Linus' disdain for Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation, and enforcing the GPL in regards to the kernel is well-known. Now we have another high-ranking kernel developer dissing on Free Software. Why? What is about freedom that turns off so many people? Is there suddenly so much Free Software in the world that we need to pollute it with closed, proprietary gunk? I'm not going to go all pundit and claim this is a trend that signals the doom of Linux, though it is tempting. A core, essential freedom of Free Software is the end user gets to control what goes on their systems. All these people who think freedom means forcing more proprietary junk on everyone are missing the point by several country miles.
There are a number of same old oft-repeated responses to these issues: "I just want it to work. Leave the politics out of it. Too much idealism is bad." etc etc... a lot of these are answered in "Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel". That is Greg Kroah-Hartman's famous talk that states plainly "Closed source Linux kernel modules are illegal." Greg K-H went on to launch the Free Linux Driver Development! project, which has succeeded in attracting a lot of vendors to the world of GPL drivers. Mr. Kroah-Hartman is also a leading kernel developer, so it is good I did not cry doom.
We finally have all the board members and officers appointed. While a good chunk of the NMLC consist of members of the New Mexico Ubuntu LoCo I’m very please that we have others involved as well , even someone that is primarily a Windows users.
Puppy Linux can be installed on your USB stick. So can PortableApps, a collection of cross platform open source software that can run on Windows. Interestingly, nearly all of the apps also run perfectly in wine, except for a few issues. So, I got an idea. Why not try and integrate the two.
Then, of course, there’s Linux. Netbooks work just brilliantly with Linux and Linux on the desktop has matured to a point that it’s far easier to justify installations in an educational setting than it was even a year ago. An increasing number of Windows-only applications run under Wine, as well. So why install Windows 7, Windows Vista, or even go with the Mac OS if a free operating system works just as well? As soon as I finish writing this, I’m going to start installing Fedora 10 on my Acer Aspire One to experience a full Linux distro on a netbook. We’ll see how that goes.
There’s a new little netbook or ultralite notebook floating around out there, a few sites have mentioned it already with mixed reactions, and a few of them made fun of it like a bully might to a child on the playground, and this without ever physically seeing the thing. Anyway, this new little netbook is linux based, it’s small, portable, inexpensive and lightweight, sure it’s not going to run Crysis, but if you’re looking for something to play around with then this just might fit the bill.
Last November, Openbravo, an open-source software (OSS) company in business for less than three years, celebrated the one-millionth combined download of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and point-of-sale applications. While the number of actual deployments is far less, given that developers often download the software as part of a tire-kicking exercise, the high interest in an open-source application as sophisticated as ERP reflects the increasing traction that OSS is gaining in the corporate world.
