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
- A Week After a Worldwide Windows Outage Microsoft is 'Bricking' Windows All On Its Own, Cannot Blame Others Anymore
- A look back at a week of lousy press coverage, Microsoft deceit, and lessons to be learned
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- Links 26/07/2024: Hamburgerization of Sushi and GNU/Linux Primer
- Links for the day
- Links 26/07/2024: Tesco Cutbacks and Fake Patent Courts
- Links for the day
- Links 26/07/2024: Grimy Residue of the 'AI' Bubble and Tensions Around Alaska
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 26/07/2024: More Computers and Tilde Hosting
- Links for the day
- Links 26/07/2024: "AI" Hype Debunked and Elon Musk's "X" Already Spreads Political Disinformation
- Links for the day
- "Why you boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with software."
- Ask McDonalds how this "AI" nonsense with IBM worked out for them
- No Olympics
- We really need to focus on real news
- Nobody Holds the GNOME Foundation Accountable (Not Even IRS), It's Governed by Lawyers, Not Geeks, and Headed by a Shaman Crank
- GNOME is a deeply oppressive institutions that eats its own
- [Meme] The 'Modern' Web and 'Linux' Foundation Reinforcing Monopolies and Cementing centralisation
- They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
- 'Boiling the Frog' or How Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is Being Abandoned at Short Notice by Let's Encrypt
- This isn't a lack of foresight but planned obsolescence
- When the LLM Bubble Implodes Completely Microsoft Will be 'Finished'
- Excuses like, "it's not ready yet" or "we'll fix it" won't pass muster
- "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs"
- The lesson of this story is, if you do evil things, bad things will come your way. So don't do evil things.
- When Wikileaks Was Still Primarily a Wiki
- less than 14 years ago the international media based its war journalism on what Wikileaks had published
- The Free Software Foundation Speaks Out Against Microsoft
- the problem is bigger than Microsoft and in the long run - seeing Microsoft's demise - we'll need to emphasise Software Freedom
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 25, 2024
- IRC logs for Thursday, July 25, 2024
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- Links 26/07/2024: E-mail on OpenBSD and Emacs Fun
- Links for the day
- Links 25/07/2024: Talks of Increased Pension Age and Biden Explains Dropping Out
- Links for the day
- Links 25/07/2024: Paul Watson, Kernel Bug, and Taskwarrior
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Microsoft's "Dinobabies" Not Amused
- a slur that comes from Microsoft's friends at IBM
- Flashback: Microsoft Enslaves Black People (Modern Slavery) for Profit, or Even for Losses (Still Sinking in Debt Due to LLMs' Failure)
- "Paid Kenyan Workers Less Than $2 Per Hour"
- From Lion to Lamb: Microsoft Fell From 100% to 13% in Somalia (Lowest Since 2017)
- If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it
- Microsoft Windows Became Rare in Antarctica
- Antarctica's Web stats still near 0% for Windows
- Links 25/07/2024: YouTube's Financial Problem (Even After Mass Layoffs), Journalists Bemoan Bogus YouTube Takedown Demands
- Links for the day
- Gemini Now 70 Capsules Short of 4,000 and Let's Encrypt Sinks Below 100 (Capsules) as Self-Signed Leaps to 91%
- The "gopher with encryption" protocol is getting more widely used and more independent from GAFAM
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 24, 2024
- IRC logs for Wednesday, July 24, 2024
- Techrights Statement on YouTube
- YouTube is a dying platform
- [Video] Julian Assange on the Right to Know
- Publishing facts is spun as "espionage" by the US government and "treason" by the Russian government, to give two notable examples
- Links 25/07/2024: Tesla's 45% Profit Drop, Humble Games Employees All Laid Off
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 25/07/2024: Losing Grip and collapseOS
- Links for the day