Links: Apache Software Foundation Board Members, Mozilla Bug Bounty, Governments Approach Free Software
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-21 23:03:54 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-21 23:03:54 UTC
Summary: Gathering of some Free software and Open Source news
We run down the 10 best open source alternatives to the business software we use every day.
Running a business can be costly at the best of times, so we’ve delved into the open source world and plucked out some great alternatives to those heavyweight proprietary applications that we all know and need.
These applications could prove viable solutions to real business needs and could save you and your organisation money in the process. What’s more, if you’re just starting out these pieces of software could have your business up and running (and earning) a site quicker, not to mention keeping you in the black for longer, which is no mean feat in 2010.
The 2010 New Zealand Open Source Awards are now open for nominations at http://www.nzosa.org.nz/.
This year's Awards will focus particularly on achievements from over the past two years.
"There were so many strong nominations for the 2008 event," said panel chair Don Christie, "that we are keen to hear back from projects that have moved forward in the last years, as well as new initiatives using free and open source solutions."
In the field of graphic arts, vector clip art is associated with pre-made images used to represent whatever medium. It is comprised completely of illustrations made using computer software, and it does not contain stock photography.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is pleased to announce that Shane Curcuru, Doug Cutting, Bertrand Delacretaz, Roy T. Fielding, Jim Jagielski, Sam Ruby, Noirin Shirley, Greg Stein, and Henri Yandell have been elected to serve on the ASF Board of Directors.
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Mozilla
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE HOUSE Mozilla has upped the bounty it offers to anyone that discovers a bug in its software.
In a blog post Mozilla said that the evolving threat landscape had lead it to raise its reward to $3,000 in order to "better support constructive security research".
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Education
For K-12 IT directors, the major appeal of open source software (OSS) generally focuses on savings in licensing fees and access to software that would not otherwise be affordable. Many also are finding that OSS simply is the best solution for their school districts--even compared to commercial versions.
IT directors with OSS experience largely have been opportunistic about how they got started. In a series of interviews conducted for THE Journal, three IT directors shared their experiences--the hows and the whys--launching OSS in their districts.
They have very different stories, but have all learned that the transition to an open source "shop" takes time.
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BSD
The FreeBSD Security Team have identified a little bug in FreeBSD where a lost mbuf flag can result in data loss.
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Government
The government's decision not to renew an agreement with Microsoft for up to 800,000 NHS desktops could be an opportunity for open source suppliers to prove their worth.
According to an article on IT channel website Microscope.co.uk, the government did not feel the deal, known as an enterprise agreement, which aims to give lower prices in return for group buying was not value for money. It prefers individual NHS Trusts to buy what they want, rather than being forced to be part of an enterprise wide deal.
The European Commission is planning to spend 3.344 million Euro until 2016 to continue the services provided by its projects - such as OSOR.eu and SEMIC.eu - on open source and on electronic data exchange.
The EC published the budget details last week Thursday for its e-Government project. Apart from the 3.344 million Euro planned for the new platform to provide collaborative services for current Semic.eu and OSOR.eu users, another 8.8 million Euro are foreseen to provide support for existing and future communities around eGovernment in general, including the growing Open Source community on OSOR.eu and the community around interoperablity assets on Semic.eu.
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Openness/Sharing
Why should the free and open source software community regard their work as a commons? For people focused on building a specific piece of software, the need to label it a “commons” may seem gratuitous. What’s the value? But there are some good reasons for understanding free/open source software as a commons, as I explain in a recent essay published by the FLOSS Roadmap project.
It's hard to predict how an open source hardware revolution could change consumer electronics. There are very few ideas that stem from complete air -- nearly every great new thing has come from modifying something that came before.
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Programming
Adobe has announced that its partnering with Sourceforge to expand its open-source offerings and have more flexibility with the related programs. Basically, all of Adobe’s open-source and standards efforts will be hosted and managed on Sourceforge through the site’s new developer platform. Adobe is actually the first customer of the newly launched platform.
The US State Department has thrown its weight behind an initiative to promote software development for the good of East African residents.
The Apps 4 Africa contest was launched earlier this month and aims to encourage developers to produce software that will improve the quality of life for residents of this region.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Brett Wilson LLP Sent Over 5 Kilograms (or Over 12 Pounds) of Legal Papers! Because Writing About Microsoft Abuses is 'Illegal'.
- How do you guys sleep at night? On a big pile of Microsoft money?
- Extremism as a Weapon Against GNU/Linux (Microsoft Lunduke)
- He ought to know the Halloween Documents. Wasn't he a Microsoft employee when these came out?
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- Gemini Links 09/07/2025: Extreme Testing and Golang Documentation in Geminispace
- Links for the day
- Vice President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Complains That Techrights Gives Visibility to Legal and Technical Issues at the EPO
- "Follow-up on enquiries relating to Dir. 1218 and 1001"
- Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com and Various Slopfarms That Lie About "Linux" and Are Promoted by Google News
- Google does not seem interested in tackling this problem
- Links 09/07/2025: War Updates and Microsoft Moving to India to Cut Costs
- Links for the day
- GNU/Linux Was Always a 'Movement' of Inclusion of Tolerance
- Even the licences themselves remove access barriers
- Links 09/07/2025: "Subprime AI Crisis" and "OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially"
- Links for the day
- Huge Piles of Legal Papers ('Paper DDoS') Do Not Impress Judges and Regulators
- they just make judges and regulators even more suspicious of the eagerness to resort to 'paper DDoS'
- Lunduke Isn't Even Hiding His Anti-Linux Agenda (From "Linux Sucks" to "Linux is Pedophiles")
- just trying to make a lot of trouble
- Some People Use Computers to Get Actual Work Done
- Tolerance and inclusion must extend to acceptance that some people don't agree with you, might never agree with you, and imposing what allegedly works for you on them is unreasonable
- Example of "Old" Things That Still Work
- The notion that something being "old" implies it must be discarded is typically advanced by those looking to sell more of something
- Some Scheduled Maintenance Later Today
- Typically the most vulnerable service during short interruptions is IRC
- Computers Are Just a Tool
- People don't get married because they love weddings, folks don't join the army because they love war, and most drivers don't drive to work because they love cars
- Apple Way Past Its Prime
- Apple deserves a decline
- The FSF's SysOps Team Recovered From Serious Hardware Issue Within Hours
- About half a day ago I noticed that all/most GNU/FSF sites were not reachable and thus reached out to a contact for any details
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 08, 2025
- Slopwatch: Turning Bugs Into FUD About "Linux", Getting Basic Facts Wrong
- all the screenshots are of fake articles; we don't want to link to any
- Technical Reasons, Not Politics: With Wayland "it feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability"
- Lately, quite a few benchmarks were published to show Wayland compares poorly compared to what we had
- PCLinuxOS Recovering From Fire
- It looks like a nightmare scenario, where even backups onsite get destroyed
- Links 09/07/2025: More Heatwaves, Officials Culled in Russia
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/07/2025: XScreensaver and Resurrection
- Links for the day
- Links 08/07/2025: "Cyberattack Deals Blow to Russian Firmware" and "Cash Remains King"
- Links for the day
- FSF40 T-shirt message
- by Alex Oliva
- Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Creativity, Gotify with NUT Server, and Sudo Bugs
- Links for the day
- More on "Lunduke is Actually Sending His Audience to Attack People"
- "pepe the frogs"
- Links 08/07/2025: Sabotage of Networking Infrastructure, Microsoft XBox Game Pass Deemed “Unsustainable”
- Links for the day
- Dalai Lama Succession as Evidence That Determined, Motivated People Can Reach Their Nineties
- And we need to quit talking about their death all the time
- Many Lawyers (for Microsoft) and 1,316 Pages to Pick on a Litigant in Person Who Exposed Serious Microsoft Abuses
- Answers must be given
- Gemini Links 08/07/2025: Ancillary Justice and Small Web July
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, July 07, 2025
- Layoffs and Shutdowns at IBM, Not Just Microsoft
- Same as Microsoft
- The FSF's (Free Software Foundation, Inc.) 2025 Summer Fundraiser Already Past Halfway Line
- This is where GNU/Linux actually started
- With Workers Back From a Holiday Weekend, Microsoft Layoffs Carry on, More Waves to Come
- Now it's Monday and people are bad to work, even some journalists
- Mozilla Had No Good Reason to Outsource Firefox Development to Microsoft
- What does Mozilla plan to do when GitHub shuts down?
- Mozilla Firefox Did Not Die, It Got Killed
- To me it'll always look like Mozilla got killed by its sponsors, especially Google, which had a conflict of interest as a sponsor
- You Need Not Wave a Rainbow Flag This Month to Basically Oppose Arseholes Looking to Disrupt and Divide the Community
- Don't fall for it
- Dan Neidle, Whom Brett Wilson LLP SLAPPed (on Behalf of Corrupt Rich Tax Evaders), Still Fighting the Good Fight
- Neidle fights for the poor people
- What Miguel de Icaza and Microsoft Lunduke Have in Common
- Similar aims, different methods
- Wayland Should Start by Dumping Its Very Ugly Logo
- Wayland wins the "ugliest logo" award every year
- Stop Focusing on Hair Colours, Focus on Corporate Agenda
- If someone commits a crime, it does not matter if his or her hair was mostly white or there was no hair or a wig or whatever
- Links 07/07/2025: Science, Conflicts, and a Fictional K-pop Group
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/07/2025: Being a Luddite and Announcement of Gotify
- Links for the day
- Links 07/07/2025: XBox Effectively 'Dead', DMCA Subpoena Versus Registrar
- Links for the day
- The 'Corporate Neckbeard' is Not the "Good Guy"
- Works for IBM
- The Nasty Smear (and Stereotype) of "Neckbeard" or "Greybeard" is Ageism
- This is the sort of stuff they might try to volley at critics of Wayland
- Why Many of Us Use X Server and Will Continue to Use It For Many Years to Come
- Don't make this about politics
- Microsoft's Nat Friedman Became Unemployed the Same Time the SLAPPs Against Techrights Started Coming From His Friends (Weeks After We Had Exposed Scandals About Him and the Serial Strangler, His Best Friend, Who Got Arrested a Few Days Later)
- Nat Friedman is not "Investor, entrepreneur"
- Brett Wilson LLP Uses Threats to Demand Changes to Pages or Removal of Pages Without Even Revealing Which Staff Member Does That (Sometimes People From Another Firm!)
- This has been in the public for years
- Dan Neidle Said "It Really Then Became a Job of Tormenting" Lawyers Like Brett Wilson LLP (Who Threatened Him for Exposing Crimes, Just Like They Threatened My Wife a Few Months Later)
- he and his wife decided to take on the evil people and their evil lawyers
- Large Language Models (LLMs) Externalise Their Cost to the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
- "The forty-sixth Free Software Bulletin is now available online!"
- Weeding Out Extremism in Our Community
- To me it seems like Microsoft Lunduke is rapidly becoming like a "hate preacher" who operates online, breeding an extremist ideology or trying to soften its image
- Censorship Versus Fact-Checking and Quality Control
- It's not censorship but a matter of quality control
- Reinforcing the Allegations Some More, Bryan Lunduke Digs His Own Grave
- In his latest episodes he merely repeats his own lies, which I debunked using evidence right from his own mouth
- Global Warming and Free Software as a Force of Mitigation
- we'll need to think about Software Freedom, not just brands like "Linux"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 06, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, July 06, 2025
- Gemini Links 07/07/2025: BaseLibre Numerical System and TUI Rant
- Links for the day