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Posts published by “Larry Cafiero”

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Ubuntu Turns 10 & systemd Is Not Contagious

By Larry Cafiero on October 24, 2014 |

Hardware and Operating Systems

Ubuntu Turns 10 & systemd Is Not ContagiousUtopic Unicorn

FOSS Week in Review

Everyone is either at Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, Ohio LinuxFest or All Things Open, so there’s no one around to bounce off some ideas regarding what’s happening this week. Besides, if you were at any of those three events –- and if not, why not? — you probably know more than I do at this point.

In any case, besides two great stories this week by my colleagues, FOSS Force editor Christine Hall’s ATO coverage and Ken Starks’ pre-OLF piece, there were a few things of note that happened this week, like…

Ubuntu turns ten, releases 14.10: Many accolades were made, toasts were proposed and Ubuntu turns ten while releasing Ubuntu 14.10 –- all the way up to the letter U with Utopic Unicorn –- on Thursday.

Continue readingUbuntu Turns 10 & systemd Is Not Contagious
Four Simple Words to Remember on FOSS Forumsexploding computer

Four Simple Words to Remember on FOSS Forums

By Larry Cafiero on October 22, 2014 |

Community

[Editor’s note: This commentary originally ran as an item in the Larry the Free Software Guy blog earlier this year.]

I wrote a blog item back in October 2011 that garnered the highest amount of hits (well into five figures), and the highest amount of comments (around 200), that this blog has ever achieved. Even the follow-up blog item garnered an abnormally high number of eyeballs. No, I’m not linking to either because I’d prefer not to go another round in the ring, so to speak, putting aside the fact that both blogs still get a considerable number of daily hits.

exploding computerBut if you Google “larry fsf” (no quotes), it comes up first — at least it did for me just now (sorry, “Larry Lessig”).

The back-and-forth in the comments is sometimes civil, sometimes not, and since this outpouring of vitriol — mine included — is abnormally high, I have given a lot of thought about the range of civility in the FOSS world.

I’ve been sitting on the following commentary for a long time. I even wrote an unpublished draft months ago that sits in the Larry the CrunchBang Guy draft queue because, well, I didn’t pull the trigger on writing about the incident in that forum which pushed over the first proverbial domino.

Continue readingFour Simple Words to Remember on FOSS Forums
Open Source Women, Preinstalled Linux & the SF Giantszareason

Open Source Women, Preinstalled Linux & the SF Giants

By Larry Cafiero on October 17, 2014 |

Community, Hardware and News

FOSS Week in Review

With another week coming to an end, let’s wrap it up on a somewhat balanced note.

Get out the Vote: Our friends at Red Hat are now taking votes for the Women in Open Source Awards. The first award of its kind, the prize shines a spotlight on women making important contributions to an open source project, to the open source community, or through the use of open source methodology.

Red Hat logoNominations are open through Nov. 21. Qualified judges from Red Hat will narrow down the nominees to a subset of finalists for both the Academic and Community awards. The public will vote to determine the winner from the finalists selected. Winners will be announced in June during an awards ceremony at next year’s Red Hat Summit in Boston.

Continue readingOpen Source Women, Preinstalled Linux & the SF Giants
One Week: Three FOSS Expos

One Week: Three FOSS Expos

By Larry Cafiero on October 10, 2014 |

Business, Community and Hardware

The week after next the FOSS world will be brimming with opportunities to find out more about what’s going on in three separate shows around the country. If you are within a day’s drive of any of them — or if you are not adverse to flying — making it to one of them would be well worth the effort.

In the South, there’s All Things Open, which is being held midweek — Oct. 22-23 — in Raleigh, N.C. ATO is a conference exploring open source, open tech and the open web in the enterprise. Featuring 90 speakers and 100 sessions, ATO brings a lot of heavy hitters to the Research Triangle area. The price for admission might be considered steep by regular Linux show denizens — ranging from $25 for the Women in Tech/OS panel presentation to $229 for a two-day pass. Those who wish to check out the menu of options can go to the ATO registration page.

Continue readingOne Week: Three FOSS Expos
Questions on Ubuntu Touch, GNOME and Oracle

Questions on Ubuntu Touch, GNOME and Oracle

By Larry Cafiero on October 3, 2014 |

Desktops, Distros, Mobile and Operating Systems

FOSS Week in Review

Other than the continuous scrambling to fix Shellshocked — if nothing else we in the FOSS world are both quick to respond to fixes and quick to come up with great names for epic bugs — this has been a relatively quiet week on our side of the digital street. Yeah, we can laugh at Apple for releasing an update that wasn’t really an update and at Microsoft for losing the ability to count, jumping from Window 8 to Windows 10, now with the improvement of having — wait for it — a command line.

But here are a couple of morsels in the FOSS realm this week, answering a few questions, like:

Hold the phone? Remember the Ubuntu Edge, the smartphone for which Mark Shuttleworth went, hat in hand, begging for $32 million so the wider digital community could fund his pet project?

Continue readingQuestions on Ubuntu Touch, GNOME and Oracle
What Linux User Groups Can Do for FOSS

What Linux User Groups Can Do for FOSS

By Larry Cafiero on October 1, 2014 |

Community, Distros and Operating Systems

On a monthly basis — on the last Saturday each month — members of the Felton Linux Users Group drag their collective butts out of bed at the crack of 9:30, or possibly earlier, and make their way from various points in the sleepy little town just northeast of Santa Cruz to the solar-powered Felton Fire Station for their meeting.

