"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the recipients of its Award for Projects of Social Benefit and its Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Groklaw received the social benefit award, and Harald Welte received the advancement award. FSF president Richard Stallman handed out the awards at the conclusion of the FSF's annual associate members meeting in Cambridge, MA..."
Read more »Harald Welte and Groklaw announced as winners of the FSF's annual free software awards
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Windows Vista Incapable
"Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is shipping and what we know so far is that it is incapable of running on many types of machines. In fact, Microsoft is being sued for putting stickers all over machines claiming that Vista could run on them, when in fact, it cannot.
Read more »The Moore’s Law of open source
Before joining ZDNet I wrote a lot about Moore’s Law, the idea that things get faster-and-faster faster-and-faster. I found exponential Moore’s Law effects everywhere. Not just in chips, but in magnetic storage, in optical storage, in optical transport, even in radios. The only place where I didn’t find it was in software. But now the folks at SAP Research have.
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Connecting open source and mobile users - the Nokia plan
Check out Nokia’s point of view on What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help, in the words of Ari Jaaksi. Building upstream following community rules is in the heart of this plan. This is what Nokia has been doing, learning and contributing back a lot. Now it’s time to dive deeper.
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Social inclusion with Xubuntu: A tale of free software changing lives
"M6-IT, a Community Interest Community in the UK, are part way through a project to equip socially excluded families with computers running Xubuntu. I was recently able to interview Richard Rothwell of M6-IT about this project and its progress..."
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GNU/Linux World Domination for the Wrong Reasons
"Whenever I hear people discussing GNU/Linux's prospects for becoming more popular, I'm reminded of a comment by Tommy Douglas, the social democrat who became a hero for introducing universal health care into Canada. If he could press a button and gain a million voters who did not understand his policies, he said, then he would not press that button. He meant that he was not in politics simply to be elected, but to gain supporters for his ideals -- and that he was determined not to lose sight of his long term goals while pursing short term ones.
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Free Software Supporter - Issue 1, March 2008
"Welcome to the all new Fee Software Supporter! — the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update. Each month we will highlight some of the important work being done by the FSF, and give an update on recent happenings in the GNU project and the campaign for software freedom. Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your website..."
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GNU and FSF News for March 2008
"The Free Software Foundation wants your help to end software patents and boycott Trend Micro. The GNU Project is going to be participating in Google's Summer of Code again this year. Rumor has it that Microsoft may be planning a GNU Project killer with its own recursive acronym. For the fourth time in its history, rms has passed Emacs on to new maintainers. A new version of GCC is out. The Mozilla Foundation and GNOME Foundation are in kahoots to bring you new and improved software..."
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Kerala State Electricity Board banishes proprietary software platform
Kerala Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan inaugurated a new billing software,named ORUMA, based purely on Free Software developed by the KSEB(Kerala State Electricity Board) itself in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday.The KSEB will save Rs.9.5 crore on licence fee and software upgrading because of the shift to free software, the release added.
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Free Open Source Software (FOSS) - Why should I support it?
Arguments on why anyone would/should support open source applications.
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Free Software and the GNU Operating System
"...Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy..."
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New lines of contention: Information Commons vs. New Enclosures
"...It is this intensive effort at the private appropriation of knowledge that has created different movements of resistance. The free software movement, the movements of farmers against biopiracy in seeds and animal and vegetal types, where Western corporations are privatizing the fruits of thousands of year of communal cooperation; the movement of patients and developmental organizations for access to reasonably priced medicines and medical knowledge; the movement for free access to scientific publications, are all related reactions to these New Enclosures.
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The free software movement is a political cause, not a technical one.
RMS: "That is completely backwards. The free software movement is a political cause, not a technical one. 'Choose based on technical criteria first of all' is the opposite of what we say. [...] The GNU Project is not just a collection of software packages. Its intended result is a coherent operating system. It is particularly important therefore that GNU packages should work well with other GNU packages. For instance, we would like Emacs to work well with git or mercurial, but we especially want it to work well with Bzr..."
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Free Software Supporter
"Today we released our first issue of the Free Software Supporter, a subscription based monthly newsletter that highlights the work of the foundation as well as provides updates from the GNU project. You can sign-up to our low-traffic mailing list to receive it each month..."
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Ending Software Patents
"Last week, the Free Software Foundation announced an important new initiative called End Software Patents whose goals are pretty evident from the project's name. So far, the initiative is backed by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center [...] ESP can reach out farther than the FSF alone and build a coalition that can destroy software patents for the good of much more than the free software community..."
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