Free/Open Source Software News: More Advocacy, Liberation, and Free Software on the Web
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-06 13:37:30 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-06 13:37:30 UTC
Advocacy
The APC Chris Nicol FLOSS Prize recognises initiatives that are making it easy for people to start using free/libre and open source software (FLOSS). The prize will be awarded to a person or group doing extraordinary work to make FLOSS accessible to ordinary computer users.
Imagine a world with fewer queues in banking and retail, and more self-service options. Imagine no longer relying on one cubical or terminal for service. Sounds unreal? This world is now a possibility in South Africa thanks to the partnership between LSD and Cashware.
Essentially, an open-source software or OSS is a kind of computer software which has its source code made available and licensed by virtue of such a license agreement which authorizes the copyright holder to study, modify and distribute the software to anyone, without any further charges and for any purpose whatsoever.
Open-sourcing
As part of the ROS team the engineers at Willow Garage wanted a low price point entry available for new programmers. The TurtleBot's SDK contains a collection of programs that range from basic to advanced. Instructions show how to set up the bot, operate with a keyboard, operate with a joystick, and fully utilize the Kinect camera data. There's also a cleverly titled section about maintenance called TurtleBot Care and Feeding.
Cisco may be a multi-billion entity that was built around a proprietary operating system, but if recent moves are any indication, a wave of open interoperability has been steadily reshaping how Cisco is bringing next-generation IT infrastructure to market.
A few months ago we wrote about Linksys Reviving The WRT54G Router In 802.11AC Form. Belkin, which owns Linksys, has begun releasing code for this new router -- the WRT1900AC -- but with this early code is still some glaring problems.
Misc.
XBMC, an open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media that is available for multiple platforms, has just reached version 13.0 Beta 3 and is now available for testing.
Events
Apache and Nginx
Two of the world's most widely deployed web servers have both recently been updated to fix security vulnerabilities.
With so many Apache Hadoop distributions on the market, what sets them apart? MapR is hoping that bringing feature-rich open source searching to its Big Data platform via integration with Elasticsearch will help draw users by making Big Data analytics and business intelligence faster and more comprehensive.
Mozilla
Mozilla and the Rust community are pleased to announce version 0.10 of the Rust compiler and tools. Rust is a systems programming language with a focus on safety, performance and concurrency.
If you've ever done any web development work, you are probably intimately familiar with the fact that what you build on the web may show up fine in one browser, yet be completely broken in another. It used to be that this problem simply meant testing sites and pages across popular desktop browsers, but in the age of mobile technology, you now have to test your creations across mobile devices, too.
While Mozilla has mostly been in the headlines this week for news related to contributions made by its new CEO Brendan Eich, another piece of meaningful news regarding the company is largely being ignored: Google Chrome has moved past Firefox to take second place in desktop browser market share, according to web traffic stats from Net Applications. In March, Chrome grabbed 17.5 percent of desktop brower traffic, while Firefox sat in third place with 17.2 percent. This is a first for Chrome, according to Net Applications' data, and is possibly driven by Google's extensive advertising for Chrome and Mozilla's new focus on Firefox OS and mobile technology.
The latest Mozilla Firefox nightly builds have begun enabling the generational garbage collector to better compete with Google's Chrome on performance grounds.
In an exciting collaboration with Mozilla and Google, Intel is bringing SIMD to JavaScript. This makes it possible to develop new classes of compute-intensive applications such as games and media processing—all in JavaScript—without the need to rely on any native plugins or non-portable native code. SIMD.JS can run anywhere JavaScript runs. It will, however, run a lot faster and more power efficiently on the platforms that support SIMD. This includes both the client platforms (browsers and hybrid mobile HTML5 apps) as well as servers that run JavaScript, for example through the Node.js V8 engine.
Thimble is actually a subset of Mozilla’s Webmaker project, which is aimed at teaching all kinds of web literacy and development skills.
Many, many people have noticed that if we had a way to reliably record program execution and replay it later, with the ability to debug the replay, we could largely tame the nondeterminism problem. This would also allow us to deliberately introduce nondeterminism so tests can explore more of the possible execution space, without impacting debuggability. Many record and replay systems have been built in pursuit of this vision. (I built one myself.) For various reasons these systems have not seen wide adoption. So, a few years ago we at Mozilla started a project to create a new record-and-replay tool that would overcome the obstacles blocking adoption. We call this tool rr.
