Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-22 18:55:05 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-22 19:00:10 UTC
Summary: Today's news about digital freedom and openness
Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting -- a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
-
Web Browsers
Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world's fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we'll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
-
Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download ("Save link as") / upload dialog - in Linux that is, as I didn't try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I've noticed it.
-
SaaS
There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion's Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.
In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
-
BSD
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port--this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
-
Project Releases
The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware".
-
Government
Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
-
Openness/Sharing
It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
-
Open Data
Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- The High Cost of Making Scepticism of Proprietary Voting Machines a "Trump" and "Conspiracy Theory" Territory
- Time to get back to paper? Or read an old paper?
- Today We Got an Early Birthday Gift
- Exciting times
- [Meme] Going Too Far to the Left Can Breed Militant Ideology
- Some people can never be appeased because they prefer not to be appeased
- FSF Expressed No Preference Regarding Presidential Candidates (Its Founder Did)
- Because he is a principled person, he does not prioritise loyalty to customers or employers (money)
- Who Next on the Linux Foundation's 'Kill List'?
- Remember that only about 2% of the "Linux" Foundation's budget goes to Linux
-
- [Meme] Questioning Proprietary Software? Not OK...
- A disaster long in the making
- Links 07/11/2024: HTTP/3, Health Research, and Punditry
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/11/2024: On Writing Publicly and Record Player Table
- Links for the day
- Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Hosted SOSS as Microsoft Propaganda Platform With Microsoft Front Group OSI
- They essentially promote what they're attacking under false pretences [...] OSI is deeply corrupt. It's more toxic than arsenic.
- Anti-Linux FUD, Now in LLM Form, Thanks to Brittany Day
- They attack Linux with chatbots
- [Meme] When You Discredit People Who Discredit Secret Code
- proprietary systems with hundreds of millions of transistors (and hundreds of millions of lines of code)
- Links 07/11/2024: Online Manipulation in Social Control Media, Election Deniers, and More
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/11/2024: emacs-guix and File Hoarding
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Election Day at the European Patent Office
- Less than 60 minutes left to cast your vote
- Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) Election Ending Today
- In one hour
- [Meme] When the Patent Office Does Illegal Things and Staff Speaks Out
- many leaks received today
- Apple's Debt Has Skyrocketed While Gimmicks Like Vision Pro Failed
- In Apple's case, the debt is almost double the "Cash on Hand", which isn't even cash
- A President Trump is Excellent News to Microsoft
- His racist policies gave lots of contracts to Microsoft
- Links 07/11/2024: Facebook Scams, Journalists on Strike
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 06, 2024
- IRC logs for Wednesday, November 06, 2024
- Microsoft-Connected Publishers Want Us to Think That Linux is Some Sort of a Virus and a "Backdoor"
- "The problem is with windows and the attack vector is via Windows"
- We've Made it to 18! Here's to Another 18!
- Going on for another 18 years means until some time at the end of 2042
- Links 07/11/2024: Political Angst and Laptop Issues
- Links for the day
- Even LKML Subjected to Slop/SPAM by Guardian Digital, Inc (linuxsecurity.com)
- They're really awful
- Links 06/11/2024: BPF in RFC 9669, More Facebook Fines for Privacy Abuses
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/11/2024: Political Shock and Hermaic Encouragement
- Links for the day
- Planet Debian Allows Politics (But It Depends on Your Opinions and Debian's Big Sponsors)
- Planet Debian is OK with politics... as long as all your political opinions are the "correct" ones and you add cute animals
- What Makes RMS Such an Attractive Target ('Discreditisation' Campaigns)
- Don't be so easily fooled
- The Biggest OEMs or Vendors of GNU/Linux Stopped Competing With Microsoft (Which Pays Them to Promote Windows, Too)
- Where are the competition authorities (or regulators for that matter)?
- Let's Encrypt Falls to a New Low of Only 0.6% of Gemini Capsules Known to Lupa
- In Gemini Protocol, certificates for encryption are required, but centralised Certificate Authorities (CAs) aren't needed
- Computer-Generator Crap Flooding the Web, the Latest Example About "Linux"
- Here's today's example
- Links 06/11/2024: Election Disinformation and Legal Actions
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/11/2024: Stargazing and Death on Hallowe'en
- Links for the day
- Would You Trust a Liar?
