Summary: Heise's journalistic work covering Free and Open Source software is resurrected, thanks to pressure from concerned followers and former writers
EARLIER this year we sent many E-mails back and forth, exchanged ideas in social networks, and also wrote some articles urging Heise to bring The H back to the Web. A lot of effort was put into it before and behind the scenes. Last week there was a turning point and we seemed close to achieving our goal; with Linux Devices it took several months to achieve (and a lot of persistence/effort), but this time it took only weeks. Digital preservation is very important to Free and Open Source software. Without it, it's hard to inform the public and improve the perception of Free/Open Source software.
"The H-Online UK archive appears to be up again,"
said David Gerard from Wikipedia, "with old URLs working." Fantastic!
In other news, after a day-long struggle we've managed to restore
Tux Machines (news aggregation site) to a fully working order after some issues with caching (it turned out to be a conflict between Drupal cache and Varnish cache). Several improvements (security- and access-wise) were made in this process.
In the coming week we shall have plenty of interesting articles (opinions and original reporting) to share. We are starting to increase the pace of publication again, after a relatively slow 2013.
Our ambition to save those inactive sites (with no
new articles in them) from going offline was partly driven by concerns that journalism is drying up a bit when it comes to software freedom (less so when it comes to Linux). Some Linux-oriented events may as well still be alive (e.g. SCALE 12x [1,2]), but audiocasts are becoming fewer [3,4] (there are new arrivals though [5]), magazines are becoming fewer (
Linux Journal is still going [6], but its Web site is hardly active), emerging Linux-related events are about proprietary software [7] with DRM or other restrictions [8] (taking place in Seattle, near Microsoft), leaving interview and such interactions to few community sites [9]. Keeping existing literature and references alive is the least one can do to secure an identity and defend from misinformation, revisionism, etc.
Groklaw has always been exceptionally serious when it comes to long-term preservation of information, but it too is now an inactive site.
Slashdot seems to be
going down the same path.
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Related/contextual items from the news:
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In 2013 we kicked off Bad Voltage, a fun and irreverent podcast about technology, Open Source, gaming, politics, and anything else we find interesting. The show includes a veritable bounty of presenters including Stuart Langridge (LugRadio, Show Of Jaq), Bryan Lunduke (Linux Action Show), Jeremy Garcia (LinuxQuestions Podcast), and myself (LugRadio, Shot Of Jaq).
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Hello Unixmen readers, today we have a special guest here at our desk! Ladies and gentlemen, we present you our friend Sancho Lerena from Pandora FMS. In case it doesn’t ring you any bell, Pandora FMS is a monitoring software which helps you to detect problems before they happen, managing your IT infrastructure: servers, networking and applications. So, if you want to find a job or if you are currently employed as Linux/Network Administrator then you should be aware of it. Here’s a little summary of Pandora from Unixmen.
