These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of October, 2014. 1. Breakthrough in Wireless Technology…Or Not by Ken Starks.…
FOSS Force
Last week, I wrote an item that mentioned that the original Ars Technica article on 10 years of Ubuntu, since rightfully edited to delete the number of countries under the sphere of Ubuntu’s influence, briefly reflected the following irksome claim:
“Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, estimates that there are 25 million Ubuntu users worldwide. Those users span 240 countries…”
Numbers: They may not be Canonical’s strongest suit.
I don’t blame Ars Technica for originally posting it because it’s a common claim by our friends from the Isle of Man. Also, I give Ars Technica all the credit in the world for going back and fixing it. But for the last week, it bothered me that Canonical might continue to make such a claim, knowing full well that they had erred.
I went to the Ohio Linux Fest this year to give the closing keynote address to somewhere around 300 folks. And trust me…this will show…
It’s not a good day for Drupal users, with the security folks at the CMS platform telling all users to consider themselves compromised if they didn’t install a security patch within seven hours of its release on October 15th.
Fixing the infected sites will require a bit of work. Sites will need to be taken offline, and the current install of Drupal blown-up and replaced with a backup from before October 15th. Any changes made made to a site since that date will have to be redone. Site owners will also need to notify their hosting companies of the situation, since the Drupal exploit could also be used to hack into other sites on a host’s server. Hosts will not be happy to hear this.
Users of other CMS platforms can give a sigh of relief — after all, they’ve dodged a bullet — but they’d be well advised to pay attention; a similar scenario could play out on any platform at any time.
It’s all over for Hello World’s fundraising campaign on Indiegogo — and what a success it was.
You may remember that the project, which makes short educational videos on Linux and other tech subjects, began a crowdsourcing campaign on September 10th, hoping to raise $2,048 needed to purchase new equipment. On October 9th we reported that the project had exceeded its goal, with a total at that time of $3,145. The campaign ended nine days ago, on October 20th, with the total raised at $3,705 or 181 percent of the target.
For nearly a month now, we at FOSS Force have had no trouble reaching the popular FOSS sites Tux Machines and TechRights. Both sites are published by Roy Schestowitz and both sites, especially the former, had been offline during much of September due to a prolonged DDOS attack.
On October 4th, when we last reported on this, accessibility to both sites was greatly improved but still somewhat spotty. During most of this month, however, we’ve had no noticeable difficulty reaching either site.
According to Schestowitz, although the site continues to be under fire, he and his team have developed methods to deal with the attacks.
Now that the mega-conference week that was is in the books — Ohio LinuxFest, All Things Open and Seattle GNU/Linux Conference are all history for this year — generally the Linux/FOSS world catches its collective breath and starts thinking about shows in 2015.
But wait. There’s one more event that deserves special mention before we close out the year. For those of you who are on the BSD side of the FOSS street, Meet BSD California 2014 takes place this weekend in San Jose at the offices of Western Digital.
A biennial tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area, MeetBSD 2014 uses a mixed unConference format featuring both scheduled talks and community-driven events such as birds-of-a-feather meetings, lightning talks, and speed geeking sessions. MeetBSD can be traced back to a local workshop for BSD developers and users, hosted annually in Poland since 2004. Since then, MeetBSD’s popularity has spread, and it’s now widely recognized as its own conference with participants from all over the world.
I spent four days last week attending Ohio LinuxFest 2014, one of the busiest and most successful Linux shows in the country. It was my honor and privilege to deliver the closing keynote this year, and much of what I said either alluded to or squarely addressed our trust in free open source software.
That should be a no-brainer, right? I mean, GNU/Linux, or just “Linux”, is rooted in FOSS applications and principle.
Except when it’s not.
Here’s what I want to know. Is replacing a well known application in Linux with a crippled version acceptable when it’s done in the name of stability? I’ll go ahead and place myself in front of you for scorn and castigation by admitting that I’ve been a member of the Slashdot community since 2002. Everyone has a sig line, right? Mine was thoroughly honed to be as concise a possible:
“Windows assumes you are an idiot…Linux demands proof.”
In other words, for the most part, Linux users are in complete control of everything in/on their system. Linux will allow you to completely bugger your installation, because as a user you have the responsibility to know what you are doing. Fools are not suffered gladly when using Linux. You wanna play with the rm command? Go ahead…it’s your computer.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with this year’s All Things Open conference. There were a few glitches, as might be expected, but not enough to matter. Was it perfect? Probably not. Perfection at a conference would probably be pretty boring — and boring would be a fault keeping it from being perfect, if you’ll excuse a little circular logic. Let’s just say say that ATO was more than good enough — and then a lot more.
But now it’s over, one for the record books, as they say, leaving behind memories and anticipation for 2015.
I saw this last year at ATO, which is about the only opportunity I have to rub elbows with big tech. This year, I no longer raised an eyebrow when I saw good things going on and positive energy being generated by the development teams at companies with worrisome business practices. I figure this is a good thing. The suits need to be surrounded by FOSS folks. Maybe a little of that “share and share alike” philosophy will rub off.
Take Facebook, for example. There’s more going on with the social giant besides Zuckerberg and his friends being busy turning data mining into profits.
It seems that the company is committed to open sourcing practically everything it creates, from hardware to software. I knew about the company’s open sourcing of green hardware through the Open Compute Project, but I’d assumed the company was like many other firms, given its track record on privacy issues — happy to build infrastructures on open source and give nothing back.
Not true, according to Pearce.
FOSS Week in Review
Everyone is either at Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, Ohio LinuxFest or All Things Open, so there’s no one around to bounce off some ideas regarding what’s happening this week. Besides, if you were at any of those three events –- and if not, why not? — you probably know more than I do at this point.
In any case, besides two great stories this week by my colleagues, FOSS Force editor Christine Hall’s ATO coverage and Ken Starks’ pre-OLF piece, there were a few things of note that happened this week, like…
Ubuntu turns ten, releases 14.10: Many accolades were made, toasts were proposed and Ubuntu turns ten while releasing Ubuntu 14.10 –- all the way up to the letter U with Utopic Unicorn –- on Thursday.
Walking through the noisy between sessions crowd, I asked Charley Rich (not the dead country singer, he assured me) if he’d been at All Things Open last year. He hadn’t. Rich had rented a booth at the conference and had come down from Long Island to unveil his new SaaS product, jKool. We were looking for a reasonably quiet place where we could sit for an interview.
I pointed out that ATO was only in its second year. “Last year it was really good,” I said. “This year is even better.”
I’d been saying that all day, since about an hour or so after I arrived for day one of ATO’s second go. I’m not being paid to shill for the event or anything like that — I’m just truly impressed.
Of course, some may think that I impress much too easily.