These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of February, 2017. 1. Best Linux Distro: Final Round of Voting Has…
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With just a little imagination, you could easily make yourself a pretty cool mobile app using Open Data Kit.
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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.
Now that Thunderbird is back in the Debian repositories, the decade long dispute that led to all Mozilla products in Debian being rebranded has ended.
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.
Open data is an important concept at Code for America, which addresses the widening gap between the public and private sectors in their effective use of technology and design.
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Finding compatibility issues in open source software is tedious and complex. Roblimo explains why organizations that look for compliance issues are a valuable asset to the FOSS community.
</p?Roblimo’s Hideaway
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:
People involved in the maker movement are coming up with all sorts ideas to both help the planet and improves people’s lives — such as this idea for an open source village.
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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.)
Considering that System76 chose to unveil its new design plans to The Linux Gamer — no invite went to FOSS Force, BTW — we can’t help but wonder if a System76 Steam Machine isn’t in the works.
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Gardiner Bryant, famed Linux gamer in Maine, recently produced this interesting video hinting at upcoming new Linux hardware from System 76.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.