Free/Open Source Software News: More Advocacy, Liberation, and Free Software on the Web
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-06 13:37:30 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-06 13:37:30 UTC
Advocacy
The APC Chris Nicol FLOSS Prize recognises initiatives that are making it easy for people to start using free/libre and open source software (FLOSS). The prize will be awarded to a person or group doing extraordinary work to make FLOSS accessible to ordinary computer users.
Imagine a world with fewer queues in banking and retail, and more self-service options. Imagine no longer relying on one cubical or terminal for service. Sounds unreal? This world is now a possibility in South Africa thanks to the partnership between LSD and Cashware.
Essentially, an open-source software or OSS is a kind of computer software which has its source code made available and licensed by virtue of such a license agreement which authorizes the copyright holder to study, modify and distribute the software to anyone, without any further charges and for any purpose whatsoever.
Open-sourcing
As part of the ROS team the engineers at Willow Garage wanted a low price point entry available for new programmers. The TurtleBot's SDK contains a collection of programs that range from basic to advanced. Instructions show how to set up the bot, operate with a keyboard, operate with a joystick, and fully utilize the Kinect camera data. There's also a cleverly titled section about maintenance called TurtleBot Care and Feeding.
Cisco may be a multi-billion entity that was built around a proprietary operating system, but if recent moves are any indication, a wave of open interoperability has been steadily reshaping how Cisco is bringing next-generation IT infrastructure to market.
A few months ago we wrote about Linksys Reviving The WRT54G Router In 802.11AC Form. Belkin, which owns Linksys, has begun releasing code for this new router -- the WRT1900AC -- but with this early code is still some glaring problems.
Misc.
XBMC, an open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media that is available for multiple platforms, has just reached version 13.0 Beta 3 and is now available for testing.
Events
Apache and Nginx
Two of the world's most widely deployed web servers have both recently been updated to fix security vulnerabilities.
With so many Apache Hadoop distributions on the market, what sets them apart? MapR is hoping that bringing feature-rich open source searching to its Big Data platform via integration with Elasticsearch will help draw users by making Big Data analytics and business intelligence faster and more comprehensive.
Mozilla
Mozilla and the Rust community are pleased to announce version 0.10 of the Rust compiler and tools. Rust is a systems programming language with a focus on safety, performance and concurrency.
If you've ever done any web development work, you are probably intimately familiar with the fact that what you build on the web may show up fine in one browser, yet be completely broken in another. It used to be that this problem simply meant testing sites and pages across popular desktop browsers, but in the age of mobile technology, you now have to test your creations across mobile devices, too.
While Mozilla has mostly been in the headlines this week for news related to contributions made by its new CEO Brendan Eich, another piece of meaningful news regarding the company is largely being ignored: Google Chrome has moved past Firefox to take second place in desktop browser market share, according to web traffic stats from Net Applications. In March, Chrome grabbed 17.5 percent of desktop brower traffic, while Firefox sat in third place with 17.2 percent. This is a first for Chrome, according to Net Applications' data, and is possibly driven by Google's extensive advertising for Chrome and Mozilla's new focus on Firefox OS and mobile technology.
The latest Mozilla Firefox nightly builds have begun enabling the generational garbage collector to better compete with Google's Chrome on performance grounds.
In an exciting collaboration with Mozilla and Google, Intel is bringing SIMD to JavaScript. This makes it possible to develop new classes of compute-intensive applications such as games and media processing—all in JavaScript—without the need to rely on any native plugins or non-portable native code. SIMD.JS can run anywhere JavaScript runs. It will, however, run a lot faster and more power efficiently on the platforms that support SIMD. This includes both the client platforms (browsers and hybrid mobile HTML5 apps) as well as servers that run JavaScript, for example through the Node.js V8 engine.
Thimble is actually a subset of Mozilla’s Webmaker project, which is aimed at teaching all kinds of web literacy and development skills.
Many, many people have noticed that if we had a way to reliably record program execution and replay it later, with the ability to debug the replay, we could largely tame the nondeterminism problem. This would also allow us to deliberately introduce nondeterminism so tests can explore more of the possible execution space, without impacting debuggability. Many record and replay systems have been built in pursuit of this vision. (I built one myself.) For various reasons these systems have not seen wide adoption. So, a few years ago we at Mozilla started a project to create a new record-and-replay tool that would overcome the obstacles blocking adoption. We call this tool rr.
We support the Mozilla community and the vital work they've done—and must keep doing—for the open Internet. EFF has been following the discussions around the choice of Brendan Eich as Mozilla’s CEO, including the announcement that he is stepping down.
As partners to Mozilla in campaigns that have included the fight against SOPA/PIPA, the StopWatching.US Coalition against mass surveillance, the effort to Encrypt the Web, the battle to prevent non-consensual online tracking, and ongoing work to make Firefox a more secure browser, we appreciate the frank and honest discussion that the community has undergone over this issue and respect the openness of the process. In that respect, as in many others, the difference between a closed and an open community is profound.
