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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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
- From Do Your Own Research to Do Your Own Search
- The Web is full of garbage; search engines amplify this garbage
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- Peter Moon's (Computerworld) Interview With Richard Stallman
- Stallman: If you want freedom don't follow Linus Torvalds
- At What Point Does Outsourcing Constitute Malpractice?
- Brett Wilson LLP's new staff page is misleading
- United Arab Emirates (UAE) Sailing to GNU/Linux, According to statCounter
- countries in that region will quickly learn the price of neglecting digital sovereignty
- More People Moving to Geminispace?
- at age 6+ Gemini Protocol seems to have gained some maturity and it seems like more people use it
- Permutation in LLMs Does, Inevitably, Change Meanings and Therefore LLMs Cannot Properly Rephrase or Summarise Texts
- LLMs lack actual grasp or comprehension of what they spew out
- Links 23/06/2025: Many Security Breaches, Population Declines
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/06/2025: "America at the Crossroads" and OpenWRT Surgery
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 22, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 22, 2025
- Pure Dove
- Different means different, and sometimes those who "deviate" from "the norm" have a point
- Censorship is a Sign of Weakness Which Invites More Censorship Attempts
- revolutionaries don't succumb to pressure from bullies
- Why It's Unlikely That LLM Slop Will Dominate the Web in the Long Run
- Slopfarms will eventually perish (they have no actual value) and "survivors" on the Web will be sites that never depended on search engines and social control media
- GNU/Linux in Argentina Now Measured Near 5%
- Like in central Europe, they must be seeing an increasingly hostile US
- BetaNews is Fake News, Composed by LLM Slop
- nothing in BetaNews is written by humans anymore
- Links 22/06/2025: Giving Up on Smartphones and 'Jaws' at 50
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/06/2025: Furniture Construction and Bubble for Comments
- Links for the day
- Links 22/06/2025: Windows TCO Tales and YouTube Getting More Hostile to Users
- Links for the day
- The FSF Board and FSF Beard
- So the FSF's Board has grown
- Law Firms Facing the Consequences for Patently Abusive Litigation on Behalf of Microsoft Employees Who Got Arrested for Strangulation and Had Done Even Worse Things
- Having spent 1.5 years bullying me with patronising letters on behalf of Microsofters, last week they got served a massive bill and, in effect, lost the Hearing
- New Report From the EPO's Staff Representatives in The Hague (LSCTH) Reveals Many Unsolved Issues
- Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH) wrote to staff just before the weekend
- LLMs Breaking Everything
- Computing and the Net became a playground for scammers and "bros", like people who "invented" fake currencies and also try to tell us that LLMs spewing out things will have some real value
- Links 22/06/2025: More Slop Lawsuits (Copyrights) and "America’s Oligarch Problem"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/06/2025: Gigantic Toolchest and Annoying Bots
- Links for the day
- The Calling
- Persist and persevere, justice will come your way
- So Far Every BetaNews 'Article' is LLM Slop, So BetaNews is Officially Just a Slopfarm
- They just don't seem to value what they have
- IBM Rumour: Mass Layoffs (RAs) Lists Being Made for Consulting, With Effect in July 2025
- Bogus companies with no viable products and no world-leading (in their field) staff are doomed to perish
- Links 21/06/2025: Data Breach With 16 Billion Passwords, Dutch Government Recommends Children Under 15 Stay off TikTok and Instagram
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/06/2025: Notes about Typst (and LaTeX) and Opos
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's Competition Tactics: Sabotage GNU/Linux Installs, Block Chrome
- Edge is dying
- 1989: Free Software as "Open" Software (OSI Didn't Coin "Open Source", It Also Predates Linux)
- "One man's fight for Free software"
- The Microsoft OOXML Modus Operandi: Throw 1,000 Pages of Other People's Work for a Judge to Read Ahead of a One-Hour Meeting
- No time to discuss this - that's the point
- Formalities Officers (FOs) at the EPO Are in Trouble, Reveals Internal Report
- We already know, based on an HR pattern we saw at IBM and elsewhere, that reallocating roles can be prerequisite for dismissal and those who do so expect many to resign anyway
- The Web is Slop and FUD, Let's Go to Gemini Protocol
- Lupa sees self-signed capsules at 92.4%
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 20, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, June 20, 2025
- Links 21/06/2025: Phone Bans for Concerts, Tensions in Taiwan Strait
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/06/2025: Spoilers, Public Yggdrasil Node, Changes to AuraGem Search
- Links for the day