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FOSS Force

Why I’m Not a Full-Throttle FOSS Advocate

“Software Freedom” shouldn’t mean “use free software or else.” It should mean you are free to use the software you choose.

Roblimo’s Hideaway

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.

DuckDuckGo Ups Ante: Gives $300K to ‘Raise the Standard of Trust’

For the seventh year in a row, the search engine that promises not to stalk your online moves puts its money where its mouth is, this year by donating $300,000 to organizations that work towards online privacy.

DuckDuckGo logo

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.

‘Think WordPress’ Documentary Trailer

While Linux runs the Internet, it’s the free and open source content management platform WordPress that runs most of the websites we visit to stay informed and entertained.

The Screening Room

WordPress logo

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.

No, OpenSUSE and SUSE Downloads Haven’t Been Hacked

No matter what you might have heard or read, it appears as if last week’s defacement of openSUSE’s news site didn’t affect download images of either openSUSE or SLES.

openSUSE News WordPress
Screenshot courtesy Schestowitz.com

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.

‘Night in the Woods’ Improving Games by Open Sourcing Code

“Night in the Woods,” the much anticipated crowdfunded game scheduled to be released next week — with a GNU/Linux version, BTW — built a development community by open sourcing code.

The Screening Room

Night in the Woods website screenshot

Game software developer Jon Manning has created a very well-done 60-second promo for his upcoming talk at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco, Feb 27-March 3, 2017 – Making Night-in-the-Woods Better with Open Source.

Poverty Helps You Keep Technology Safe and Easy

In the technology age, there might be some before unknown advantages to living on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. The question is, do they outweigh the disadvantages.

Roblimo’s Hideaway

Poor Linux

Earlier this week I saw a ZDNet story titled Vizio: The spy in your TV by my friend Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. Scary stuff. I had a vision of my wife and me and a few dozen of our closest friends having a secret orgy in our living room, except our smart TV’s unblinking eye was recording our every thrust and parry (you might say). Zut alors! In this day of Internet everywhere, we all know that what goes online, stays online. Suddenly our orgy wasn’t secret, and my hopes of becoming the next President were dashed.

Except… lucky me! I’m poor, so I have an oldie-but-goodie dumb TV that doesn’t have a camera. There’s no way my old Vizio can spy on us. As Mel Brooks didn’t quite say, “It’s good to be the poverty case.”

Back Yard Linux

It’s not as lonely being a Linux user as it once was. These days you’re liable to find people throughout your neighborhood using Linux.

Linux, supported around the world

My how times have changed.

It wasn’t long ago that Linux users couldn’t get any respect. People on the street had absolutely never even heard of Linux, and if you needed the services of technical support, like from your ISP, you might as well forget it. Back in the day, the help desk’s favorite thing to say was “we don’t support Linux.”

What they meant, of course, was that they had no clue on how to do anything in Linux. They were skilled at guiding users through arcane parts of Windows to determine whether the problem was with the company’s servers or with the customer’s computer. If the truth be known, they didn’t really know anything about Windows either, but they had a script.

‘Open Source’ Is Now a Word?

So far there’s been no news on Microsoft’s reaction to “open source” being officially recognized by the arbiters of the English language.

open source distionary

“Open source” is now officially a word according to Merriam-Webster, according to my good friends at Ars Technica. Actually, I don’t know anybody at Ars Technica, but whenever you’re stealing news from another news source, you’re traditionally allowed to refer to everyone who works there as “my good friends.” The theory is that if they think you’re a friend of theirs, they won’t sue you.

Charlie Reisinger’s ‘The Open Schoolhouse’

The Screening Room

Charlie Reisinger is the IT Director of the Penn Manor School District, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He recently finished writing a spellbinding book describing how his school district decided to adopt open source software and methods. When reading this book, I sent an email to Charlie saying: “This book reads as if it’s your doctoral thesis — it’s a multiyear capstone project.” Charlie responded, “It felt in some way like that while writing the book.” Charlie went on to tell me that the reason he wrote the book was to help other school districts make the plunge into open source. “Come on in – the water is warm!” is the reassuring tone throughout the book.

Here is my video review of this book. Note — at 27-minutes long, it’s much longer than my other video book reviews. I had no choice but to give the book its due. It’s a masterful piece of storytelling that offers hope to students and teachers everywhere.

Best Linux Distro Award: The Envelope Please…

For the second year in a row, Arch Linux wins both rounds in our poll to determine the winner of our Readers’ Choice Award for Best Linux Distro.

The FOSS Force Readers’ Choice Awards Poll

Arch Linux Best Linux Distro 2016The readers of FOSS Force have made their voices heard and for the second year in a row you have chosen Arch Linux to be the recipient of the FOSS Force Readers’ Choice Award for Best Linux Distro. The recipient was determined by the results of a poll that opened on January 30 and closed at noon EST today.

The selection was a two part process that began with a qualifying poll in which readers could suggest distros to be included in the just ended final round of voting. The final round asked the question, “Which of the GNU/Linux distros listed below would you choose to win the FOSS Force ‘Best Desktop Distro’ Award for 2016?”

This year, both rounds of polling set records for our site. As they like to say after political elections, voter turnout was very heavy.

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