As of today, Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil has been detained by the Syrian government for 943 days. For those of you who may not be aware…
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Credit: Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 8038433@N06’s photostream
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.
photo: campuspartybrasil, CC-BY-SA-2.0
“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.”
Jeff Hoogland, the lead developer of Bodhi Linux, said in a blog post on Friday that “for a variety of reasons,” he is stepping down from the leadership of his “labor of love.”
Bodhi Linux, based on Ubuntu, is a lightweight distro leveraging the Enlightenment Desktop. A note on the Bodhi Linux web page says, “We regret to inform you Bodhi Linux is no longer being maintained,” and has a link to Hoogland’s blog page.
Internet users spoke loudly, firmly, and in no uncertain terms on Wednesday in sending a message of overwhelming support for net neutrality protections during the Internet Slowdown campaign.
Tech companies, websites, public interest organizations and more than a million users joined forces to bring the message of net neutrality forward by posting icons and links on their sites symbolically representing a slow-loading Internet, and by directing those clicking on the links to messages to Congress, the White House and the Federal Communications Commission.
“The numbers tell the story: People everywhere are using the Internet to save the Internet from phone and cable companies,” said Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future. “We’ve shown that the best way to fight these powerful special interests in Washington is through mass action by people from outside Washington. The FCC and Congress can no longer dismiss the overwhelming consensus of public support for real Net Neutrality protections.”
Wednesday’s Internet Slowdown action generated just over 300,000 calls and nearly 2.2 million emails to Congress by Thursday afternoon. Facebook shares of the spinning “loading” icon topped 1.1 million. In addition, 722,364 filed comments Wednesday at the Federal Communications Commission, bringing the total number of comments since March 1 to 7.7 million.
Appearances can be deceiving, and in this particular case, they can make a very poignant statement. To illustrate the point of the “fast lane/slow lane”…