August 1, 2025
Keeping tech free
Another poll with results that aren’t a surprise. In this poll we wondered if you thought that software patents remain a threat to Linux and FOSS. Yup, you do. The results were pretty lopsided and not at all difficult to interpret.
The Week in Review on a Saturday? Don’t worry, I’ve got a note from the phone company.
On Thursday afternoon, our phone company experienced a widespread outage of its fiber system, meaning FOSS Force had no telephone or Internet for about 24 hours. On Friday morning, I actually packed up a laptop and drove to the village of Pilot Mountain to use the secure We-Fi at my favorite coffee house, The Living Room, to edit and publish Phil Shapiro’s Friday column, and to finish editing and publishing another article which had originally been scheduled to go up on Thursday. Things are slowly getting back to normal, but I’m still behinder than I want to be.
But enough of the woes of FOSS Force. Let’s get on to some real FOSS news…
At this point, how much effect the continuing economic backlash caused by the North Carolina General Assembly’s passage HB2, otherwise known as the “Bathroom Bill,” will have on the state’s two major open source conferences is anybody’s guess. Certainly, the past three weeks have not been good for operators of event venues in North Carolina, nor have they been good for the state’s bean counters, whose job is to make what the General Assembly spends balance with incoming tax revenue, which is certainly taking a hit in at least some counties.
Three weeks ago, on March 23, in a hastily called special session of the state’s General Assembly, HB2 was passed as a knee jerk response to a local ordinance enacted in Charlotte which, among other things, gave transgendered people the legal right to use the public restroom of their chosen gender, regardless of their gender at birth. HB2 takes away that right, but doesn’t stop there. It ends up limiting the rights of all North Carolinians except straight, white and Christian males.
The Video Screening Room Another great video tutorial for learning how to use a free and open source program. This time it’s the popular vector…
Our good friends at Softpedia reported last week that the fledgling UbuntuBSD variant could be seeking the imprimatur from Canonical and become an official Ubuntu “flavor.”
Jon Boden, the lead developer of UbuntuBSD, submitted a post on the Ubuntu developers’ discussion list to let them know that he would “like to contribute all my work to Ubuntu Community and, if you think it is worthy, make ubuntuBSD an official Ubuntu project like Xubuntu or Edubuntu.”
As the Internet of Things gets bigger and bigger, some of you may be wondering how you can get started with IoT without having to purchase an expensive setup. Companies such as Nest and Wink are great for automating your home, but who wants to spend a lot of money only to realize that home automation isn’t for you? This is where the Raspberry Pi can be a great tool for figuring out if the IoT world is right for you. But even if you own a Raspberry Pi and are tech-savvy, getting started in the IoT realm can be quite daunting, which is where Cayenne comes into the picture.
OpenToonz was released as open source less than a month ago and the quality of tutorials for it on YouTube continues growing. I was especially pleased to run across a series of tutorials created by Alon Dan, who has a Patreon account to fund further tutorial creation. I learned a lot watching this tutorial – OpenToonz Painting Tricks and Color Model.
In 2005, I found myself at a career crossroad. A career-ending injury threw the biggest of monkey wrenches into the works for me. I owned my own business and business was good, but it was only good with a maximum of four employees, counting myself. I attempted to become a “gentleman” owner but I found that paying the extra man proved to be costly as well as difficult to administer. That injury led to me doing what I do now.
I give computers to kids who cannot afford one.
The decision I faced was life-changing either way I went. My inclination was to go back to school and get the certs I needed to work in the Linux administration field. I already had the base knowledge and experience; it was just a matter of jumping through the hoops to get a piece of paper saying I already knew what I was learning. Not that I wouldn’t learn a thing or two along the way.
Hazelcast, a leading provider of open source operational in-memory computing, today announced a partnership with Chariot Solutions, a leading enterprise application and mobile development consulting firm, at the Philly Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise 2016 conference.
Chariot has extensive open source experience, with many of its consultants actively contributing to key OS Java projects. Working with partners, the company advises clients on the evolving open source Java landscape, delivering tailored solutions which incorporate frameworks and tools that are commercially viable due to established community support and enhancement. Prior to signing an official partnership agreement, the two companies had worked together on several projects in telecoms and media.
Five or six years ago the major GNU/Linux and FOSS news aggregators were filled with stories about software patents. These days, not so much. Does this mean that the threat posed by patents is actually less now than in 2010, or have patents simply not been getting the coverage they once did?
