According to a recent tweet, Oracle (the company which recently acquired Sun Microsystems) has started to charge a license fee for its popular open office compatibility plug-in for Microsoft Office. Is this a signal for other open source and free software vendors to start charging for commercially valuable applications?
Full story »
Read contents from Free Software Magazine
Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
Categories
Best karma users
From the staff of FSDaily: Comedians in Perth, Magicians in Perth, Bands in Perth
akf
2 years 4 weeks 4 hours 2 min ago
confused
There seems to be a big confusion here. The ODF-Plugin for MS-Office was never Free Software. Yet, still I think, this is a very bad move.
akf
2 years 3 weeks 6 days 12 hours ago
monetizing Free Software
Okay, this article is not about Free Software. But to answer the question: it would not be wrong to monetize Free Software. The FSF even encourages to do so.
knowing-card
2 years 3 weeks 5 days 17 hours ago
Open formats are part of FSDaily's scope
Even though this is about a company charging money for a proprietary plugin for a proprietary office suite, it might be of interest to the free software community for several reasons:
* It relates to ODF an open format and standard.
* It illustrates how Companies behind proprietary software can (through vendor lock-in) squeeze their customers.
* It gives the FOSS community an insight into the possible future other Oracle software: MySQL, OpenOffice.org etc.
* It can be used to convince to use a free software office suite instead of MS Office.
If it's of interest or people think others should know about it they can vote it up.