FOSS Force

Apple Takes a Bite of Open Source

By Larry Cafiero on June 10, 2015 |

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.

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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.

SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue

SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue

By Christine Hall on June 8, 2015 |

Community, Interview, News and Operating Systems

The FOSS Force Interview

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.

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SouthEast LinuxFest's Jeremy Sands — 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.

MS Supports SSH, Keeping Up With the Kubuntus & More…

By Larry Cafiero on June 5, 2015 |

News

FOSS Week in Review

How can it be Friday already? Not that I’m complaining, but it seems like only a few hours ago I was posting a story about SouthEast LinuxFest (more on SELF below) and now I’m collecting the week’s highlights, sins and foibles and giving them to you as this week’s wrap-up.

** If our coverage matters to you, please consider supporting our work through our FOSS Force Independence 2026 fundraiser. **

Microsoft joins the 21st Century: Our friends in Redmond — you know, the folks who love FOSS so much that they want to hug us to death, literally (in the traditional sense of the word) — have decided to provide support for SSH in their own PowerShell, according to various articles this week. We’re going to link to one in The Register, because any story with a sub-headline “Now that the door has hit Ballmer on the way out, OpenSSH support is go” is one you just have to go with.

Redmond Fights FOSS Openness With ‘Transparency’ Centers

Redmond Fights FOSS Openness With ‘Transparency’ Centers

By Christine Hall on June 4, 2015 |

Business, News, Operating Systems, Politics and Security

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.

Being SELF-ish: Linux Comes to the GNU South

Being SELF-ish: Linux Comes to the GNU South

By Larry Cafiero on June 3, 2015 |

Community, News and Operating Systems

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.

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.

Linux & the Bling Factor

By Ken Starks on June 2, 2015 |

Desktops, Distros and Operating Systems

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.

So what’s this big, important topic?

It boils down to to this: Are you hot…or not?

Dell Bets On Ubuntu

Inspiron 14 3000 Series Laptop Ubuntu Edition

Dell Bets On Ubuntu

By Christine Hall on June 1, 2015 |

Distros, Hardware, News and Operating Systems

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.

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.

May’s Top Ten

By FOSS Force on June 1, 2015 |

Site News

These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of April, 2015. 1. Announcing the Birth of Hurd by Christine Hall.…

FOSS Force’s Future Is in Your Hands

By Christine Hall on May 31, 2015 |

Site News

Less than sixteen $20 contributions daily needed to meet our goal.

We can do this!

100 dollar bill We’re 31 days into our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign — known as our May Pledge Drive until we extended the expiration date to June 15 — and as of this morning we’ve raised $1,215 dollars. That’s twenty percent of our $6,000 goal. In other words, it’s not nearly enough.

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Under our current plans to pay our writers, this amount will only be enough to fund us for barely over a month. If we spread it thin, it’ll be enough to keep our writers minimally paid for seven weeks — nowhere near the six months we need if we’re to get this expansion of FOSS Force off the ground.

Mandriva 1998-2015

By FOSS Force on May 29, 2015 |

Distros, News and Operating Systems

Mandriva S.A., the French company behind Mandriva, the distribution that long time Linux users will remember as Mandrake, died this week at the age of sixteen. The announcement came in the form of a notice posted by the company earlier this week. The cause of death was financial hemorrhaging.

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The distro began life as Mandrake, but was forced to change its name due to a trademark dispute with the Hearst newspaper chain, which owned the rights to the “Mandrake the Magician” comic strip. Mandriva was a combination of the original name and Conectiva, a Brazilian distro the company purchased for $2.3 million in 2005.

Neocypherpunk Summit 2026

Open Source Monitoring Conference

Apple Takes a Bite of Open Source

SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue

The FOSS Force Interview

MS Supports SSH, Keeping Up With the Kubuntus & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Redmond Fights FOSS Openness With ‘Transparency’ Centers

Being SELF-ish: Linux Comes to the GNU South

Linux & the Bling Factor

Dell Bets On Ubuntu

May’s Top Ten

FOSS Force’s Future Is in Your Hands

Less than sixteen $20 contributions daily needed to meet our goal.

We can do this!

Mandriva 1998-2015