The spirit of open source can be found all around us in the world. Just look for it, and you’ll find it.
The Screening Room
This evening when I spotted this music video on YouTube, my immediate reaction was — “That’s a song about open source!”
FOSS Force
Excuse the hyperbole, but we’ve always wanted to use a click-baity sort of headline — just to see if they work. That being said, we’re not going to spoil the fun. To find the answer, you’re going to have to watch the video. Don’t worry, however — bad things rarely happen when Linux is involved.
The Screening Room
We found this short eight minute video quite by accident while searching through the FOSS Force News Wire looking for something else. In it, we find the well known open source community manager, Jono Bacon, at home, apparently alone and in his kitchen, recording himself as he plays with his newly acquired Google Home device. This surprised us, as we didn’t know he actually had a home. It seemed to us he spends all of his time in his office, and we figured he lived there. We were also surprised to find him alone. A community manager, we figured, is absolutely always surrounded by his community.
Google has plans to replace Linux-based Android with its own built-from-scratch operating system, Fuchsia. Why? Mainly, it seems, to get away from the GPL.
Roblimo’s Hideaway
Google Fuchsia first saw the light of day in the summer of 2016 as an unannounced bit of code posted on GitHub. Now, in May 2017, the word is being spread by so many tech news outlets that we don’t have room to list them all.
The Screening Room
Conference keynote speeches can unify attendees around ideals or principles that cut
across a broad swath of a particular field. Such was Chris Aedo’s recent OSCON keynote, which he summarizes in this short interview video. Chris works as the program manager, developer advocacy for IBM. OSCON is the annual O’Reilly Open Source conference. currently held in Austin, Texas..
A little over two-and-a-half years ago, Linus Torvalds spent over an hour taking and answering questions from an audience of developers at DebConf14 in Portland, Oregon. Some of what he said is by now old news, but that’s interesting too, as it serves as a marker for where we’ve been.
The Screening Room
Usually when you see Linus Torvalds speaking at a conference, it’s in the form of an interview, with the interviewer more likely than not being his old friend Dirk Hohndel of VMware. Very famously, Torvalds “doesn’t do speeches.” However, back in August, 2014, he took another tack, which he sometimes does, and submitted himself to answering questions from the audience at the Debian developer conference, DebConf14, in Portland, Oregon.
After nearly a year and a half with an uncertain future, Mozilla tells Thunderbird it can stay and that its future is now certain — in a most uncertain way.
This is complicated. Mommy Mozilla has eased up about kicking her child Thunderbird out of the house. T-bird can stay, but must live in the basement or in the room above the garage or something — and no more free ride. From now on, it must pay its way and obey house rules.
I’m joking, of course. Well, not exactly.
We’re reasonably certain this wasn’t written by the hand of any god. Then again, we haven’t personally met any gods, so how would we know? All we know for sure is that as some good book almost said, “The truth shall make you chuckle.”
Roblimo’s Hideaway
“REPENT!”
It’s easy to imagine Richard M. Stallman yelling “Repent, ye software sinners!” as he stands on a mountaintop, wearing flowing robes and raising a hand-carved wooden staff toward the sky — with lightning and thunderheads swirling around him, of course. Meanwhile, the Israelites — I mean computer users — cower in the valley below, worried that The Lord shall smite them for the sin of using proprietary software.
Last week, Red Hat’s DeLisa Alexander presented the third annual Women in Open Source Award to Avni Khatri and Jigyasa Grover at Red Hat Summit 2017.
The Screening Room
Red Hat is a company that does many things right, including promoting women in tech. Learn about the two winners of this year’s Women in Open Source Award, announced at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston last week.
Apricity OS, another promising Linux distro has ceased development. “Lack of time” was cited as the major cause.
The Arch Linux based distribution, Apricity OS, has announced in an undated notice on its website that it’s shutting down. I learned the of news today when given a heads-up by a follower on Twitter.
The announcement is short and sweet:
Take a trip through the history of free software, Linux and open source, starting from the early days in the 1980s through 2001, when this film was made.
The Screening Room
A few weeks back, when we featured Brian Lunduke’s interview with Richard Stallman, we lamented the fact that most users who come to GNU/Linux these days seem to have little knowledge of the history of free software, Linux and open source. This is not good, for without a community of supporters, free tech cannot survive.