Photo: Joi Ito, CC-BY-2.0
Mediaoriente gave this report, and the Free Bassel Safadi Facebook page has also been active on Saturday, though details have been sketchy.
FOSS Force
FOSS Week in Review
Mea culpa: I went to bed last night thinking it was Wednesday, woke up today thinking it was Thursday, went along with my usual Thursday work plan (which differs little from any other weekday) until Christine Hall emailed me and asked, “Where’s the wrap?”
Oops. With apologies and with a brand new calendar in hand, here’s the weekly wrap-up.
Photo by Jamie Pham)
“Microsoft and Google are pleased to announce an agreement on patent issues,” Redmond has said in a joint statement with Google. “As part of the agreement, the companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility.”
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of September, 2015.
!. Real Linux Coming to Tablets by Christine Hall. Published September 7, 2015. This month saw the announcement of two impressive tablets, both running versions of Linux. One’s running Sailfish OS from Jolla. The other will run the much anticipated Ubuntu Touch.
2. Booting Windows 10…Out the Door by Ken Starks. Published September 15, 2015. Our irrepressible Mr. Starks finds out a few things that make him angry about Windows 10 and goes on a rant. He’s mad. Really, really mad. We can’t imagine how angry he’d be if he actually used Windows.
It wasn’t long ago that gamers avoided Linux like the plague, citing the lack of games as their main reason. When I was growing up, there were next to no major games to play on Linux and it seemed no developers cared to try. However, with the help of companies like Valve, 2K, and Aspyr Media, that’s quickly changing. More and more games are becoming available, with even some being Linux exclusives, including a launch on Steam of Don’t be a Patchman this past July.
Her name is Natalia and she doesn’t have a clue about what is in store for her tomorrow. Natalia started high school this year. She’s not only an honor roll student, she’s musically gifted as well. Natalia studies the piano, tenor sax and now the cello. She was inspired by the group “Two Cellos” and she begged her mom to buy her a cello. Well, that’s not possible in her home with their current income. Natalia’s mom works two jobs to make it and the only instrument she has at home is an old tenor sax that she found in a pawn shop. However, an uncle did respond and he is buying her a cello at the end of October.
Natalia is able to practice piano four hours a week. Two hours at her school, another hour at a local community-sponsored recreation center and one hour at the local library. That library has several music rooms. Her mom takes her to these various places when she returns from work each evening. Natalia’s mom doesn’t have much time to herself, she’s a single parent who wants nothing more than for her child to succeed.
Well, here we are, only three weeks away from the third annual All Things Open (ATO) conference, slated to be held in Raleigh on October 19 and 20. ATO is all about the enterprise and is targeted at those who earn their livings in open source tech, be they coders, system administrators or front office folk.
For the non-enterprise FOSS user, it may seem from a quick glance that ATO has little to offer, but that’s not the case. Buried between all the technically focused talks for devs and sysadmins is a plethora of great workshops for those who’s interest in FOSS doesn’t necessarily include writing code or keeping a server or two operating. In other words, it’s not just about designing GUIs or methods for optimizing databases for intensive cloud use.
FOSS Week in Review
Highlighting the week’s activities in the FOSS realm is, say it with me, money. You know, the thing that we all want but that most of us never have enough of. Some have it and some need it — making it a good thing we’re about to tell you who is who with this weekend’s wrap up.
Open FOSS Training Indiegogo Campaign: Back home again in Indiana — Martinsville, Indiana, to be exact — Matthew Williams has taken the baton and is running with it when it comes to training folks in the use of free/open source software, or what we lovingly refer to as FOSS.
Microsoft has gone and built a Linux distro. Well, maybe it’s not a distro but some sort of Azure switch to use in the cloud. But anyway, Microsoft want’s you — meaning you open sourcers who never do anything but throw brickbats at the fine folks in Redmond — to know that it’s built on Linux. So there. Microsoft does love Linux, as if there was ever any doubt.
Great. Just great.
I’m sure they would’ve preferred to build their switch-masquerading-as-an-operating-system on Windows, but they couldn’t figure out how to pull all of the crap they didn’t need out of the Windows bloat. Of course, they could’ve used BSD and made the whole kit and caboodle proprietary, which would be more their speed, but that wouldn’t have given them any open source cred, which they’re so desperately trying to garner. Since there’s no need to make it proprietary as it’s going to be sitting on Azure where it can be used without ever having to show the source code, why not use Linux to prove their newfound love for open source?