McAvoy clearly appreciates his ability to speak his mind without fear of retribution. But he also demands the termination of employment of a person that he disagrees with.
That sounds like hypocrisy, and intolerance, to me.
The worst of what I’m seeing is this – people who have steadfastly supported gay rights (and minority rights in general) but don’t like seeing how Eich is being treated are being called bigots and worse by their colleagues.
Chrome(ium)
Google’s Chrome Remote Desktop app beta is released for invite-only. Chrome Remote Desktop allows you to set up your computer for secure remote access. This includes setting up your computer so that you can access it later from another machine; or you can also use the app to let a friend remotely access your computer temporarily, perfect for times when you need help solving a computer problem.
Last April we introduced Blink as the new rendering engine for Chromium. Since then, the project has grown to include over 200 active contributors, and code complexity has been reduced significantly. We’ve also made encouraging progress on our top priority for 2014: mobile web performance.
Recent Techrights' Posts
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- 2012 Article About the Free Software Foundation Blasting Canonical/Ubuntu Over Adoption of "Secure" Boot (Microsoft's Remote Control Over GNU/Linux Since PCs' Power-on)
- By Katherine Noyes (article has since then became 404, not found)
- Debian Can Dump Blind Users Because I am Not Blind
- the sort of mentality we're up against
- The European Patent Office Cannot Attract Proficient Patent Examiners Who Master Their Domain
- They are enablers and facilitators of corruption
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- Despite its small population size, Norway gave us Qt and many other things
- Finland (and NATO) Must Move to GNU/Linux and Dump Microsoft Even Faster
- "Microsoft is not a technology problem, it is a staffing problem."
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- "Linux and Secure Boot certificate expiration"
- linuxconfig.org Joins linuxtechlab.com and Others, Becomes a Slopfarm With Fake Linux 'Articles' (LLM Slop)
- They contain "linux" in their domain names, but they are just slopfarms
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- Links for the day
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- Political discourse typically guides what's "normal" and what "good citizens" should believe/feel
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- Few people run a one-person instance in the Fediverse
- The Demise of GAFAM Necessitates Greater and Broader Awareness
- Morale at Microsoft is really bad
- Free Software Foundation Reaches 75% of Funding Goal
- Not bad for this "Fosschild"
- Slopwatch: 7 New Examples of Fake 'Linux' Slop Pieces (Plagiarism With Misinformation)
- Serial Sloppers need to be shunned
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- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
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- Some people call it a "shell game". Sometimes it's done for tax evasion purposes.
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- Will the cutoff date be extended again?
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- Ideally, all Gemini capsules should use self-signed certificates
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- [Meme] 9AM Meeting at Brett Wilson LLP
- Brett Wilson LLP in space
- Listing as Staff People Who Left the Company More Than Six Years Earlier
- There are apparently no laws against that
- Brian Fagioli Shovels Up LLM Slop (Plagiarism) Onto Slashdot, Then Uses Slashdot for Affirmation or as Badge of Honour
- Notice how some of his latest slop is presented ("as featured on Slashdot")
- Social Control Media Productivity
- Snapping photos of the bone
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- That might help explain why they're willing to tolerate serial stranglers from Microsoft as clients
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity.com Slopfarm and Slopfarms Propped Up by Google News
- "As LLM slop is foisted onto the WWW in place of knowledge and real content, it now gets ingested and processed by other LLMs, creating a sort of ouroboros of crap."
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- Links for the day
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
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- CALEA / CALEA2 is more of a front door than a back door
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- Since January there was only one noticeable outage
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- "Torvalds Family Uses Windows, Not Linus’ Linux"
- Attack of the Slopfarms
- FUD-amplifying bots with slop images, slop text (LLM slop)
- When People Call a Best/Close Friend of Bill Gates a "Serial Rapist"
- Good thing that the Linux Foundation keeps the "Linux" trademark ("Linux Mark") clean
- Not My Problem, I Don't Care
- Context/inspiration: Martin Niemöller
- Honest Journalism About the European Patent Office Ceased to Exist After SLAPPs and Bribes to the Media
- The EPO is basically a Mafia
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- It seems possible that in 2025 alone Microsoft will have laid off over 50,000 workers
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- Gee, wonder why car sales have plummeted...
- Why I Believe Brett Wilson LLP and Its Microsoft Clients Are All Toast
- So far our legal strategy has worked perfectly
- EPO Jobs Are Very Toxic and Bad for One's Health
- Health first, not monopolies
- Response to Ryo Suwito Regarding the Four Freedoms
- the point of life isn't to make more money
- Microsoft's Morale Circling Down the Drain
- Or gutter, toilet etc.
- What Matters More Than "Market Share"
- The goal is freedom, not "market share"
- Tech Used to be Fun. To Many of Us It's Still Fun.
- You can just watch it from afar and make fun of it all
- Links 17/07/2025: "Blog Identity Crisis" and Openwashing by Nvidia
- Links for the day
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- This is not politics
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- Having spoken to victims of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
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