When writing earlier this week about Adobe's sponsoring of the SQLite project, I ran into a complicated issue: is software released into the public domain also open-source software?
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OOXML Fails to Get Majority Approval at BRM - Updated 2Xs
Andy Updegrove has the results in detail here, including a breakdown of the votes. Basically, there were too many proposed changes to be able to cover them in the BRM, so they tried a workaround, but the upshot is ... it's a mess.
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Will The Canoniclique Finally Listen To Kubuntu?
One of my first tasks on Brainstorm was to query for "KDE" and "Kubuntu" ideas, but I found only one: Idea #478 - Support kubuntu and kde the way you support ubuntu and gnome. Fine. It's about as well-expressed an idea as I could have hoped for, and a good candidate for merging the duplicate questions into. But what's been interesting is watching the early resistance from GNOME users, not so much in the comments, but in the bouncing score.
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Graphics and Free Software: a great 2007, but where is OpenGL?
2007 was probably The Year Of Free Graphics: AMD/ATI’s specs, a new totally Mesa , output hotplugging via XRandR and the announcement of new shiny OpenGL specs. While this all was truly great, the OpenGL releases never happened, and there are no updates on the topic.
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Alien Arena 2008 to be released March 1st
Alien Arena 2008, the followup to the game Linux.com proclaimed "blows away it's FPS competition" http://www.linux.com/feature/119775 is scheduled to be be released on March 1st, 2008.
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End Software Patents project comes out swinging
Four months after being announced, the End Software Patents project (ESP) is launching a new Web site with arguments for economists, computer scientists, lawyers, and lay people about why they should support the project. Prominent on the site is the publication of a report on the state of patents in the United States during 2006-07, and a scholarship contest that will award $10,000 for "for the best paper on the effects of the patentability of software and business methods under US law."
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Microsoft Strategies: Using NGOs to Push Agendas
The extent to which Microsoft can go in its efforts to get OOXML is interesting. Microsoft has "persuaded" several non-profit organizations to bombard the Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the Bureau of Indian Standards with letters supporting its OOXML proposal.
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Full Circle Magazine Issue 10 Released
Full Circle - The Independent Ubuntu Community Magazine is proud to announce the release of issue ten
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£99 laptop could hatch the Linux generation
PC manufacturer Elonex is launching ONE, an ultra-portable laptop, at this week’s Education Show at the NEC. The machine provides a 7″ LCD screen, wireless Internet access and 1GB on-board solid state memory (there is no hard disc to save on costs). It runs Linux with what looks like OpenOffice for word processing and is being aimed at the education market. It costs just £99.
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Geek of the Month: Richard M. Stallman
It’s the last day of the month once again. To our avid readers, you may already know that it is time once again to honor an über geek whose works and life changed the course of technology, particularly the field of computing. So without further a do, let’s give importance to a very famous free software evangelist, the living legend himself, Richard M. Stallman.
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GIMP 2.4.5 released
"Version 2.4.5 of GIMP has been released. This is a bugfix only release..." -- http://www.gimp.org/
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Google helps FSFE's Freedom Task Force to deliver training, attend conferences and translate documents.
"Google has made a donation to assist FSFE's Freedom Task Force with delivering training courses, attending conferences and localising documents [...] «Free Software Foundation Europe has been working to promote and protect Free Software in Europe for many years and the Freedom Task Force is a good example of their long-term approach to supporting the community,» says Jeremy Allison, Member of the Technical Staff - Software Engineer, Google. «I believe that they are doing useful work and I'm proud to see Google supporting their activities.» ..."
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Torrentflux — web-based BitTorrent client
The Bittorrent network is becoming increasingly popular and perfectly legal. It allows to download the latest movies, music or, to say the least, almost every Linux distribution available.
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SystemRescueCD
Bad things happen, and sometimes those bad things will happen to your computer, or a computer you are responsible for. There are quite a few Linux live CDs out there designed for the purpose of rescue systems.
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WikiLeaks Uncensored
Thanks in no small part to the efforts of The EFF and others, the honorable District Judge Jeffrey S. White has withdrew an earlier order blocking the wikileaks.org domain resolution.
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Read contents from Free Software Magazine
Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanFrom the very start, directories have served a very useful purpose on the Internet. (One I find useful for example is Free Web Directory). News sites can also be considered directories: they index and categorize news stories! What about categorizing software? In the open source world you get Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat; there are still, believe it or not, shareware and freeware directories like FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and Freeware Downloads (although you need to be careful, as they are not like their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselAbout Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software?, it's clear that the topic of software directories is very hot. Most of what you find on Google, however, are not pointing to free and open soruce software -- or worse, they mix the two. Examples of such sites are Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download, which simply don't focus on "free as in freedom", and still can be used as good free software directories.








