Guile is a library designed to help programmers create flexible applications. Using Guile in an application allows programmers to write plug-ins, or modules (there are many names, but the concept is essentially the same) and users to use them to have an application fit their needs.

There is a long list of proven applications that employ extension languages. Successful and long-lived examples in the free software world are GNU Emacs and The GIMP.

One of those, is BackTrack, a hackers delight, one that is loaded with all the best Free Software and Open Source penetration testing applications available. The latest edition is BackTrack 5, code-named Revolution. We are actually at BackTrack 5 R2. Keep in mind that BackTrack is not a distribution for newbies. This is serious stuff.

Code names have been around for a long time. Remember the Manhattan project in the 1940s? That turned out to be the atomic bomb. Thankfully, not all code names hide such sinister projects. So what kind of code names are developers out there coming up with?

Proprietary code powers the world banks, networks, voting machines and other critical applications that we regularly interact with. But the real question is where mission critical applications like this can be done with open source code, as many open source advocates would like to see happen.

When explaining why Free Software is important, one question that often comes up is: “do I really need the software freedom?”

GStreamer is an open source multimedia framework that's used by many GNOME applications and a few KDE apps as well. It's really meant to be used by programmers to create rich applications by accessing GStreamer's API. Thankfully there's also a command line interface available for us non-programmers. It's really meant for only testing, but that's OK. If it works, it works.

In recent weeks I have banged on about Open Source, expending two articles on Firefox alone. Open Source applications make their code available to everyone. Disagreements and rabid balkanisation within the Open Source community aside, for our purposes the term might as well refer to free software whose licence allows you to share the source code, alter it, use it, do with it what you will.

This shows a clear link between Free Software and Free Seeds movement, between José Bové & RMS...

Ubuntu applications have a variety of benefits over the basic applications that come with closed-source, proprietary systems. The biggest advantage is that they are free, and anyone can easily download and install them without having to pay anything.