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
- IBM Says That Half of Its "Assets" is Basically Pure Fiction ("Goodwill")
- It times get tough, IBM can sell "Goodwill" at the local pawn shop and pay back the lenders, right?
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- Links 01/02/2025: Administrative Chaos and Aviation Disasters Persist
- Links for the day
- Arrested: Albanian Outreachy whistleblowers, Sonny Piers GNOME & Debian connections
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 1/2/2025: LLM Hype Revisited, Linuxwashing by Oumi
- Links for the day
- Growing Evidence That the Patent Industry Has Become a Major Scam
- Seeing that the patent "industry" has turned to serious crimes (sometimes to cover up corruption) and seeing that the net negative is clearer for all to see, people who argue for abolition of all patents will have a field day
- Planet Ubuntu Overrun by LLM Slop? Faizul "Piju" 9M2PJU Seems to be Publishing Fake Articles About "Linux"...
- Maybe it is "assisted" by LLM slop, but slop is slop and it introduces many problems
- Gemini Links 01/02/2025: LLMs, Analog Computer, and BorgBackup
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 31, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, January 31, 2025
- Links 31/01/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Microsoft, Sweden Again Fails to Protect Critics of Violence
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Fake Articles About "Linux" and More (Latest Roundup Featuring BetaNews, Janus Atienza, and Brittany Day From Guardian Digital, Inc)
- LLM slop season
- Microsoft Staff Explains How Microsoft Swindled Employees and Avoided Paying Out Severance Pay (Microsoft Hasn't Much Money Left in the Bank)
- This is a classic way to avoid paying workers
- "Not one of us" by Dr. Andy Farnell
- Elon Musk has brought embarrassment to nerds and technologists
- Gemini Links 31/01/2025: "Bulletin Buble" and "Why Blog?"
- Links for the day
- Static Site Generators (SSGs) Pay Off: Vastly Faster Sites, Much Smaller Hosting Bills
- success story for SSGs
- Of Note: Linux Foundation Has Already Let Linux.com Rot for About 4 Months (No Activity)
- there's no campaign aside from marketing spam there
- Techrights Should be Even Faster Now
- We're now better off
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, January 30, 2025
- Richard Stallman (RMS) Gave 3 Talks in India in Less Than a Week
- In India this month we've not seen a single negative comment about RMS
- Indian Data Biases statCounter For or Against "Linux"
- In statCounter, the GNU/Linux increases and decreases are deeply tied to what it does with data collected in India
- The Corporate Media Pretends That Facebook ("Meta") Has Performed Well, But Its Debt Doubles Every 2 Years Despite Mass Layoffs
- That same media also helps parrot misleading financial claims
- Microsoft's Debt Surged by More Than 6,000,000,000 Dollars in Just 3 Months
- numbers released hours ago
- The Sheer Irony of Microsoft Proxy Accusing Others of 'Stealing'
- Wherever DeepSick's data came from, Microsoft (or its proxy) is in no position to issue criticism.
- The Difference a Decade (and GAFAM Money) Makes
- Credibility cannot be purchased
- [Meme] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Critics Because Its Message is Effective
- Applying to others the same standards one is willing to violate?
- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised $422,000 (Another $22k in the Two Weeks After Campaign Ended), Proving That Truth and Justice Tend to Find a Way
- 10,000+ dollars a week even without campaigning for more funds
- Faking Revenue Increase by Buying Your Own Products and Services (Through Scams and Scammers Like Scam Altman)
- Is this what society deserves? Media that instead of exposing corruption has chosen to participate in it and profit from it?
- Microsoft Mass Layoffs Without Severance Pay Reported Hours After Microsoft Reported Weak Numbers and Microsoft Stock Fell
- Microsoft has a bloodbath this month
- Links 30/01/2025: Fentanylware (TikTok) Causes Deaths, FBI Seizes Domains
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/01/2025: Action vs Inaction, Gopherholes, and More
- Links for the day
- Another Slew of Fake Articles About 'Linux' and 'Security' From Brittany Day at linuxsecurity.com (Spamfarm/Slopfarm)
- linuxsecurity.com is basically a pariah and parasite. It lessens the incentive to write real articles about "Linux" by generating fake ones to outrank the originals.
- Links 30/01/2025: Microsoft Wants Convicted Felon to Give Fentanylware (TikTok) to It (After Making a Phonecall Asking for That in 2019), "Moving Away From Google's Ecosystem"
- Links for the day
- Jack M. Germain (LinuxInsider) Seems to Have Turned to LLM Slop, Graphics Slop, and B2B SPAM
- LinuxInsider is barely active anymore
- Links 30/01/2025: Amazon Layoffs and DeepSeek Panic
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/01/2025: Chaos Reigns, E-mail, Searching
- Links for the day
- IBM: Many Thousands of Layoffs in 2025
- If 2025 is expected to be the same, then perhaps about 20,000 IBM workers will no longer be there
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, January 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, January 29, 2025