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Posts tagged as “open source”

FSF, Canonical Breakthrough; OSCON & More…

Editor’s note: FOSS Force will be offering live video streaming of all OSCON keynote addresses beginning Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at noon EDT.

FOSS Week in Review

I was ready to pack my bags for OSCON on Friday with a pretty quiet week, and a quick roundup which would allow me to hit the road and head north to Portland. No such luck. We have OSCON coverage coming next week — more on this later — but some of the more scintillating stories of the week include the following:

FSF, Canonical Makes Progress on Licensing: The $140,000-plus in donations is still missing, but that’s not the biggest news coming from Canonical this week. After two years of wrangling between the Free Software Foundation and Canonical — with a little help from the Software Freedom Conservancy — the FSF announced that they have made some progress on updated licensing terms for, as the FSF calls it, “Ubuntu GNU/Linux.”

Patent Trolls Working Overtime

Unified Patents LogoThe trolls are still at it. In spite of the fact that the Supreme Court was busy ruling against them last year — between January and June it ruled against patent holders six times — the number of cases being brought by non-practicing entities (NPE), which is one measure of a troll, continues to rise. According to a report published in June by patent defense organization UnifiedPatents, there will be about eight thousand tech related patent disputes this year, with over six thousand of these expected to go to trial.

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

Using the New iproute2 Suite

For years, even in 2015, web tutorials, college textbooks and lab simulators have all been teaching the traditional networking utilities, such as arp, ifconfig, netstat and route. Whether you know it or not, most of these commands were deprecated years ago. They were replaced with commands from the iproute2 suite of utilities. Most Linux distros have continued to install the traditional tools, but CentOS, Arch and now openSUSE (among others), are moving to put them into deprecated status. That means we’ll need to start getting used to the new tools.

For those not familiar, the 2.2 Linux kernel revision (way back in the olden days) brought about some changes to the way the kernel handled networking. New features were introduced back then that had not been implemented anywhere else. The old tools use the /proc interface, while the newer tools use the newer kernels’ netlink interface. At least some of the older tools are no longer in active development. The bottom line is that the iproute2 suite offers some definite advantages over the old tools.

Don Parris

Don Parris wears a Facility Services cape by day, and transforms into LibreMan at night. He has written numerous articles about free tech, and hangs out with the Cha-Ha crowd, learning about computer security. He also enjoys making ceviche with his wife, and writing about his travels in Perú.

Turning Off the Mute Button

Anyone who has read FOSS Force for the last couple of months knows that I lost my voice to cancer and that I’ve become personally involved in getting a decent text to speech (TTS) application developed. Some of you have reminded me that there is a good assortment of text to speech applications for Linux, especially in the mobile market, such as Android and the iExperience. Granted, for both examples, but we are needing an application that can either come preinstalled or be easily installed on almost any Linux distribution. That leads us back to the plentiful choices within the Linuxsphere you feel the need to mention. Yes, there are a lot of them, but when it all gets boiled down, they all share one simple trait.

Jigsaw PuzzleNone of them even approach usability for the everyday computer user. None. And you would think that of all these choices, one of them has to work…or provides documentation reasonable enough for everyone. You would think.

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

Microsoft Writes Check, Free OSCON Passes & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Money: Can’t live with it, and can’t live without it. OK, maybe you actually can live with it, but money seems to be the overriding theme this week when it comes to FOSS news. With this being payday for most of you, try not to spend too much mental currency on some of the developments this week, like:

OpenSSH logoMS Writes a Check: Well, this was probably inevitable. With a generous donation, Microsoft has become a gold contributor to the OpenBSD project — the first gold contributor — in an effort to get OpenBSD’s help in porting OpenSSH to Windows. This comes from a report on ZDNet, where Steven Vaughan-Nichols tells the tale of checkbook participation in open source as “the best option…for our team to adopt an industry proven solution,” says Microsoft’s Angel Calvo. A gold contributor writes a check for anywhere between $25,000 to $50,000, so even at the minimum, the OpenBSD Foundation scores big. In exchange, Microsoft gets to port OpenSSH, which arguably is the gold standard for remote administration. Of course, it isn’t revealed how much, in code, Microsoft is going to contribute going forward, but as long as the money is there…I guess the money is there.

