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
- "My Hands Are Shaking While Writing" About IBM's Mass Layoffs at Red Hat (Bluewashing)
- Shame, shame, shame on the corporate media for not covering Red Hat's layoffs this year
- Taking a Look at the Last Articles of Bob Cringely at Forbes, They Were All About IBM and Its Collapse
- It's all about IBM
- What is "Computer Science"? It is What Broligarchs Reject.
- Nowadays some people call themselves informal terms or made-up titles (with terms like "AI" or "big data" or "data" tossed into the mix)
- Brigading Against Women - Part XXVII - Americans and Public Executions
- "People who work for Facebook / Xitter / Bytedance's Tiktok / Microsoft / Oracle / IBM / Apple / Uber / Lyft / Wolt / DoorDash / AirBnB / Bolt / and so on are doing some world-class projection when they have the audacity to call others Bad People(tm)"
- Gemini Links 12/10/2026: Westminster Quarters, Civilization, Luddites, and More
- Links for the day
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- Links 12/10/2026: Shopify (Slop Booster) Has Security Issues, "Russia’s Yandex Says Data Center in Vladimir Shut Down After Drone Attack"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Windows Causes Problems (and Delays) to LibreOffice and The Document Foundation
- Nothing would please Microsoft more than Windows curtailing the development of LibreOffice and adoption of ODF
- So Far This Year Microsoft Windows Lost a Lot of Ground in China, GNU/Linux Gaining at Its Expense
- GNU/Linux will soon exceed 10%
- Lessons of Margaret Hamilton (Software Engineer)
- Stop abetting men who attack women in the sciences
- RIP, Bob Cringely
- He was too young to leave us, his articles were still brilliant and his mind as lucid as ever
- Linus Torvalds Has a Conflict of Interest Regarding Slop
- Linus Torvalds is paid by the slop pushers
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 11, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, October 11, 2026
- Africa Sees GNU/Linux Exceeding 5% "Market Share"
- It wasn't always like this. It used to be measured at 1 or 2 percent.
- Slop-ware Is Not Newsworthy
- LLMs are exceptionally loquacious and create large code bases
- Links 11/10/2026: US Sides With Vladimir Putin, Convicted Felon Dubbed "Agent of a Foreign Power"
- Links for the day
- IRC Tracker Back in Order, Number of Known IRC Networks Continues to Increase
- We don't know if our article helped trigger a resolution
- Links 11/10/2026: "Execution TV" (Iran Aped by US) and ‘Digital Oblivion’ Caused by Slop Frenzy Online
- Links for the day
- Voice for the Impoverished
- the country's leaders attack the country's own press
- Gemini Links 11/10/2026: Adults Dressing Up as Animals, 44th Birthday, and More
- Links for the day
- Running a Country's Economy by Borrowing Over $400,000,000,000 Per Month
- This is the hallmark of an economy in irreversible decline
- Brigading Against Women - Part XXVI - Trying to Deplatform Critics of Microsoft's Restricted Boot
- Like James Bottomley, Matthew Garrett served Microsoft's agenda while employed and salaried by other companies
- Anderon Is Not a Real Company, It's an IBM Bailout Dressed Up or Wrapped Up In Buzzwords
- It certainly does seem like they receive money from taxpayers for nothing, or for IBM to do mass layoffs/closure at Albany under the guise of "making a new spinoff"...
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 10, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, October 10, 2026
- Gemini Links 10/10/2026: Radio Romania International, Avoiding GAFAM, Open Camera, and Another Palm
- Links for the day
- The 2026 Slop Prediction (Slopfarms Perishing)
- Morality in the "digital world" has deteriorated profoundly
- netsplit.de (Survey of IRC Networks and History) Only Partly Functional This Month
- Get well soon, netsplit.de
- Microsoft Cuts
- GAFAM enshittification
- NVIDIA Acts Like It Cannot Pay Salaries (Too Many Obligations, Sales in Circular Financing, or Basically Accounting Fraud)
- Masters of acting as clients of themselves
- Paying for elections, Reform UK illegal confession in High Court
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Contemptuous Law Firm Accusing Others of Contempt of Court
- Keeping a running tally can help
- Links 10/10/2026: Let's Encrypt Making Changes (Problem for Small Sites/Operations), Quartz is Officially a Slopfarm (Busted)
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Abuses PERM and Lays Off Workers in India
- The US government has made it easier for Microsoft to hide the mass layoffs
- The GAFAM Elections in the United States
- If the election is run by platforms that have back doors "baked-in" and if the communications are overseen by GAFAM, you would not have to be a "nutty MAGAt" to dispute the outcome
- More GAFAM Layoffs (Late on Friday Night)
- They say they are worth trillions, but they don't even make money
- Male-Dominated EPO Fails to Have "Concrete Measures to Support Female Staff"
- Being a female at the EPO is exceptionally hard
- Brigading Against Women - Part XXV - No Anonymity for People Who Did Illegal Things
- "Empathy is the sunlight to the vampire of culture."
- Production Freeze at the European Patent Office (Opposing Monarchy, Institutional Maladministration and Corruption)
- Eight reasons to participate
- Links 10/10/2026: Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' Silencing Critics, "Data Centres are the New Front Line in the Russia-Ukraine War"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 09, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, October 09, 2026
- Gemini Links 10/10/2026: Optimism, Stargazing, "Life Without Smartphone", and Fairphone 4
- Links for the day