April 23, 2025
Keeping tech free
Google Fuchsia first saw the light of day in the summer of 2016 as an unannounced bit of code posted on GitHub. Now, in May 2017, the word is being spread by so many tech news outlets that we don’t have room to list them all.
Open Data Kit is a free and open source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. The flexibility that open source offers means that the use cases for these tools are very broad. Check this introductory video about ODK tools which explains a rural medicine use case.
Do you ever look at your Android phone and wonder how much of the software on it is open source? I just did, and I was surprised at how little FOSS I had on it. Could I change that? After a bunch of searching, I did. But only a little.
Android itself is an open source project. Google controls the main branch and can keep you from using the “Android” trademark if you fork the project, but otherwise you can do anything you like with the code.
Now let’s talk about Android applications. Maybe I shouldn’t admit this in public, but until the idea for this essay came up last week in a conversation with FOSS Force editor Christine Hall, I hadn’t thought much about Android app licenses, not even when choosing apps for my own use.
There are three basic models for monetizing digital goods on Google Play — freemium, paid apps and advertising supported using Google’s AdMob service. The Video…
Security expert and co-creator of the Linux-hardening (and now Unix-hardening) project Bastille Linux. That’s Jay Beale. He’s been working with Linux, and specifically on security, since the late 1980s. The greatest threat to Linux these days? According to Beale, the thing you really need to watch out for is your Android phone, which your handset manufacturer and wireless carrier may or may not be good about updating with the latest security patches. Even worse? Applications you get outside of the controlled Google Play and Amazon environments, where who-knows-what malware may lurk.
Moodle is a very popular free and open source learning management system, like Blackboard, used extensively around the world. Back in 2004, a very smart friend of mine, Gina Russell Stevens, explained to me that Moodle is so useful it could be used for many purposes beyond education. Her comment stuck with me. When I noticed that Moodle now has a free mobile app available for Android and iOS, it occurred to me that this app could be customized for many civic communication purposes.
When Linus Torvalds started work on Linux, his purpose wasn’t to reinvent the operating system. Just the opposite. His purpose was to build an operating system that was a lot like the already existing Unix. In other words, he embraced what was already being used.
As development continued, refinements were naturally added that didn’t exist in other operating systems, many of which eventually ended up in other *nixes and even Windows, just as many new additions to Unix also ended up in the Linux kernel. But the original purpose was simply to build on what had gone before, not to create something radically different.
Distros, Mobile, News, Operating Systems and Web Apps
Here I am, sitting at the FOSS Force table in the land of the not-so-deep-south. I’m in Charlotte, in the northern Carolina, 33 miles exactly from the border with the other, southern, Carolina, which is probably good, just in case I need to make a quick getaway. I’m also almost exactly 90 miles from the termite eaten shack I call home up near the Virginia state line. Essentially this morning I’ve traveled from state to shining state.
I am, of course, at the SouthEast LinuxFest, which is Tux’s gift to the land of fatback, grits and turnip greens. This year’s trip is something of a working trip, because I really can’t afford to take three days away from work. So FOSS Force has a table here, convenient for me to get my work done, as I’m doing now, writing the weekend roundup. It’s just like my home office, except here I’m surrounded by Linux using and loving folks instead of by unswept cobwebs and more stink bugs than I can tolerate, which is how I live. It’s fun here. It’s different. Later on I’ll take in a lecture, which will be the first performance I’ve seen that’s not on a TV screen since last October.
But first, the FOSS news…
I’ve finally defined what it is I don’t like about Android — or about any mobile device for that matter. I’ve grappled with this issue for several years, boiling my dislike of Google’s operating system down to “it’s always trying to sell something.” But that wasn’t quite it, and I knew it. The selling thing is a symptom, not the disease, so to speak.
Then, one day last week I finally had my aha! moment and realized precisely what it is I don’t like about mobile devices. I was reading a pretty good article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, his take on the death of computing as many of us know it, when I came across a line that was basically meant as an aside, and suddenly I understood why I don’t like Android or iOS and never will.
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.