It’s a good group with core regulars hosting meetings since the Lindependence Project held three open houses to introduce the town to Linux in the summer of 2008. In those open houses, various distros like Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Mandriva, along with hardware maker ZaReason, and even an open-source stuffed penguin maker called Open Animals based in Phoenix, appeared to show their wares to the curious in the San Lorenzo Valley area. Around 600 people appeared over the three days and more than 300 live CDs went out the door.

Continue readingWhat Linux User Groups Can Do for FOSS
You Know What Bugs Me About FOSS…?

You Know What Bugs Me About FOSS…?

By Larry Cafiero on September 26, 2014 |

Desktops, Distros, Humor and Operating Systems

Earlier in the week, my FOSS Force colleague Ken Starks wrote a very poignant column on these pages about how there’s no room for the kind of bullying and other varieties of douchebaggery which seems to appear all too often in forums.

That’s something that really bugs me. Not the fact that Ken brought it up, of course, but the fact that people don’t have the common decency to act with civility in the public realm. When someone responded they way they did to Ken as he describes, I’m grabbing some popcorn because Ken has the unique ability to use words like a Ginsu knife to slice and dice such hapless assclowns before they know what hit them.

But back to my point: The lack of civility and reasonable goodwill that some malcontents show in the FOSS realm bothers me.

Do you know what else bothers me? Glad you asked.

Continue readingYou Know What Bugs Me About FOSS…?
Fedora 21 Alpha Gets Off on the Right Foot

Fedora 21 Alpha Gets Off on the Right Foot

By Larry Cafiero on September 24, 2014 |

Desktops, Distros, Operating Systems and Reviews

I say this often – a little too often – and I’ve hammered home the point in various blogs, to say nothing of calling out people who “review” alpha or beta versions of distro releases: Reviewing an alpha or a beta version is akin to sticking your finger in a bowl of cake batter and writing about how a baked cake is going to turn out.

That said, this is not a review of the Fedora 21 Alpha, released yesterday, but rather a test drive of a version that is destined to be improved upon when it is released in December.

So now you can have your cake batter and eat it, too.

First, a moment of silence for the untimely demise of the Fedora Release Name, as Fedora 21 doesn’t have one. Fedora had the best process for release names, causing spirited debate and possibly fisticuffs along the way: $CURRENT_RELEASE_NAME is a ________ and so is $NEXT_RELEASE_NAME, with the blank being filled in with whatever the current name was. Fedora 20 Heisenbug was the last of the named Fedora releases.

Continue readingFedora 21 Alpha Gets Off on the Right Foot
Seigo Throws Flame, Office Suite Kumbaya & OS Face Off

Seigo Throws Flame, Office Suite Kumbaya & OS Face Off

By Larry Cafiero on September 19, 2014 |

Browsers, Community, Operating Systems and Software

FOSS Week in Review

Flamethrowers and a kumbaya that will probably never happen: Yep, that’s the kind of week it was this week in the land of free/open source software.

Wearing your fireproof underwear? KDE’s Aaron Seigo – never one to shy away from saying what he thinks – lit into community managers in a Google+ post on Monday, calling the community manager role in free/open source software projects “a fraud and a farce.”

Aaron Seigo KDE
Aaron Seigo, shown here in 2011, is never one to shy away from a good discussion or debate.
Credit: Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 8038433@N06’s photostream
“Communities (real ones) have facilitators and leaders of various forms and stripes,” Seigo writes. “It’s OK if they get paid so they are able to spend the time and energy facilitating and leading, but they damn sure are not ‘managers of the community.’ They are accountable to the community, selected by the community, derive their influence from community consensus and can be replaced by the community at the community’s behest.

Continue readingSeigo Throws Flame, Office Suite Kumbaya & OS Face Off
FOSS Around the World: Latin America

FOSS Around the World: Latin America

By Larry Cafiero on September 17, 2014 |

Operating Systems and Software

Too often coverage of free/open source software news and commentary tends to focus on either developments and activities in North America or in Europe. While much of the news is made on these two continents, there’s a wider world out there where folks are doing some substantial things, and promoting FOSS in their own way in their own areas.

Periodically, we at FOSS Force will be looking at areas of the world which have been either overlooked or neglected in digital news coverage. Today we’ll start south of the U.S. border with Latin America — Mexico, along with Central and South America, for those of you keeping track on maps at home.

We start this with a quick overview of the region itself, and the canvas is a large one.

Jon 'maddog' Hall (Photo: campuspartybrasil, CC-BY-SA-2.0)
Jon ‘maddog’ Hall
photo: campuspartybrasil, CC-BY-SA-2.0
Jon ‘maddog’ Hall travels extensively as executive director of Linux International and is likely the most well known de facto ambassador for all things Linux and FOSS. A world traveler, he regularly speaks in South America where he says the use of FOSS is varied.

“Central and South America is a very big region,” Hall said. “The spread of FOSS is uneven, as you might expect. Likewise, FOSS is more than just GNU/Linux, so the use of FOSS is also uneven.”

Continue readingFOSS Around the World: Latin America
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