Posts published by “Larry Cafiero”

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Is Bassel Nearer to Freedom?

By Larry Cafiero on August 12, 2015 |

Community, News and Politics

Is Bassel Nearer to Freedom?

Last October, FOSS Force published a story on the 2012 imprisonment — without charges — by the Syrian government of Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Syrian computer engineer specializing in open source software development. Bassel has become known worldwide for his strong commitment to the open source paradigm, teaching others about technology, and contributing his experience freely to help the world.

Earlier this year and up to a fortnight ago, the Syrian government has been systematically releasing hundreds of prisoners. However, so far Bassel hasn’t been one of them.

Jon Phillips, a digital activist living in the U.S. who has collaborated with Bassel on projects in the past and is currently working to help free Bassel, took a few minutes with FOSS Force to update Bassel’s plight.

Larry Cafiero

Lenovo Announces New ThinkPad P50, P70 ‘Mobile Workstation’

Lenovo Announces New ThinkPad P50, P70 ‘Mobile Workstation’

By Larry Cafiero on August 12, 2015 |

Hardware and News

ThinkPad aficionados, are you ready?

While both bending the language and changing definitions of hardware on the fly, Lenovo announced on Tuesday the Lenovo ThinkPad P50 and P70, the new ThinkPad hardware to be available in Q4.

But first, let’s set things straight: The ThinkPad is no longer a laptop, according to the Lenovo press release. The first paragraph of the press release says the company “unveiled the beginning of a new family of mobile workstation innovations.” So I guess that’s what we’re calling them now – mobile workstations.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P70 should be out later this year.

Fine.

Anyway, the new ThinkPad P70 comes with the most memory and storage ever found in a laptop…sorry, a mobile workstation. Namely, maxing out at 64GB of DDR4 ECC memory and with the ability to handle up to four storage devices and up to a terabyte of SSD storage. It also utilizes the latest PCIe technology for speeds up to five times faster than current SATA technology. But wait, there’s more: The ThinkPad P70 “comes with two Intel ThunderboltTM 3 ports for ultra-fast connectivity and a 4K UHD display or optional FHD touch,” according to the release.

Larry Cafiero

LibreOffice Hits Prime Time, Bug Bites KDE Plasma 5 & More…

By Larry Cafiero on August 7, 2015 |

Community, Desktops, Distros and Software

FOSS Week in Review

LibreOffice 5 Ready for Prime Time: LibreOffice, the office suite of choice of yours truly and others in the FOSS field, is now in the starting blocks to take on the proprietary office suites. The Document Foundation announced this week the release of LibreOffice 5.0, with a significantly improved user interface, with a better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, the latest LO release offers better interoperability with proprietary office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple iWork, with new and improved filters to handle non standard formats.

“In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the office suite we were envisioning for the long term,” said Michael Meeks, a director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of user interface.”

Larry Cafiero

Ada Initiative Closes Up Shop

Ada Initiative Closes Up Shop

By Larry Cafiero on August 5, 2015 |

Community and News

With an announcement on the Linux Weekly News site on Tuesday, the Ada Initiative will be tying up the loose ends and wrapping up their work in October.

“It is with mixed feelings that we announce that the Ada Initiative will be shutting down in approximately mid-October,” the statement said. “We are proud of what we accomplished with the support of many thousands of volunteers, sponsors, and donors, and we expect all of our programs to continue on in some form without the Ada Initiative. Thank you for your incredible work and support!”

According to the statement, after a search for a new executive director late last year, the new hire didn’t work out.

The statement explains: “That brought us to a decision point. It would have been unreasonable to expect Valerie (Aurora, a co-founder) and Mary (Gardiner, a co-founder) to continue with the Ada Initiative forever. We considered running a second ED search, but it had become clear to the board that the success of the Ada Initiative was very much a product of its two founders, and was a direct result of their experiences, skills, strengths and passions. We felt the likelihood of finding a new ED who could effectively fit into Valerie’s shoes was low. We also considered several other options for continuing the organization, including changing its programs, or becoming volunteer-only.”

Larry Cafiero

Banks’ Family Values; Texas Linux Fest & More…

By Larry Cafiero on July 31, 2015 |

Community, Distros, News and Operating Systems

FOSS Week in Review

It’s been pretty warm where I live on the Central California coast, and I hope everyone else has been keeping cool — or as cool as possible — this week. After OSCON, there’s been sort of a lull in news that’s uniquely FOSS-related, but we do have a couple of tidbits to throw you as we end the week.

Keila Banks, fresh off her OSCON keynote, appears Saturday on MSNBC (Photo: OSCON video)

All in the Family: It seems that the Banks family of Los Angeles has taken upon itself to single-handedly invite the wider world to the see and try out the benefits of FOSS and programming. We reported on Keila Banks speaking at OSCON last week, but so has Business Insider and MTV News — and now MSNBC is getting in on the act by having her on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show at 8 a.m. Saturday. Check your local listings.

