Yep, it looks like the end of the week is upon us once again, and with it there has been a lot of news in the FOSS realm. What you might have missed, if you weren’t paying attention, is the following:
Happy 13th, Tux Paint: There was reason to break out the candles this week — 13 of ’em — and put them on a cake before saying “Happy Birthday” to Tux Paint. Tux Paint was first released to the wider world on June 16, 2002. Now that it’s a teenager, we can see what fantastic progress the New Breed Software folks have achieved in this time.
Tux Paint turned 13 this week, and also became available for Android. Great going, New Breed Software!FOSS Force — or rather, I — wrote about Tux Paint back in August of last year, and on its birthday back on Tuesday, there was a note on the site that said, and I quote, “We’ve just learned that Tux Paint (based on what will become the 0.9.23 version) has been created for Android, and is available for free in the Google Play Store!”
You’ve read the articles: “Linux sysadmins in demand,” yadda yadda yadda. You’ve been using Linux for some time and have been thinking, “Gee, I wish I could make a living with Linux.”
You can get the training; but it costs so much, you might say. Well, now you can get a scholarship, so there’s no excuse not to go for it.
The Linux Foundation, ever in the forefront of shaping the future of Linux, has announced the 2015 Linux Training Scholarship Program, which aims to provide educational funds “to up-and-coming developers and sysadmins who show incredible promise…but do not otherwise have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses,” according to a page on the Foundation’s website.
It ceased to be funny about the third time I read it. “Is this the year of the Linux desktop?”
Uh, yeah it is. Just like it was in 2014, 2013, 2012…It just depends on whose desktop you are talking about.
The topic came up when an old friend, Richard, and I began an email exchange to catch up after a number of years. He’s a senior Linux admin for one of the major New York City hospitals and the topic turned to some things we’ve noted over time. We talked about how Linux isn’t. It isn’t in the public awareness. It isn’t in stores. It isn’t offered by OEMs in any real quantity. It isn’t visible at all. Richard stated that it was probably better that way. Why he said that, I don’t know. I’ll have to bring that up again, but I have a fairly good idea.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
The SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) was packed on Saturday, meaning that Jeremy Sands (who told me that day two is always much busier than opening day) knows SELF. Maybe I should’ve asked his advice when I was booking my room in Charlotte. Here’s what I learned on my own: There’s a big difference between a Red Roof and a Red Hat. The later is dependable. The former took three tries to get me into a room that was kinda/sorta what I’d reserved — with Wi-Fi that didn’t work more often than it did.
Francois Dion giving his presentation as Jupiter Broadcasting handles live streaming in the foreground.Back at SELF, the place was hoppin’ when I arrived at 8:30 in the morning, and the first presentation was still a half hour away.
Francois Dion’s keynote, “Team Near Space Circus: Computing at 80,000 Feet” was nothing if not fascinating, and I was happy to get filled in on the details of a story I knew a little about because it happened in my backyard, meaning the Winston-Salem, N.C. area (in Mocksville, if you’re planning to take the test).
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Day one of this year’s SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) was kind of slow, without the bone crushing crowds I expect to see at an open source conference. However, talking with the go-to person at SELF, Jeremy Sands, I understand that this is normal for this conference. It seems that Charlotte is a city with a strong work ethic, keeping the crowd away until the weekend. Still, nearly five hundred in attendance isn’t deserving of sneers — especially on a “slow” day.
Somehow I managed to get up on time to make the hour and a half trip from my house to the Charlotte area in plenty of time for the 9 A.M. opening, groggy from only getting about three hours sleep, then wondered why I bothered arriving early. After all, the first presentation I planned to attend wasn’t until 11:30, and with no keynote address scheduled for Friday morning, that left me with a lot of time on my hands.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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.
While 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.
From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.
SouthEast LinuxFest’s Jeremy Sands in 2010.At the very least, I expect to find that at SELF even the software will be southern fried and smothered with gravy. That’s because SELF intends to be more than just another LinuxFest. It intends to be a celebration of southern living, hence the guns and barbecue. Presumably, grits will be served at breakfast, and Southern Comfort and Bourbon will be available at the after parties.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
The allegations that came with the Edward Snowden revelations of Microsoft’s cooperation with U.S. spy agencies is evidently still a problem for Redmond, if a blog item posted yesterday by security VP Matt Thomlinson is any indication. It seems the company has opened a second Transparency Center, this one in Brussels. The news comes eleven months after the announcement of the first such center on the company’s Redmond campus.
At the height of the media frenzy that developed around Snowden’s initial revelations, there were allegations that Microsoft had not only built back doors in its software for the NSA and other government agencies to use against foreign businesses and governments, but that it was cooperating with U.S. authorities in other ways as well. For example, one report indicated that the company was passing along details of unpatched security vulnerabilities in Windows to the NSA, effectively adding temporary tools to the spy agency’s cyber arsenal.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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.
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.
I’ve been kicking an idea around for a while now. I deemed it important enough to keep a notebook, a place where I could jot down my ideas and questions…maybe a profound revelation or two. I’ve collected ideas and thoughts concerning this topic from folks like Jim Zemlin, Dana Blankenhorn and Tom Adelstein. And while some conversations took place a while back, the input is no less valuable.
I’ve spent a good deal of time, as well, kicking this around with my partner-in-ink Larry Cafiero. And some of the things I’ve taken away were not gotten face-to-face: Folks like Steven Vaughan-Nichols and Matt Hartley have discussed it through their preferred media in one way or another.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
Every time we run a story on FOSS Force touching on Canonical’s financial health, such as Larry Cafiero’s notice a week or so ago about Shuttleworth’s musings on a potential IPO, the Ubuntu naysayers come up from their basements to express the opinion that Shuttleworth is finally getting tired of flushing money down the toilet and is getting ready to put a padlock on the door and go home.
Dell labels this on its website as “Inspiron 14 3000 Series Laptop Ubuntu Edition.”That’s not going to happen, because that would be snapping defeat out of the arms of victory. Shuttleworth knows the smell of victory — that’s how he came to be worth $500 million — and Ubuntu finally seems to be primed for success.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux