These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of September, 2016. 1. Discord at Libreboot Over GNU Withdrawal by Christine…
FOSS Force
We hope you enjoy and are inspired by this short video celebrating Preeti Murthy and Jessica McKellar, the winners of this year’s Red Hat Women in Open Source Awards.
The Video Screening Room
This short video packs a lot of punch. Inspiring and hopeful.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW0dwL6JzTU?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
“Learning how to program does this really important, weird thing in your brain and you realize you have this power now. This mindset that if you see something that could be better, you have the power to change it, is a mindset that I want as many people as possible to have on this planet. It can start with open source, but the really exciting part for me is when you can apply that mindset to other domains.” – Jessica McKellar, Director of Engineering at Dropbox
This Ubuntu-based Linux distribution provides the Internet for those who don’t have 24×7 access to the net.
In the West, we take the Internet for granted. Oh, we may grumble about a slow connection, but that’s a first-world problem. For many, however, the Internet is a “maybe” thing. For those users, Endless’s Endless OS 3, may be just what they need.
This Ubuntu Linux-based operating system is designed for use with the “Asynchronous Internet.”
There is little worse than deciding “you’ve had it up to here” with a particular vendor, only to discover that due to vendor lock-in, migrating away from the vendor’s proprietary platform would cost enough to put your company in the bankruptcy courts.
The Video FOSS Force Interview
This video is not technically about free or open source software, but it’s 100 percent about the danger of falling victim to proprietary vendors and their habit of making it hard to leave their sweet embrace once they get their paws on you. The Network World column by Tom Henderson that generated this interview is titled, The Many Dimensions of Cloud Value, and is subtitled, “Put your snorkels on: The marketing for cloud services is getting deep.” So is the marketing for many other proprietary something-as-a-something offerings ranging from operating systems to (obviously) cloud platforms.
There are many ways to contribute to an open source project. There are also many reasons for doing so. But before jumping in, you might want to know how things generally work within these projects.
The Video Screening Room
If you’re interested gaining some tips and insights into how to contribute to open source, this video of a presentation given on September 19 at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco by Gunnar Wagenknecht, a software engineer at Salesforce, and Wayne Beaton, director at the Eclipse Foundation, might be useful to you.
Also included: Yahoo’s big hack, Garrett on Lenovo, new Audacious and GNOME, and Ubuntu get’s ready for Yakkety Yak.
FOSS Week in Review
I spent time this week terminating a Yahoo account I’ve had since way back in the last century. For years, the My Yahoo page was my “home” page whenever I fired-up the old dial-up to go online, but over time the portal (remember portals?) became less and less relevant and I found my visits to Yahoo becoming less and less frequent. By the time I closed the account, prompted by news of a massive hack involving 500 million accounts going back to 2014, I hadn’t visited my Yahoo page in well over a year. RIP Yahoo. It was nice knowing you.
Have you often considered quitting your day job to begin an exciting career as a filmmaker? You don’t need the resources of a Hollywood studio anymore. In fact, you can do it all with free and open source software.
The Video Screening Room
Blender is a very popular 3D animation program, but not many people know that this open source, cross platform software also works well as a video editor. Some people consider Blender to be the best open source video editor available. (See the comments at the end of this article on Opensource.com).
To quickly get you up to speed, this well-done 23-minute video explains Blender to people who are already familiar with Final Cut Pro video editor — as well as with others.
You’ve owned your printer for a year or more, and have happily used off-brand ink cartridges during that time. Suddenly the manufacturer says you can’t do that anymore, and suddenly orders the printer you own to not accept the ink cartridges of your choosing.
Have you tried using you HP printer recently? If not, if you use certain models and keep your expenses down by using third party ink cartridges, you might find you have a “damaged” cartridge that needs replacing before the printer will operate. Open up a new cartridge that you’ve been keeping on hand and if it’s branded Office Max, Office Depot or anything other than “genuine HP,” it’ll be “damaged” too.
As they used to say on the Outer Limits, there is nothing wrong with your ink cartridges. HP has taken control of your printer and trained it to not accept them anymore.
It’s a no-brainer to us that free and open source should be the default for governments, because governments should be…well, open. With the Open Technology Center, John Weathersby is working to help bring open source to national defense and security.
The Video FOSS Force Interview
John Weathersby founded and ran the Open Source Software Institute to “promote the development and implementation of open source software solutions within U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies.” A worthy goal!
It was easy to place the blame on Microsoft in a knee-jerk reaction — and it didn’t help that a Lenovo representative placed blame firmly in Redmond’s lap. It appears, however, that Microsoft’s not involved, and Lenovo’s not to blame either.
The news of the day, so far, has been the speculation that machines designed to run the Microsoft’s Signature Edition of Windows block GNU/Linux from being installed. The Signature Edition is an edition of preinstalled Windows without any of the third-party junk that typically infests new Windows computers out-of-the-box.
This fear arose, and became a big deal on Reddit, after a Redditor posted, “Warning: Microsoft Signature PC program now requires that you can’t run Linux. Lenovo’s recent Ultrabooks among affected systems.”