- Why lie about the authorship?
- Mass Layoffs at Mozilla Announced During US Elections
- Maybe nobody will notice?
- [Meme] Announcing "Results" Before Everyone Even "Played"
- There is a "tech" angle to otherwise political news
- US Polls Close in One Minute (Social Control Media Does Not Care, Will Not Wait)
- US election results will be known in about 2 days
- Concentration and Centralisation Versus Aggregation or Syndication
- KDE has a history of burying old sites
- Social Control Media, Even Hours Before Polls Have Closed
- Has social control media controlled by CPC (TikTok) and the Trumpmobile guy (Musk's "X") done enough to convince people not to even vote (based on presumptive "results", presented a long time before all polls have closed)?
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 05, 2024
- IRC logs for Tuesday, November 05, 2024
- Wayland Pains in Community-Led Distros of GNU/Linux
- Few people and companies use Wayland; there's hardly any technical or practical reason to choose it
- IBM Still Conflating Microsoft With 'Security'
- As a meme
- Sanctions Cause Fragmentation in Software
- some Chinese Linux developers are already subjected to restrictions similar to Russians'
- Web Failing With Slop, Even in 'Linux' Sites (LLM Spam)
- Add SEO prompting to the mix and the Web becomes a pool of slop, not knowledge
- [Meme] State of the World Wide Web and Online Journalism
- Technically a failure (DRM) and cannot even get basic things right
- Trump's signature policy, building a wall, copied from Irish-Australian student politician
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Linus Torvalds' self-deprecating LKML CoC mail linked to Hitler's first writing: Gemlich letter
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- [Meme] Turning 18 in One Day
- just one more day
- Birthday Tomorrow
- Many cakes and drinks are ready; we're one day away now
- The Internet is Failing to Protect Democratic Processes and Human Knowledge
- Amplifying lies, rewarding plagiarists
- Links 05/11/2024: Criminal Referrals Regarding Patent Trolls and Disinformation About the Election Process (Already)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/11/2024: 'App' Needed for Parking, NNCP, Gomphotherium
- Links for the day
- How Voting Does Not Work
- You cannot vote from an "app"
- Saving the Planet With Honesty, Transparency, and Sharing (Not Only of Computer Code)
- GAFAM is destroying the only habitat humans and other animals have and it'll only get worse
- Disinformation About Election Outcomes Even Before Any Election Outcomes (or Election/Voting!)
- seeding doubt about election outcomes
- Links 05/11/2024: Bluesky and Enshittification, Pugad Baboy, and Lots of Disinformation Flooding the Web
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Sweaty Under the Belly
- "OK, my critics are 'spam'"
- Microsoft Bribing Canonical (to Stop Competing) and Bribing Users to Shun the Competition
- Canonical is worth shunning
- [Meme] The 2024 'Info Bros'
- And prehistoric googling
- Computers Getting Worse (for the User) Over Time
- This is like Windows-ism coming to "Linux" through the hardware
- [Meme] How NOT to Vote
- Another form of (mostly-unspoken-of) election interference
- An LLM Inside a 'Search' Engine Means That Companies Tell You What They Want, Not What Web Pages to Visit
- The future of 'googling' things might be as unreliable as using Social Control Media as a source of information
- Google's Debt Has Increased and 'Cash on Hand' Fell by 22.27% This Past Year
- These are the numbers that the corporate media intentionally leaves out
- Against Outsourcing of Sites and E-mail
- Software Freedom is great, but it is not enough if you let someone else do it 'for you'
- Drew DeVault: People Talking About My Attack Site (Against the Founder of GNU/Linux) is "Spam"
- "Spam on sr.ht mailing lists"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 04, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, November 04, 2024
- There's a Reason Why Techrights is Turning 18 and Tux Machines Will Turn 20.5 Next Month
- I started advocating GNU/Linux when I was a teenager
- "Oppose the Fascist"
- what the founder of GNU/Linux said
- Techrights Has a Long History of Fighting to Expose 'Team Mono' or Microsofters Inside GNOME
- Never downplay the malice of Microsoft and its operatives
- Halloween, All Saints Day & Swiss citizenship
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Gemini Links 05/11/2024: Halloween Over, Intention and Implementation, Bookmark Syncing
- Links for the day