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
- Links 16/05/2026: Climate Issues, Free Speech, and Monopolies/Monopsonies
- Links for the day
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- The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part XXV - Not Bringing Intelligence to the EPO, Not 'Artificial Intelligence' Either (But Intelligence-Eroding Drugs)
- The EPO was meant to be about science and law. In practice, however, it's about breaking the law and being stoned.
- The Cyber Show on Why Coding is Important and Slop Cannot Change or Replace That
- Hand-crafting one's site has plenty of advantages
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 16, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, May 16, 2026
- Gemini Links 17/05/2026: Music Theory, Reticulum Git Repos, and Releasing Kiln
- Links for the day
- Links 16/05/2026: Cuba Plunges Into Darkness (Energy Wasted by Nonsense), Googlebooks as Slop Nonsense (Energy Waste and Time Wasted)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/05/2026: Retreat and Devuan Manuals
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 78 Out of 200: Slandering Me for Saying the Truth About Graveley and Garrett's Abuse of Processes, Stacking Dockets
- These are the sorts of things British taxpayers ought to talk about
- "AI" Became a New Name or Placeholder for Debt
- Because they will only ever lose money for this thing with "tokens" or "potential"
- "Microsoft Goodwill and Intangible Assets" Down Two Years in a Row, According to Microsoft
- Microsoft cannot sell these, so what is their real relevance?
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 15, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, May 15, 2026
- IBM: Shares Down 30%, Mass Layoffs, IBM Says "Goodwill" Grew by 10% to Over a Third of the Company's Total "Worth"
- According to IBM
- Microsoft LinkedIn Layoffs "Very Likely Higher" Than 1,000 People
- Microsoft is bleeding
- The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part XXIV - Luis Berenguer Giménez at the EPO (European Patent Office) Became the Punchline of EPO Staff
- "the fact that Luis was caught with cocaine causes laughter. The use of cocaine in itself is not the real shocking bit."
- IBM Keeps Culling Essential Linux, Fedora, GNOME, and GTK Staff
- Over a month ago IBM laid off over 400 Red Hat engineers
- Cisco Cuts Nearly 4,000 Jobs Because of Debt, Nothing to Do With Slop
- The media keeps talking about revenue, not profits
- Gemini Links 15/05/2026: UDP Game Forwarding Over SSH, Avoiding LLMs, and Alhena 5.5.9
- Links for the day
- Links 15/05/2026: Electric Company Shuns Entire Town to Prioritise Only Data Centres, Saudi Arabia and U.A.E. Carried Out Secret Attacks in Iran
- Links for the day
- LLM Slop is Not Reliable, Constitutes No Process of 'Thinking'; There's No Thought Process at All, No Grasp or Understanding, Let Alone Context
- Lies have become the "business model" [...] More people ought to talk about it and explain to other people what LLMs really are
- Not a Security Expert If You Cannot Manage to Keep Online a Simple Two-User Mastodon Instance Somebody Else Built
- From uptime of ~99% to maybe 80%
- Microsoft Has All the Symptoms of a Dying Company (Mass Layoffs of the People Who Built the Company)
- the company's debt is going through the ceiling
- Focus is Important, Focus is Everything
- We are still running 6 multi-part series in tandem
- For Effective 'Finlandisation' (Not Digital Sovereignty) to Be Replaced by Autonomy Finland Needs to Think Like GNU (Software Freedom), Not Linux (Openwashing Source, Plus LLM Slop and Killswitches)
- What is 'Finlandisation'?
- Guest Post on False Marketing and PR Blitzes by Anthropic
- A lot of people my age are just tired of the nonsense
- Links 15/05/2026: UK antitrust regulator is officially investigating Microsoft Office, Anthropic’s Fraudulent Lies About Mythoslop Don't Withstand Scrutiny
- Links for the day
- IBM's Kyndryl in Trouble: Mass Layoffs, Payroll Problems, Buybacks (in Company Whose Debt is Almost Twice Its Total Value), and Soon $9 Per Share (Down Over 80%)
- Kyndryl is done. Stick a fork in it.
- ICYMI: GNU/Linux Did Not Start in Finland
- If we're honest/true to ourselves, we need to recognise history for what it is, not what some corporations (like GAFAM) want it to be
- IBM is Googlebombing the Media With Fake Numbers to Promote Fake Technology
- a classic example of why much of today's media cannot be trusted (anymore)
- Up to 10,000 Microsoft Layoffs in a Couple of Months
- Many ways to skin a cat
- Truth Hurts. People Hurt by Truth Aren't Entitled to Compensation.
- Family members aren't exempt
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 77 Out of 200: They Never Knew How to Handle Women (Except to Attack Them)
- The case against us was really quite simple
- Update on Sirius Open Source in 2026 (When Your Former Employer Commits Crimes and Nobody is Held Accountable)
- I did not envision myself spending several years (even 4 years after leaving that company) challenging the system for tolerating and even covering up corruption
- Codecs and Software Patents - Part VII - Entering Phase II, the Battle Against Companies That Normalise Taxed (by Patents on Mathematics) Codecs
- In the next few part we'll deal with the impact on Free software, including the GNU Project
- The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part XXIII - Cocaine Use at the EPO's Top-Level Management "Adds Up" and Worsens Things "Over Time"
- "cocaine use knocks the IQ down permanently a tiny bit with each use. Over time that adds up."
- Gemini Links 15/05/2026: Slop Fatigue and Banning LLM Use
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 14, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, May 14, 2026