack up and running on RHEL servers. According to news reports of the day, Oracle’s head honcho, Larry Ellison, thought he had Red Hat in his back pocket and happily referred clients who were interested in migrating Oracle’s stack to Linux from Unix or Windows to the Raleigh, N.C. based company.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux