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
- Microsoft: Work Weekends Too
- Microsoft literally working its workers to death
- Stallman Has Explained Slop is "Marketing Hype Campaign" and Torvalds Agreed. The Difference is the Bribes.
- So be like Stallman
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- Richard Stallman's Site Still Offline (Third Day), But Richard Stallman is Active Online
- he is busy online despite his site not being accessible so far this week
- PIP Layoffs at Microsoft, Even in India
- Microsoft is trying to hide the true scale of the layoffs
- Layoff Trackers Are a Sham, They're Like US 'Unemployment Data'
- Layoff trackers are similarly misleading as they only measure what companies openly admit and register with WARN notices
- The Peculiar Case of OSNews, Which Experiments With Slopfarming
- It wasn't published in error. It has been there for two months.
- Russian Federation is Removing Windows From Computers
- Windows is going "out of fashion"
- XBox CEO Has No Clue What She is Selling
- Some people believe Microsoft will parcel and offload the whole "gaming" unit to some other companies
- analognowhere.com and xkcd.com Selling Physical Copies of Webcomics
- That's one way to support their work
- PIP/GVSA at Microsoft: Mass Layoffs Disguised as Something Else
- Microsoft is trying to cheapen the workforce because the numbers don't add up
- Microsoft Lunduke Uses Twitter ("X") Because It's Algorithmically Designed to Boost His Worldview/s, He Ignores What "X" Is
- Maybe all those people really deserve one another
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 31, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, August 31, 2026
- Censorship by Threats
- It should be noted that the Web site of Richard Stallman will soon enter its third day of downtime
- In Romania, GNU/Linux Reaches 6%, According to Clownflare
- Tomorrow we'll see the latest data from statCounter (for September)
- Gemini Links 01/09/2026: Denali Park Train Trip, Crafts, and Community-Building in smol.pub
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Workers Doing 80 Hours a Week After Microsoft Culled Their Colleagues
- there are days when they work 17 hours a day (barely any time left to sleep and eat) and work starts at 5AM
- IBM Defrauds Shareholders With Fake News (Bribed Press) About "Quantum"
- That says a lot about the state of "Tech Giants" and also the utterly shameless state of the media
- Record Highs for GNU/Linux, Especially in the United States of America
- the "market share" of GNU/Linux is about 9%, still about a third of what Vista 11 stands at
- PIPocalypse at IBM
- Silent layoffs
- Spending Over a Million Bucks on Lawsuits Abroad When There's a Big Mortgage to Pay in America
- Priorities, priorities...
- Gemini Links 31/08/2026: Announcing ROOPHLOCH 2026, smol.pub Discussion, and LLM Plagiarism Engines Target Geminispace
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman's GNU Turns 43 in 4 Weeks, FSF Growing
- In a few weeks GNU turns 43
- IBM's Cuts Are Worsening Security in GNU/Linux
- IBM is still run by the same idiot who proposed taking over Red Hat
- Links 31/08/2026: Anthropic Sued Again for Copyright Infringement of Massive Scale, 'Tokenmaxxing' Shows Slop is a Worthless Liability
- Links for the day
- Links 31/08/2026: "Teslas Are Still Driving Into Oncoming Freight Trains" and "LLM Moats Quickly Evaporating"
- Links for the day
- Debian Project Discards About 25% of the Votes on LLM Slop, Microsoft Votes in the General Resolution (GR)
- "[t]he rules of the vote saw community members asked to rank each of the eight proposals. Just under 600 people voted, but Debian’s election team rejected many for unspecified reasons, leaving almost 450 valid votes to count."
- Essentiality of Rest and Killing Oneself for Vicious Companies
- Working for Microsoft is foolish
- In the UK, Bing (Microsoft) Down to Lowest Level Since January
- our tax money being passed to Microsoft via MoUs (back door deals with kickbacks)
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 167 Out of 200: The Court of Appeal Might be the Next Step
- Today is our last vacation day
- German Government Sponsors IBM Because of GNU/Linux
- Flatpak is sponsored by, run, and controlled by IBM
- Richard Stallman Speaks to Christine Hall of FOSS Force, stallman.org is Down for Over a Day
- interview does a good job addressing the hype about LLMs too
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 30, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, August 30, 2026
- Gemini Links 31/08/2026: Holidays, Stream of Consciousness, and Posting Online
- Links for the day
- Anniversaries Next Month
- The month should be otherwise quiet and uneventful for us
- Coding is Not Obsolete
- we drown ourselves in chaff to meet "LOC" objectives while ignoring everything else
- Microsoft Layoffs Perpetual But Silent, People Pushed Out Using Pressure or Incentive Schemes
- Earlier this month we named some of the programs
- Links 30/08/2026: Apple Rant and LLM (Slop) Scrapers Target Gemini Protocol and Gopher
- Links for the day
- Salaries Are Counted in Money, Not in Participation in the Employer's Scheme
- articles greatly exaggerating GAFAM salaries
- Walls in Free Software
- mind your own business and move on
- Even Linux Cannot Cope With Slop
- Bots on the Web are truly obnoxious
- What a Summer!
- Tomorrow is the last day of this month
- Links 30/08/2026: Soldiers in Niger Attack Presidential Palace and Airport, Nepali City Struggles to Handle the Many Dead Bodies
- Links for the day
- Clownflare Sees GNU/Linux Rising to 11% This Past Week
- Is it the year of "Linux in China"?
- Links 30/08/2026: Russian Strike on a Ukrainian Warehouse and Rhetoric Escalations
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/08/2026: Photography, Paper Books, Linux Kernel and the Debian Projects Permitting Slop Plagiarism
- Links for the day
- Imagine a World Where Nobody Fights for Software (and Computing) Freedom
- The community keeps fighting back, so some of these ambitions are delayed or watered down
- FSF Has Grown (More Staff) After a Year of Financial Growth
- On October 4 the FSF turns 41
- GNU/Linux Has Become More Mainstream in the United Kingdom
- It's a long weekend here and we guess some people dabble in GNU/Linux migrations, at least at home
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 166 Out of 200: Garrett Wasn't Found Innocent Per Se, the Court Wanted More Evidence of Who Was Behind Particular Accounts Using Tor
- It's complicated
- Criminals Don't Obey Laws, California Does Not Enhance Online Safety
- It has been a while since we last mentioned so-called 'age-verification' laws
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 29, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, August 29, 2026