[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] I'm Matt Lee, Campaigns Manager at the Free Software Foundation. Here with another month of news from the world of GNU and the FSF.
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 7,824 other activists.
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I'm Matt Lee, Campaigns Manager at the Free Software Foundation. Here with another month of news from the world of GNU and the FSF.
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 7,824 other activists.
Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your web site.
Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues too.
In this issue:
Read more... (0 replies)
I'm Matt Lee, Campaigns Manager at the Free Software Foundation. Here with the first of what will be a regular posting each month of news from the world of GNU and the FSF. Thanks to Steven for giving us the opportunity to post this here.
Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update -- being read by you and 7,824 other activists.
Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your web site.
Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues too.
In this issue
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There's an ongoing debate about whether a free/open source project needs to be "organic" to be worthwhile, where "organic" is (arguably) defined as a project which the first release included source, and is generally characterized as by a distributed development team with no single company truly in control, and "inorganic" is generally code that started off life as a proprietary effort. I'd like to argue that making "inorganic" open source work is a big challenge worth tackling.
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The Myth
Content Management is easy. You download one of the numerous systems
available, plug-in your data. Something magical happens (???) and out
comes a professional looking and operating website. This obviously
manages all of your content from all different sources with ease. All
you have to do is make a template and you’re done! If this sounds like
something you’ve heard and are suspiciously weary of. You should be,
because it’s all snake oil! If it was that easy I would probably quit my
job and go study law. Since it is not, let us continue first by giving a
brief background on what content management is.
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Skype fought the GPL and the GPL won. The OLPC XO project abandons free software just as RMS switches to an XO; RMS not happy. New monthly newsletters from the FSF and FSFE. GNOME and KDE want to have a joint development conference in 2009. GNOME and GCC conferences coming up later this year. Plus all the usual news: more GPL v3 conversions, HURD news, GNOME news, GCC news, and more.
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Rsync is an incredibly powerful tool that synchronises anything from a single file to an entire hierarchical filesystem, over a network. Unlike many other synchronisation methods, rsync will use the outdated copy of a file to save on network traffic (resulting in anything up to 99% optimisation).
Rsync the implementation however is restricted to only Posix systems (such as Linux, Cygwin and *BSD), and, worse, its implementation can only perform operations on Posix-based filesystems. This seems somewhat puzzling, and, as part of the continued Tech Fusion series, this article will outline some of the amazingly powerful things that could be done with rsync... if it had a VFS layer.
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informal though this is, it's important enough to say as an article. i've been keeping an eye on the series currently being written and some of my comments - most notably to Pizza - indicate that i'm "jumping up and down". so Pizza - many apologies! :)
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As part of the Tech Fusion Outline Series, this article describes some additions to the Debian Distribution model which, if implemented, would have the benefits of making Debian, the Debian Development and deployment entirely independent of Server-based Infrastructure.
The brief outline will be expanded in this dedicated article, pointing out how tieing together components and technology that already exists would be useful not only for Debian but also for other purposes, such as video and audio media distribution. (A method of payment for work on Debian or other media is not within the scope of this article but is easily conceivable). This article therefore explains how and why Debian Distribution Development could go "Distributed".
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Free Software developers fall into two main categories: those that stand by the principles behind free software - patent-free, license-free and unrestricted distribution (for example, Richard Stallman's admirable stance); and those that are simply happy to compromise to some extent, for example to download libdvdcss to watch DVDs, or to install proprietary software such as Skype, on the basis that there is simply no (or no better) alternative (for example, Ubuntu which supports all kinds of proprietary firmware and binary drivers, and gets itself into enormous difficulties as a result).
These "level of integrity" choices are decisions that we, as Free Software developers, are free to make. Yet the average person is simply unaware of these issues of "integrity", or they are but do not value them highly, choosing "interoperability with their friends and businesses" as "more important". Or worse, they agree that integrity is important yet are forced into making decisions to use - and stick with - proprietary software. In such instances, the level of experience of (and thus the offerings available from) Free Software developers in a particular area of specialist expertise that the users absolutely must have before being able to consider migration, is close to or literally zero.
As Free Software developers, is it therefore ethical for us to ignore these people whose lives are blighted by lack of choice, or is it more ethical for us to remain in our integrity, by providing non-interoperable Free Software alternatives (with no means of conversion between the free and proprietary software)?
To put that another way: should Free Software developers serve themselves and their own needs, or should they look to serve others? This article highlights these quite important questions that every Free Software developer should be asking themselves, and advocates a way to proliferate, protect, enjoy and benefit from Free Software principles: that of the "Social Business".
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