The Raspberry Pi Report Our Pi guy finds a lot to like as he gets down and dirty with Ubuntu MATE’s latest and greatest release…
Posts tagged as “open source”
The Mozilla Foundation has hired Simon Phipps to examine and evaluate options for the Thunderbird desktop client, which is seeking a new home. His initial report was made public on Monday.
On Monday, Mozilla’s executive director Mark Surman posted an update on Mozilla’s efforts to find a new home for its Thunderbird email client on his personal blog. In early December, Mozilla announced that it wanted to shed itself of Thunderbird, a project that’s been associated with Mozilla since the start of the foundation.
In a nutshell, the Mozilla Foundation finds that continuing to maintain and development Thunderbird distracts from its current focus of getting Firefox back on track. Thunderbird is a huge project, requiring much in the way of resources, but has a user base that’s been in decline since 2012, as many users are turning away from desktop email clients in favor of web based email services.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
The Video Screening Room
When Pennsylvania’s Penn Manor High School launched the state’s largest free software learning program, they did it a little differently than most schools. As click-baity ads on FaceBook like to proclaim: You won’t believe what happened next.
For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.
If there was ever a time to make the distinction between OSS and FOSS, it is now. Microsoft may be the largest open source company on the planet, but it will never be a FOSS company.
It was only a couple of years ago that the FOSS world was proclaiming that Microsoft was a dead company walking. The king was dead. Sales of new Windows releases were flat and Android was seriously kicking its butt in the mobile marketplace. FOSSers were sure they wouldn’t have Redmond to kick around for much longer.
Times have changed. Android is still winning on mobile, but other than that, Microsoft is back on track and is maybe more secure than ever. That’s not good for FOSS.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
The Video Screening Room
This movie trailer spoof sells a movie that’s definitely not coming soon to a theater near you. If it were, however, you can bet your booty it’d be released under a Creative Commons license.
When I found out that I was going to have the opportunity to substitute for Phil Shapiro for today’s video column, I jumped at the chance. Why? Because I want to share with you one of the great TV parodies that the JavaZone conference produces each year.
In case you don’t know, since its beginning fifteen years ago, JavaZone has grown to be the largest independent conference for Java developers on the planet. The conference is held each year in Oslo, Norway, with this year’s event scheduled for September 7-8.
You don’t have to be a big Java fan to really like these folks, for they are 100 percent — that means totally for those of you who have trouble with numbers — behind open source. For the past six years or so, they’ve produced annual video parodies of popular television shows, which over time have become increasingly lavish productions.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Larry the BSD Guy It’s a sad day at the FOSS Force office. Larry Cafiero says goodbye and walks off into the sunset. This weekend,…
The Mexican distro Escuelas, or ‘School,’ Linux was designed to give extended life to aging hardware in financially strapped school districts in Latin America and is based on Bodhi Linux.
On Monday, a GNU/Linux distro designed to be used in schools, Escuelas Linux, released version 4.4. Just how dedicated to education are the developers of this distro? Plenty. In case your Spanish is as rusty as ours, the Spanish name Escuelas translates to “schools” in English.
There are more than a few things that are unusual about Escuelas Linux. For one, although ultimately derived from Ubuntu, it’s not a first generation descendant on the Ubuntu tree, but traces it’s *buntu roots by way of Bodhi Linux. The distro also uses the Moksha desktop, which Bodhi developed after becoming unhappy with the direction that Enlightenment was taking.
The Video Screening Room
These days, GitHub is pretty much the warehouse district where nearly all open source projects are stored and maintained. There are some tricks to navigating the site, which can easily be mastered by watching tutorial videos.
If you’re an open source enthusiast, you need to be advocating for interested community members to familiarize themselves with GitHub, an amazing web tool for collaborative work. There are many introductory videos about GitHub on YouTube, but this one by Udacity I found particularly accessible.
For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.
The Heart of Linux
The lead developer of a new text-to-speech app based on MaryTTS talks about what’s been done and what remains to do.
It’s been a while now since we talked about creating a front end GUI to the open source text-to-speech program, MaryTTS. I have a personal stake in this, as I lost my larynx, and thus my voice, due to throat cancer.
The state of text-to-speech software in the Linuxsphere is horrible. Don’t get me wrong, the software is out there and much of it is fairly good. Where we fall down is that it requires using the command line to get much of it to work. Often TTS software in Linux comes in parts and pieces that have to be assembled in order to get it to work, and the terminal is where most of that work needs to be done.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
The FOSS Force Poll
While it’s good to know that voters in our poll are aware that software patents remain very much a threat to free tech, the small number of people who voted might indicate a lack of awareness on the issue by newcomers to FOSS.
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.
FOSS Week in Review
With Bellingham, Washington getting geared up for next weekend’s show, can OSCON’s performance in Austin be far behind?
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…
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux