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Posts tagged as “open source”

Ada Initiative Closes Up Shop

With an announcement on the Linux Weekly News site on Tuesday, the Ada Initiative will be tying up the loose ends and wrapping up their work in October.

“It is with mixed feelings that we announce that the Ada Initiative will be shutting down in approximately mid-October,” the statement said. “We are proud of what we accomplished with the support of many thousands of volunteers, sponsors, and donors, and we expect all of our programs to continue on in some form without the Ada Initiative. Thank you for your incredible work and support!”

Ada Initiative Ally Workshop
The Ally Workshop is one of the many positive programs the Ada Initiative brought to the tech field. Though the Ada Initiative is closing up shop in October, the programs will be available for others to continue.
According to the statement, after a search for a new executive director late last year, the new hire didn’t work out.

The statement explains: “That brought us to a decision point. It would have been unreasonable to expect Valerie (Aurora, a co-founder) and Mary (Gardiner, a co-founder) to continue with the Ada Initiative forever. We considered running a second ED search, but it had become clear to the board that the success of the Ada Initiative was very much a product of its two founders, and was a direct result of their experiences, skills, strengths and passions. We felt the likelihood of finding a new ED who could effectively fit into Valerie’s shoes was low. We also considered several other options for continuing the organization, including changing its programs, or becoming volunteer-only.”

Putting Lipstick on a Penguin

There was a time, and it’s been a while back, when I believed my mission in life was to mount my open source horse and endorse Linux without remorse far and wide.

“Linux is coming, Linux is coming!”

One if by torrent, two if by…uh, download link.

While it’s true that I was a shameless shill for a particular distro during that period, it was the message that was important. Linux will change your oil. Linux will change your baby’s diapers. Linux will change your life.

TuxAnd while using Linux may well change your life, I may have ever-so-slightly exaggerated the amount and impact of that change. Maybe just a little bit. Maybe.

It was then I explored ways to present Linux to the new user, and to do so in a way that did not cause system shock. I decided to make each new Linux installation look as much like Windows as possible. My partner Diane did fairly well when I told her we would become a one operating system household. She wasn’t weaned…she was herded into the world of Linux. I had cleaned the last virus from her computer.

Ken Starks

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

Banks’ Family Values; Texas Linux Fest & More…

FOSS Week in Review

It’s been pretty warm where I live on the Central California coast, and I hope everyone else has been keeping cool — or as cool as possible — this week. After OSCON, there’s been sort of a lull in news that’s uniquely FOSS-related, but we do have a couple of tidbits to throw you as we end the week.

Keila Banks
Keila Banks, fresh off her OSCON keynote, appears Saturday on MSNBC (Photo: OSCON video)
All in the Family: It seems that the Banks family of Los Angeles has taken upon itself to single-handedly invite the wider world to the see and try out the benefits of FOSS and programming. We reported on Keila Banks speaking at OSCON last week, but so has Business Insider and MTV News — and now MSNBC is getting in on the act by having her on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show at 8 a.m. Saturday. Check your local listings.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

KDE Plasma Goes Mobile

While FOSS Force gave you a look at setting up KDE Plasma on the desktop in Don Parris’ article last week, KDE recently jumped into the mobile fray by announcing KDE Plasma Mobile at their Akademy conference this week in Spain.

While it joins an already crowded field, with the likes of Android, Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS and others already in the mobile OS space, Plasma Mobile “offers a free — as in freedom and beer — user-friendly, privacy-enabling, customizable platform for mobile devices,” wrote Sebastian Kugler, a lead architect, on KDE’s website. “Plasma Mobile is currently under development with a prototype available providing basic functions to run on a smartphone.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

phpMyAdmin Bids SourceForge Farewell

phpMyAdmin, the popular free and open source web based tool for administering MySQL databases, has left the SourceForge building.

In a blog post on Saturday, the project’s infrastructure coordinator, Michal Čihař, announced that a migration from Sourceforge is all but complete. The few remaining items left on the SourceForge server will be “hopefully handled in upcoming days as well.”

phpMyAdmin logoA popular web based application for administering MySQL databases, phpMyAdmin is the preferred tool of many webmasters for working with MySQL when used to power websites and is installed by default with most web hosting packages. The app can be used to perform a variety of tasks, including creating, modifying or deleting databases, tables, fields or rows; executing SQL statements; and managing users and permissions.

Christine Hall

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

OSCON: The Envelope, Please…

OSCON logoOSCON wraps up, as it always does, with its closing remarks, a short talk — this year by Simon Wardley on “Situation normal, everything must change” — and the annually awaited O’Reilly Open Source Awards, which had five winners this year.

The five are…and because no one else will say it, I will:

The OSCON goes to…

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

OSCON: Goodbye, Portland

On the last morning of the last day of the last OSCON in Portland, things seem remarkably upbeat. Though resigned to the fact that they’re losing the home-field advantage for having the largest FOSS expo in North America, many Portlanders still feel that OSCON will be back someday. Officially, O’Reilly is focused laser-like on the Austin event in May 2016 — among the increasing number of O’Reilly events here in North America and elsewhere — so 2017 is not even on the radar yet.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

RMS Likes Crowd Supply, Riddell Pokes Ubuntu & More…

FOSS Week in Review

While Larry Cafiero is up in Portland having himself a merry auld time at OSCON, I’m in the sweltering heat and humidity of North Carolina, normal for this time of year, with dreams of All Things Open swirling through my head. ATO, because it’s the next conference I’ll be able to attend — and because it happens in October, when the weather around here is much more tolerable.

Crowd Supply logoWhile Larry’s been keeping an eye on things at the self-proclaimed most-important-open-source-conference-in-the-multiverse, I’ve been keeping an eye on the happenings in the FOSS world elsewhere. In the process, I’ve managed to make Larry part of this Week in Review.

Christine Hall

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

OSCON: From the Expo Floor

I’ve said this before: Going from FOSS expo to expo several times a year is like following the Grateful Dead from gig to gig, or to help younger folks understand it, following Phish all over the place and ending up at Bonnaroo.

Like many of the Linux/FOSS events that dot the calendar year, OSCON resembles that — Bonnaroo without the mosh pit (though now that I’ve written that, let’s see if something like that appears in Austin next year) — but along with the camaraderie there’s also an element of “high school reunion” in the mix.

Fedora logo
Fedora Project leadership alumni were out in force at OSCON.
Though it’s mostly the same faces — the same welcoming, friendly faces — augmented by new faces, the new stories abound.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

OSCON: Purism Respects Your Rights & Freedom

Your digital rights — do both your hardware and software respect them?

Because if they don’t, Purism might have the answer to this shortcoming.

At OSCON, Purism has on hand the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops – the numbers designating the screen size (13-inch and 15-inch, respectively) — which are both designed, chip-by-chip and line-by-line to respect your rights to privacy, security and freedom, which is Purism’s philosophy.

Purism logo“We developed Purism so that users can have access to the highest quality computers without compromising these beliefs,” the Purism website states. “The founder of Purism developed the Philosophical Contract, that we all abide by, which was adopted from the Free Software Foundation, and expanded to include hardware manufacturing as it relates to software.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

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