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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

Apple Takes a Bite of Open Source

Unless you’ve been incommunicado due to a stint in the Witness Protection Program, stranded on a deserted island, or sleeping under a rock — or possibly any combination thereof — you have already heard that Apple announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference this week that the kings of closed-source software based in Cupertino will open-source its programming language Swift.

Swift logoWhile there have been no injury reports yet from the multitudes simultaneously jumping on the Swift-as-open-source bandwagon — and no shortage of “Apple to tailor Swift to open source” headlines (can someone hand me an air-sickness bag?) — you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t share the rampant enthusiasm for a couple of reasons.

MS Supports SSH, Keeping Up With the Kubuntus & More…

FOSS Week in Review

How can it be Friday already? Not that I’m complaining, but it seems like only a few hours ago I was posting a story about SouthEast LinuxFest (more on SELF below) and now I’m collecting the week’s highlights, sins and foibles and giving them to you as this week’s wrap-up.

OpenSSH logoMicrosoft joins the 21st Century: Our friends in Redmond — you know, the folks who love FOSS so much that they want to hug us to death, literally (in the traditional sense of the word) — have decided to provide support for SSH in their own PowerShell, according to various articles this week. We’re going to link to one in The Register, because any story with a sub-headline “Now that the door has hit Ballmer on the way out, OpenSSH support is go” is one you just have to go with.

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

Being SELF-ish: Linux Comes to the GNU South

Here and elsewhere, like it or not, I’ve compared those who travel from FOSS expo to FOSS expo as the spiritual kin to Deadheads following the Grateful Dead across the country while the band toured. Needless to say, I don’t mean this in a negative way — it’s not like we all show up unwashed for days in tie-dye T-shirts (unless it’s from a vendor at a previous show) in VW Microbuses — but it’s more of a movable feast where reunions take place every few months with far-flung friends and, as it always happens, great presentations take place and folks of all stripes.

SELF 2013
From SELF 2013. Photo by Eugene Mah.
So we can also boil it down into a phrase coined by Robert Earl Keen: “The road goes on forever, and the party never ends.”

That said, the next stop on the Magical Linux-y Tour will be in North Carolina — you’ll see the link in the upper right of this page — the SouthEast LinuxFest, known more commonly by its acronym SELF (FOSS Force is a Supporting Sponsor), takes place next weekend in Charlotte. For three days, June 12-14 to be precise, Jeremy Sands and the rest of the crew at SELF bring Linux, BSD and FOSS to what has lately become my favorite geographical location, by name: the GNU/South.

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

Ubuntu: Show Me the Money & Kubuntu Lead Ousted

FOSS Week in Review

Well, so much for an easy week. I was ready to kick back, give Fedora 22 a further test run and pop open a cold one (root beer, of course) while I wrapped up the week with items like Jim Whitehurst’s busy week which included, among other things, an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” a review of Bodhi Linux on about.com, of all places, which I found interesting in a quirky way. And maybe — just maybe — we could all talk about Richard Stallman claiming the OS we all use should be called GNU, oblivious to the fact that this particular train left the station, oh, 20 years ago or thereabout.

Jonathan Ridell
Kubuntu’s Jonathan Riddell
But no. Now I have to make popcorn, sit back, and watch this drama unfold.

The $143,000 question: Softpedia reported earlier this week that there’s a unaccounted-for $143,000 in donations to Ubuntu that the Ubuntu Community Council can’t seem to find. While this doesn’t seem to be a new story, if mailing list traffic is any indication, it is an issue that does pique the interest for — what do you call them again? Oh yeah — answers.

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

A Few Laps With Fedora 22

To great fanfare, Fedora 22 was released to the wider world yesterday. And to those who awaited it with bated breath, it does not disappoint.

A word to the uninitiated: As many of you already know, in the broadest terms, Fedora is a testbed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Developments in Fedora – and there are many, leading to its cutting-edge reputation (which wrongfully scares some users from using it; more on this later) – sooner or later end up on RHEL for the commercial market.

Fedora logoSince the introduction of Fedora.next — the umbrella program for the roadmap for the distro going forward — the distro comes in three basic flavors: Workstation, Server and Cloud. Workstation is the desktop/laptop version — and workstation version for businesses. Cloud and Server are pretty self-explanatory.

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

SCALE 14X Moves, Canonical Considers IPO & More…

FOSS Week in Review

While the week started out with some of us waxing nostalgic about penguins on racing cars, it seems that the march of progress and onward-and-upward improvement continues, if news from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is of any indication.

SCALE moving: According to a highly placed source in the SCALE hierarchy — of course, that would be me — SCALE has outgrown a series of hotels over the last several years, and the 2016 edition of the expo will be held at the Pasadena Convention Center from Jan. 21-24, 2016.

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

The Day Linux Crashed

OK, class, open your history books.

The end of May usually brings many people’s attention toward Indianapolis, home of the Colts, Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), and a 500-mile race on a 2.5-mile rectangular track affectionately known to those who follow auto racing as “the Brickyard.”

As a greenhorn Linux newbie eight springs ago, I happened upon an article on LXer about this guy in Texas who had an idea on how to promote Linux. Oh, it was a crazy idea all right, but thinking about it at the time, it was one that might…just…work. For the Indianapolis 500 in 2007, the idea — this crazy plan — was to put Linux on the side and nose of a car, and while penguins couldn’t fly, they still could go just over 220 and turn left.

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

Linux Mint Going systemd, Foresight Closes Shop & More…

FOSS Week in Review

An active week — both here at FOSS Force around the Fossosphere — is coming to an end, and by “active,” I completely mean that in a good way. Special tip of the hat to Ken Starks and his interview on FOSS Force yesterday, which you should check out if you haven’t already.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the FOSS realm…

Linux Mint to go with systemd: While Linux Mint did not join the systemd derby when the green flag dropped, Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre expects the next releases of Linux Mint to use systemd by default, according to an article this week in PC World.

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

From Windows XP to Linux: Adding to the List

Yesterday on Datamation, Matt Hartley wrote what could best be described as a reminder piece about the folks using Windows XP at home or in small businesses having options when it comes to replacing that particular operating system, and that the best option — go ahead and say it with me — is Linux.

Hartley mentions an adequate lineup of distros — Linux Mint, Ubuntu MATE, PCLinuxOS, and Puppy Linux (okay, for the really old machines, I’ll go with that one) — but in the wide world of Linux, there are more. Several more. Okay, maybe more than several more.

I understand that Matt may not have wanted to get bogged down in a distro food fight, and while I enjoy that as much as the next guy or gal, I’m not looking to hurl edible projectiles either. But I don’t shy away from it either.

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

Linux Mint in June, Matt Hartley’s Goodbye & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Well, as they say, TGIF: Thank God it’s FOSS. As folks get settled in this weekend in beautiful downtown Orem, Utah, at OpenWest — the expo formerly known at one time as the Utah Open Source Conference — here’s a look at some of the things that transpired during the course of the week.

Linux Mint LogoHello, Rafaela: According to a Softpedia article, Linux Mint announced this week that it will release its next version of Linux Mint 17 — 17.2, which was given the release name Rafaela. Not much else was released in the way of information, other than the release candidate would be available next month, as well as lead developer Clement Lefebvre saying that Linux Mint 18 will be available sometime next year.

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

Linux From Square One

This week I had been pursuing a story on a virtualization development which was prematurely suggested/whispered/uncovered at LinuxFest Northwest. However, I understand from those who know more about the subject than I do — which is just about everyone — it was apparently not as groundbreaking as I thought. With my knowledge of virtualization ranking just slightly above my non-existent grasp of quantum physics, I had to put that one aside thanks to a ever-approaching deadline.

Opensource.com logoBut never mind: Something better came along, and the virtual lemons now become lemonade.

We’ll take a walk down memory lane in a minute, but Jason Hibbets and his team of scribes at Opensource.com published a story today announcing a new page on the site to introduce everyone — from the curious to the not-yet-enlightened and beyond — to Linux/FOSS.

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

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