The continuing adventures of a new open source tinkerer who comes to realize that we embrace — or eschew — change for reasons that aren’t…
FOSS Force
It’s easy to be tempted to draw a parallel between the recent fork of ownCloud by Nextcloud and The Document Foundation’s fork of OpenOffice six years ago. Slight differences are there, but they’re probably meaningless.
There are more than enough similarities between the recent forking of ownCloud to Nextcloud and the creation of LibreOffice out of OpenOffice six years ago to draw comparisons, but there are also many differences. As Yogi Berra might say, they are the same but different.
OpenOffice, if you’ll remember, was forked by a group of developers who had been frustrated for years by roadblocks to what they saw as necessary development by Sun Microsystems, which had created the open source project out of Star Office, a proprietary suite it purchased in the late 1990s. When the situation worsened after Oracle took ownership, the developers created The Document Foundation, forked OpenOffice and released it as LibreOffice under the GPL. Improvements became evident right away, with much of the early work centering on cleaning up the bloated code base.
Among other things, our Pi guy looks at the newest addition to the MagPi Essentials collection, Dave Akerman and a Raspberry Pi breaking a lofty record, and Tim Peake returning from space while leaving his Astro Pis in orbit.
The Raspberry Pi Report
Quite a few things have happened in the Raspberry Pi world since I last wrote. While the entire list of amazing stories would be too long to include everything here, I’ll try my best to include the stories from June that show how far things have come for the Raspberry Pi since my last column at the end of May.
Sometimes applications have capabilities that go beyond their primary use. Our contributing video editor found this excellent video tutorial on editing videos in Blender, an app that’s primarily used for creating animated films.
The Video Screening Room
Blender is well-known for its 3D animation features, but did you know it also contains a very fine video editor? This explanatory screencast shares a lot of tips and tricks. I especially enjoyed when the screencaster made mistakes and then explained them. That can add a lot of value to a screencast. In fact, I’d pay good money for mistakes.
“Linux is a failed experiment,” she spit. “It has no business even existing in the tech world and I am fully capable of recovering any important files myself. I do not need your help.”
The Heart of Linux
I live in a pretty cool place. We were lucky enough to find a quiet retirement community for those over the age of 55 and/or those who have disabilities that prevent them from working. Our rent is controlled by the government, so we are living in a two bedroom, two bath apartment but are paying the average rent for a studio. How cool is that? The waiting list for these apartments is usually nine months, so we were happy to have the management call us and tell us that we could move-in less than ten days after filing our application.
This is an extremely nice complex. It’s what I call a Stepford complex, a neighborhood tucked away on a side street that, if you didn’t know it was here, you would never see. Everything is neatly built, with buildings perfectly in line with those on each side and with the unit across the street. The understated entrance is often blindly passed by, even when people are looking for it. The residents tend to be close to their neighbors and there isn’t a stranger in the whole place. New residents will find that within a week of their arrival, people will be standing at their door presenting them with cakes, pies, casseroles, cupcakes and cookies, all in the name of getting in the door and seeing who they are and what they are all about. Retirement communities are like that. Diane refers to folks like this as having “nose troubles.”
If FOSS is to have a future, we must embrace both mobile and the Chromebook model and develop a distro that’s equally at home on a phone, a low resource cloud based computer and on a traditional PC.
Op-ed
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.
Also included: LinuxQuestions.org has a birthday, six new distro releases, Ubuntu considering dropping 32-bit support and the feds were after Snowden.
FOSS Week in Review
Happy birthday America. And happy birthday to LinuxQuestions.org. America, more correctly known as United States of America since we’re not the only country on this big piece of land, turns 240-years-old on Monday, if you accept July 4, 1776 as it’s “born on” date. If it’s not too hot, I’ll be going to the Shoals community ballpark to watch the fireworks display and eat some 50 cent hot dogs. I’ll be ordering mine “all the way,” which around here means chili, slaw, mustard and onions. The birthday wish for LinuxQuestions.org is a little belated. The site was started by Jeremy Garcia sixteen years ago last weekend.
Now on to this weeks FOSS news highlights…
Companies that traditionally focused on proprietary software are now playing catch up in order to compete by utilizing open source development. The Video Screening Room…
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of June, 2016. 1. Why I’m Unlikely to Ever Return Microsoft’s Love…
An unadorned search page that loads fast. Search results combined from a number of sources. No sponsored search results to get in the way of…