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

If You Give a Kid Linux…

I was planning to have an easy Tuesday, but then I got wrapped up in Reddit. But not just any Reddit topic — this one was special; as many of them are, of course, but let’s just put that aside for a second.

Reddit had a topic in r/Linux entitled “Should I /make/ my kid use Linux?” And because I have, um, a “history” with this topic (e.g., I have a child and she does use Linux and free/open source software, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News), I am going to go out on a limb and say the following:

Knaapen Learning Center
Bruno Knaapen Tech Learning Center in Austin, Texas
“Make” your kid use Linux, as if you were “making” him or her eat Brussels sprouts? No.

Encourage your kid, by all means necessary, to use Linux? Absolutely, because he or she will want to use it from the start.

The Reddit topic is worth a read. If you haven’t done so already, go there now. There are a lot of good posts, but my favorite is from someone with the handle Robsteady, who says, “TL;DR Don’t MAKE them use it, just set them up so they grow accustomed to that being what gets used. Raise them in it instead of trying to change them to it eventually.”

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

How I Discovered Linux & Changed the World

There are pivotal times in our collective and personal histories when we remember exactly where we were. Those moments do not fade through the years, ever. For me, that first memory was President of the United States John Kennedy being assassinated. I wasn’t old enough to understand the weight or importance placed upon the event, but I knew, based on the reactions around me, something terrible and far-reaching had happened. Something terribly profound. Parents were called to come get their children. School would resume in three days.

Apollo 15 Lunar RoverAnd then, there I was, standing in my pajamas at 10:30 p.m., staring at the screen of our first color television set. My mom made us stay up late to watch “the most important event in history,” according to her. Neil Armstrong was about to set the first human footprint on the moon. Although later I thought the real important event was David Scott taking the coolest dune buggy ride ever during Apollo 15. Of lesser impact to most might be the Kent State massacre, Woodstock and the death of John Lennon.

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

Ubuntu on a Stick, Cascadia’s Best & More…

FOSS Week in Review

antiX logoIt inspires awe how quickly Friday comes along — one minute I’m talking stories for publication with my colleagues Ken Starks and Christine Hall, and the next thing I know, deadlines are poking me in the shoulder and saying, “Well…?”

So while I am reminded by my astute daughter that pirates, too, would also prefer to program in C because, well, that’s where they sail (thank you, Mimi), let’s take a look at the week in FOSS.

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

R, Matey: Hoisting the Sails for a Programming Language

One of the several privileges of fatherhood — maybe it’s a duty, I’ll have to check — is that you have opportunities to torture your children with bad jokes. I am proud to say I have not failed in my parental role in that endeavor — ask my daughter — and whenever the letter R comes up, it is usually quick to be followed by a pirate reference. The R programming language, which runs on a variety of platforms and architectures, is no exception.

R programming language logo
So, what’s a pirate’s favorite programming…oh, never mind.
Jokes like this, in your best pirate voice: Avast, matey, what be a pirate’s favorite programmin’ language?

R (of course, you have to extend it out, like “Arrrrrrrrrrrr” or it won’t make sense).

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

Linux: Boldly Going Where We’ve Not Gone Before

I wasn’t in search of a hero when I found him.

Burt Rutan signed autographs on that blistering hot June day in the Mojave desert. His collection of engineers, scientists and “enterprise rouges” shouldered their way into front page news. SpaceShipOne had just become the first civilian aircraft/spacecraft to carry the first civilian pilot into space. His pilot for that epic flight into space, Mike Melvill, was the first recognized and licensed space pilot on the planet. How about that as “your most shining achievement” on a future resume? Burt Ratan and his company, Applied Composites, took home the ten million dollar prize offered by SpaceX. They fulfilled all of the requirements, to include everyone being alive upon landing.

Mike Melville & Burt Ratan
Mike Melvill and Burt Rutan speak to the media after SpaceShipOne’s first flight into Space. Photo by Don Logan
Yeah, I believe that stipulation was hard-coded into the contest’s requirements. Everyone gets a hero’s parade, not a solemn funeral procession.

I was a member of the crowd that gathered in the high country desert for the flight and the homecoming of SpaceShipOne. We planned our trip in order to be early. We were sure that a couple of hundred people would show up for this history-in-the-making event.

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

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