July 5, 2025
Keeping tech free
Open Data Kit is a free and open source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. The flexibility that open source offers means that the use cases for these tools are very broad. Check this introductory video about ODK tools which explains a rural medicine use case.
The hatchet is finally completely buried. Iceweasel was laid to rest a year ago with the return of Firefox to Debian. Now, Icedove gets to go gently into that good night as well, as the Thunderbird email client returns to Debian.
When I heard about FOSSA, my first thought was, “Don’t Black Duck and Palamida already have the FOSS license compatibility thing pretty well sewed up? Do we really need another company doing it?”
This was, of course, the question I immediately asked FOSSA founder Kevin Wang. His answer, via email:
Maker Movement and Video
If you’re looking for people thinking outside the box, open source people spend most of their day thinking outside the box. Witness Alex Cureton-Griffiths talking about his ideas, at MakerBay Central in Hong Kong, for an open source village in China. Yes, the text in his LibreOffice presentation appears reversed, but that’s a feature, not a bug. (Give me a few weeks to figure out why.)
Gardiner Bryant, famed Linux gamer in Maine, recently produced this interesting video hinting at upcoming new Linux hardware from System 76.
I have the Chrome web browser running full-screen on my Ubuntu desktop. Not Chromium, but proprietary Chrome — because it suits my needs better than open source Chromium. I also like Chrome better than Firefox, and I say this after using only Firefox for a week and trying hard to like it.
Some of this may be habit. We humans tend to prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar, and I’ll admit that I have gotten used to Chrome and its features.
The search engine DuckDuckGo isn’t Google — in more ways than one. For starters, its whole premise is to not follow you around as you surf the web. It’s also not rich, so it doesn’t have gazillions of dollars to throw at whatever project strikes its fancy. However, the people who run the little search engine that can are very generous with what money they do have.
As they have for the last seven years, this year they’ve been busy handing out money again.
The Screening Room
Open source activism takes many forms, including the creation of documentaries that celebrate and explain open source solutions. Two bold women in France, Deborah Donnier and Emilie Lebrun are working on a 50-minute documentary in French that celebrates and explains WordPress.
You can view the beautifully done trailer of their project here — with English subtitles.
There’s a good chance you’ve already heard the news that a week ago today the openSUSE News site was defaced with an anti-ISIS message by a Kurdish group. Yup, that happened and was quickly fixed. You might also have heard that the hack went much deeper and that openSUSE, perhaps even SUSE, might have hosted hacked versions of their distros with a newly added backdoor. Nope. All indications are this never happened.
