Posts tagged as “openoffice.org”

Redesigning Tor, Goodbye OpenOffice & More…

By Christine Hall on September 3, 2016 |

Business, Distros, News, Obits, Security and Software

Redesigning Tor, Goodbye OpenOffice & More…

Also included: Remembering Vernon Adams, Red Hat vs. VMware, a new distro release, openSUSE Leap and ransomware that deletes files.

FOSS Week in Review

The summer of ’16 is all but over. Good riddance. Here in my piece of the woods we’ve seen all of the 90 plus days with high humidity I can take. Time to get out the long sleeves and sweaters.

It’s also time to look at this week’s FOSS news.

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

FOSSForce.com

Seigo Throws Flame, Office Suite Kumbaya & OS Face Off

Seigo Throws Flame, Office Suite Kumbaya & OS Face Off

By Larry Cafiero on September 19, 2014 |

Browsers, Community, Operating Systems and Software

FOSS Week in Review

Flamethrowers and a kumbaya that will probably never happen: Yep, that’s the kind of week it was this week in the land of free/open source software.

Wearing your fireproof underwear? KDE’s Aaron Seigo – never one to shy away from saying what he thinks – lit into community managers in a Google+ post on Monday, calling the community manager role in free/open source software projects “a fraud and a farce.”

Aaron Seigo KDE — Aaron Seigo, shown here in 2011, is never one to shy away from a good discussion or debate.
Credit: Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 8038433@N06’s photostream

“Communities (real ones) have facilitators and leaders of various forms and stripes,” Seigo writes. “It’s OK if they get paid so they are able to spend the time and energy facilitating and leading, but they damn sure are not ‘managers of the community.’ They are accountable to the community, selected by the community, derive their influence from community consensus and can be replaced by the community at the community’s behest.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

What a Layperson Can Gain From an Enterprise Open Source Conference

By Christine Hall on March 26, 2014 |

Business, Media and Software

Here at FOSS Force we’re very proud to be an official media partner for the Great Wide Open conference that’ll be held in Atlanta next week. Because this is an enterprise conference, I don’t think I need to explain to those who work in IT the benefits of attending such an event. However, those of you who are primarily home users may think there’s nothing for you at a conference focused on professionals.

This isn’t true.

Any open source user, whether a professional or not, will benefit from attending an enterprise conference. Remember, the user is considered just as important to any open source project as those who develop and distribute the product. In other words, an enterprise conference is just as much about the user as the developer — even if the user is never likely to call Red Hat on the phone to order service contracts for the RHEL stack on a hundred servers.

Here are just a few reasons for a living room Linux user to attend an enterprise conference such as Great Wide Open:

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Using FOSS in a Windows-Centric Corporate Environment

By DarkDuck on October 22, 2013 |

Software

FileZilla running on Windows — FileZilla, a free and open source FTP client that can run on Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.

You have probably installed Linux on your work laptop and impress your colleagues with the style and performance of your operating systems. You promote Linux! Lucky you! I am envious!

Unlike you, I do not have this opportunity. Neither do many other office workers. That is because medium and large companies have their own policies about the software allowed to be used on their computers. More often than not, the choice of operating systems is Microsoft Windows, unfortunately. That can be because of some specific software required for business or because of management’s numbness. However, that’s not the point of this article.

DarkDuck

DarkDuck is the author and the owner of the blog Linux Notes from DarkDuck, which was a finalist in our Best FOSS or Linux Blog competition. In addition, he publishes the site Buy Linux CDs, where you can read more about different Linux operating systems and then order disks with your favorite distribution.

linuxblog.darkduck.com/

Microsoft Cranks Up FUD Machine

By Christine Hall on February 8, 2013 |

Business, Mobile, News and Software

If I were Yogi Berra, I might say something like, “When times get desperate, the desperate get desperater.”

We’re hearing reports that Microsoft is having trouble pushing copies of the whiz-bang don’t-call-it-metro Windows 8 even at reduced fire sale prices, with one tech writer suggesting a Vista-esque rollback to Windows 7. The new Microsoft Surface Pro tablet that was supposed to make Microsoft the new Apple and Steve Ballmer the new Steve Jobs has brought less than enthusiastic reviews. What’s a down on it’s luck technology company to do?

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Some Prominent Open Source Forks

By Christine Hall on August 8, 2012 |

Desktops, Distros and Software

Penguinistas used to worry about the dreaded fork, especially of Linux. “What if Linux forks and becomes like Unix?” was a question often being posed in the open source media. Linus Torvalds would do his best to put those fears to rest, explaining that under the GPL forks are usually to be welcomed.

He was of the opinion that if a fork improves a product and is liked by the users, those changes will almost certainly be rolled back into the originating application. If not, and the fork is indeed a marked improvement on the original, then the fork becomes the standard bearer at the expense of the original application.

By Christine Hall on June 21, 2011 |

Business and Software

Probably the most boring open source story recently has also been the one getting the most ink. The problem with with the Apache/OpenOffice saga is that the real story already happened, it’s history.

Oracle’s “gift” of OpenOffice.org to Apache, and the change of license from copyleft to permissive, is merely an epilogue referring back to a prologue: Oracle’s sudden ownership of the open source office suite as a mere byproduct of their acquisition of Sun.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com