Larry Cafiero

KDE Plasma Goes Mobile

KDE Plasma Goes Mobile

By Larry Cafiero on July 29, 2015 |

Desktops, Mobile, News and Operating Systems

While FOSS Force gave you a look at setting up KDE Plasma on the desktop in Don Parris’ article last week, KDE recently jumped into the mobile fray by announcing KDE Plasma Mobile at their Akademy conference this week in Spain.

While it joins an already crowded field, with the likes of Android, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and others already in the mobile OS space, Plasma Mobile “offers a free — as in freedom and beer — user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices,” wrote Sebastian Kugler, a lead architect, on KDE’s website. “Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.”

Larry Cafiero

OSCON: The Envelope, Please…

By Larry Cafiero on July 24, 2015 |

Community and News

OSCON logo OSCON wraps up, as it always does, with its closing remarks, a short talk — this year by Simon Wardley on “Situation normal, everything must change” — and the annually awaited O’Reilly Open Source Awards, which had five winners this year.

The five are…and because no one else will say it, I will:

The OSCON goes to…

Larry Cafiero

OSCON: Goodbye, Portland

OSCON: Goodbye, Portland

By Larry Cafiero on July 24, 2015 |

Community and News

On the last morning of the last day of the last OSCON in Portland, things seem remarkably upbeat. Though resigned to the fact that they’re losing the home-field advantage for having the largest FOSS expo in North America, many Portlanders still feel that OSCON will be back someday. Officially, O’Reilly is focused laser-like on the Austin event in May 2016 — among the increasing number of O’Reilly events here in North America and elsewhere — so 2017 is not even on the radar yet.

Larry Cafiero

OSCON: From the Expo Floor

By Larry Cafiero on July 23, 2015 |

Community, Distros and Operating Systems

I’ve said this before: Going from FOSS expo to expo several times a year is like following the Grateful Dead from gig to gig, or to help younger folks understand it, following Phish all over the place and ending up at Bonnaroo.

Like many of the Linux/FOSS events that dot the calendar year, OSCON resembles that — Bonnaroo without the mosh pit (though now that I’ve written that, let’s see if something like that appears in Austin next year) — but along with the camaraderie there’s also an element of “high school reunion” in the mix.

Fedora Project leadership alumni were out in force at OSCON.

Though it’s mostly the same faces — the same welcoming, friendly faces — augmented by new faces, the new stories abound.

Larry Cafiero

OSCON: Purism Respects Your Rights & Freedom

OSCON: Purism Respects Your Rights & Freedom

By Larry Cafiero on July 23, 2015 |

Hardware, News, Security and Software

Your digital rights — do both your hardware and software respect them?

Because if they don’t, Purism might have the answer to this shortcoming.

At OSCON, Purism has on hand the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops – the numbers designating the screen size (13-inch and 15-inch, respectively) — which are both designed, chip-by-chip and line-by-line to respect your rights to privacy, security and freedom, which is Purism’s philosophy.

“We developed Purism so that users can have access to the highest quality computers without compromising these beliefs,” the Purism website states. “The founder of Purism developed the Philosophical Contract, that we all abide by, which was adopted from the Free Software Foundation, and expanded to include hardware manufacturing as it relates to software.”

Larry Cafiero

OSCON Report: Big Blue Goes Big for FOSS

By Larry Cafiero on July 22, 2015 |

Business, Community, News and Software

PORTLAND, Ore. — My colleague Christine Hall beat me to the punch this morning about Capital One’s announcement on their open source development tool, but IBM and Hitachi also both made a big splash at OSCON today.

“Big Blue” unveiled a new platform for developers to collaborate with IBM on a newly released set of open source technologies. IBM plans to release 50 projects to the open source community to speed adoption in the enterprise sector and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile and analytics, among other areas.

The project is called developerWorks Open, a cloud-based environment for developers to access emerging IBM technologies, technical expertise and collaborate with a global network to accelerate projects. Developers can download the code, but also access various items like blogs, videos, tools and techniques to accelerate their efforts.

Larry Cafiero

All Things Open 2024

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

Posts published by “Larry Cafiero”

Is Bassel Nearer to Freedom?

Lenovo Announces New ThinkPad P50, P70 ‘Mobile Workstation’

LibreOffice Hits Prime Time, Bug Bites KDE Plasma 5 & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Ada Initiative Closes Up Shop

Banks’ Family Values; Texas Linux Fest & More…

FOSS Week in Review

KDE Plasma Goes Mobile

OSCON: The Envelope, Please…

OSCON: Goodbye, Portland

OSCON: From the Expo Floor

OSCON: Purism Respects Your Rights & Freedom

OSCON Report: Big Blue Goes Big for FOSS