September 15, 2025
Keeping tech free
A German fellow with the YouTube username Rhymoore shows his PINE 64, the 64 bit single board computer that’s been taking preorders for $15 on Kickstarter, booting the Android based Remix OS on his 4K monitor. Glitches still exist, but those will likely get ironed out.
Often when we run a poll on FOSS Force, the results only go to confirm what we already know. Our latest completed poll is an example. What we got was exactly what we expected. You don’t think the makers of encrypted devices, or encryption software, should help the G-Men get inside — not even with a warrant.
Emily Fox is a talented musician and Linux-loving youth in the United Kingdom. Her musical talent is enormous and she produces all her music videos using open source software.
The punishment needs to fit the crime, but in Microsoft’s case, it never has. The punishments that have been meted out to Redmond for their civil and criminal asshattery over the years have been almost laughable. From the ridiculously small punishment for obvious antitrust violations at the turn of the century when the company was convicted as a monopolist, to the law seemingly turning it’s blind eyes away from Microsoft for their blatant patent-slinging abuses.
What it all boils down to is Microsoft being fined millions while making billions.
If Penfield Jackson, the initial judge in the Microsoft antitrust case, hadn’t gotten himself thrown off the case for discussing it with the press, the Microsoft of today would look much different. The pieces of it anyway. Personally, I think I would like that Microsoft much better than the one today.
One of the complaints we hear sometimes about the plethora of GNU/Linux distributions is that they’re all “cookie cutters.” One is just like the other, we’re told, so why have so many versions of the same thing? For starters, except for a couple of rare instances, no two Linux distros are exactly alike, not even when they start with the same base. The most obvious example here would be Ubuntu, which although based on Debian, offers the user an experience completely different from the parent distro. Likewise, Linux Mint is built with Ubuntu under the hood, but as many Mint users will attest, the distro is hardly just a rebranded *buntu.
FOSS Week in Review A few months back I was thinking that reporting on FOSS wasn’t as fun as it once was. As a matter…
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of March, 2016. 1. Microsoft Does to Oracle What Oracle Tried To…
Starting a successful open source project requires a lot more than technical skills. You need to have wise strategies, which Michael DeHaan, founder of the IT automation company Ansible, clearly explains in this valuable video. In this talk, recorded March 22 on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University, he explains that for users to adopt your open source creations, the documentation needs to be outstanding. Your web site needs to be very well done. Learn these and other tips in this video.
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.
The Emmabuntüs Community today announced the third maintenance release of Emmabuntüs 3, version 1.03, based on Xubuntu 14.04.4. Like its *buntu namesake, the distro ships with the Xfce desktop by default, but also includes LXDE as an option.
What sets Emmabuntüs apart from other GNU/Linux distributions is the fact that it’s a distro with a mission. The informal community responsible for the distribution initially came together sometime before 2012 with the purpose of creating a distribution to simplify the task of refurbishing used computers to be given to charity organizations, with the key recipient being Emmaus, a secular international organization founded in Paris in 1949 by Catholic priest and Capuchin friar Abbé Pierre to combat poverty and homelessness.
