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
- Early Retirement Age: Linus Torvalds Turns 55 Next Week
- Now he's almost eligible for retirement in certain European countries
- Gemini Links 22/12/2024: Solstice and IDEs
- Links for the day
- BetaNews: Microsoft Slop is Your "Latest Technology News"
- Paid-for garbage disguised as "journalism"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 21, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, December 21, 2024
- Links 21/12/2024: EU on Solidarity with Ukraine, Focus on Illegal and Unconstitutional Patent Court in the EU (UPC)
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Microsofters at the End of David's Leash
- Hand holding the leash. Whose?
- Deciphering Matt's Take on WordPress, Which is Under Attack From Microsofters-Funded Aggravator
- the money sponsoring the legal attacks on WordPress and on Matt is connected very closely to Microsoft
- Gemini Links 21/12/2024: Projections, Dead Web ('Webapps' Replacing Pages), and Presentation of Pi-hole
- Links for the day
- American Samoa One of the Sovereign States Where Windows Has Fallen Below 1% (and Stays Below It)
- the latest data plotted in LibreOffice
- [Meme] Brian's Ravioli
- An article per minute?
- Links 21/12/2024: "Hey Hi" (AI) or LLM Bubble Criticised by Mainstream Media, Oligarchs Try to Control and Shut Down US Government
- Links for the day
- LLM Slop is Ruining the Media and Ruining the Web, Ignoring the Problem or the Principal Culprits (or the Slop Itself) Is Not Enough
- We need to encourage calling out the culprits (till they stop this poor conduct or misconduct)
- Christmas FUD From Microsoft, Smearing "SSH" When the Real Issue is Microsoft Windows
- And since Microsoft's software contains back doors, only a fool would allow any part of SSH on Microsoft's environments, which should be presumed compromised
- Paywalls, Bots, Spam, and Spyware is "Future of the Media" According to UK Press Gazette
- "managers want more LLM slop"
- Google Has Mass Layoffs (Again), But the Problem is Vastly Larger
- started as a rumour about January 2025
- On BetaNews Latest Technology News: "We are moderately confident this text was [LLM Chatbot] generated"
- The future of newsrooms or another site circling down the drain with spam, slop, or both?
- "The Real New Year" is Now
- Happy solstice
- Microsoft OSI Reads Techrights Closely
- Microsoft OSI has also fraudulently attempted to censor Techrights several times over the years
- "Warning About IBM's Labor Practices"
- IBM is not growing and its revenue is just "borrowed" from companies it is buying; a lot of this revenue gets spent paying the interest on considerable debt
- [Meme] The Easier Way to Make Money
- With patents...
- The Curse (to Microsoft) of the Faroe Islands
- The common factor there seems to be Apple
- Electronic Frontier Foundation Defends Companies That Attack Free Speech Online (Follow the Money)
- One might joke that today's EFF has basically adopted the same stance as Donald Trump and has a "warm spot" for BRICS propaganda
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 20, 2024
- IRC logs for Friday, December 20, 2024
- Gemini Links 21/12/2024: Death of Mike Case, Slow and Sudden End of the Web
- Links for the day
- Links 20/12/2024: Security Patches, Openwashing by Open Source Initiative, Prison Sentence for Bitcoin Charlatan and Fraud
- Links for the day
- Another Terrible Month for Microsoft in Web Servers
- Consistent downward curve
- LLM Slop Disguised as Journalism: The Latest Threat to the Web
- A lot of it is to do with proprietary GitHub, i.e. Microsoft
- Gemini Links 20/12/2024: Regulation and Implementing Graphics
- Links for the day
- Links 20/12/2024: Windows Breaks Itself, Mass Layoffs Coming to Google Again (Big Wave)
- Links for the day
- Microsoft: "Upgrade" to Vista 11 Today, We'll Brick Your Audio and You Cannot Prevent This
- Windows Update is obligatory, so...
- The Unspeakable National Security Threat: Plasticwares as the New Industrial Standard
- Made to last or made to be as cheap as possible? Meritocracy or industrial rat races are everywhere now.
- Microsoft's All-Time Lows in Macao and Hong Kong
- Microsoft is having a hard time in China, not only for political reasons
- [Meme] "It Was Like a Nuclear Winter"
- This won't happen again, will it?
- If You Know That Hey Hi (AI) is Hype, Then Stop Participating in It
- bogus narrative of "Hey Hi (AI) arms race" and "era/age of Hey Hi" and "Hey Hi Revolution"
- Bangladesh (Population Close to 200 Million) Sees Highest GNU/Linux Adoption Levels Ever
- Microsoft barely has a grip on this country. It used to.
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 19, 2024
- IRC logs for Thursday, December 19, 2024