We support the Mozilla community and the vital work they've done—and must keep doing—for the open Internet. EFF has been following the discussions around the choice of Brendan Eich as Mozilla’s CEO, including the announcement that he is stepping down.
As partners to Mozilla in campaigns that have included the fight against SOPA/PIPA, the StopWatching.US Coalition against mass surveillance, the effort to Encrypt the Web, the battle to prevent non-consensual online tracking, and ongoing work to make Firefox a more secure browser, we appreciate the frank and honest discussion that the community has undergone over this issue and respect the openness of the process. In that respect, as in many others, the difference between a closed and an open community is profound.
McAvoy clearly appreciates his ability to speak his mind without fear of retribution. But he also demands the termination of employment of a person that he disagrees with.
That sounds like hypocrisy, and intolerance, to me.
The worst of what I’m seeing is this – people who have steadfastly supported gay rights (and minority rights in general) but don’t like seeing how Eich is being treated are being called bigots and worse by their colleagues.
Chrome(ium)
Google’s Chrome Remote Desktop app beta is released for invite-only. Chrome Remote Desktop allows you to set up your computer for secure remote access. This includes setting up your computer so that you can access it later from another machine; or you can also use the app to let a friend remotely access your computer temporarily, perfect for times when you need help solving a computer problem.
Last April we introduced Blink as the new rendering engine for Chromium. Since then, the project has grown to include over 200 active contributors, and code complexity has been reduced significantly. We’ve also made encouraging progress on our top priority for 2014: mobile web performance.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- What's Very Vexing to GAFAM, EPO and Others Is That It's Incredibly Hard to Censor Us (and Nobody Ever Successfully Did That Before)
- resist, do not capitulate
- Receiving SLAPPs and Collecting Them Like Trophies (the SLAPPs Always Fail)
- People who file lawsuits bring even more attention to themselves (or to embarrassing statements about them)
- Year of GNU/Linux on the Laptop?
- It's not happening only in Lenovo
- What People Must Understand About the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
- some facts about the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
- More Copyright Lawsuits Against LLM Slop Providers and Suppliers of LLM Slopfarms Would Benefit Society
- It's not just bad for the Web and for society; it's also legally dangerous
- In defence of JD Vance, death of Pope Francis
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Three Years in Prison for Disney Employee’s ‘Menu Hacking’: The Economic Fallout of Digital Menus
- Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
-
- Microsoft Isn't on the Map in USSR
- To them, it's either Google or Yandex
- In Central America Windows Became a Small Force
- These are countries where Windows used to have well over 95% of the "market"
- Site May be Even Faster Now
- It basically takes less than a tenth of a second to serve the page
- Many of the Scandals Are Interconnected (Overlapping People and Corporations)
- We're only getting started
- Links 26/04/2025: General Assassinated in the Town of Balashikha, US Promoting Seafloor Mining
- Links for the day
- Links 26/04/2025: Facebook Layoffs Again, Remembering What's Real, and Say No to Mass Surveillance
- Links for the day
- Links 26/04/2025: NOAA Budget Cuts and "Dog Days Ahead"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, April 25, 2025
- Links 25/04/2025: Slop Fatigue and Patent Judges Flocking to Fake, Unconstitutional and Illegal Kangaroo Court (UPC, Captured 'Justice')
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Night Manager and Devuan in Hosting
- Links for the day
- Approaching 10,000 Articles/Pages Since Going Static
- Trying to silence or derail the site was always a dumb strategy
- Windows Falls to New Lows in Nicaragua, Now Below a Quarter (It Used to be Almost 100%)
- Another all-time low for Windows
- Microsoft is Shedding Off Loads of Staff and That Can be Dangerous Too
- Working for Microsoft is a choice; nobody forces you to do it
- Richard Stallman and the Unix Philosophy
- When asked about systemd people must remember that RMS speaks as an active Board member of the FSF and also the founder of the FSF
- The Cost (to Linux) of LLM Slop
- Slop 'artists' like Fagioli are far from harmless
- Links 25/04/2025: Ubisoft Spyware, Hegseth Fails at Tech on Every Level
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 25/04/2025: Food Forest Update and Facebook Destroying the Net
- Links for the day
- Get Rid of Back Doors, Don't Obsess Over Bounties and Other Corporate PR Stunts (or Needless Reboot Rituals)
- Security as a term has mostly lost its meaning due to repeated misuse for many years
- Serial Sloppers Are Killing the Web (They Probably Don't Care, Either)
- Slop is a disease on the Web
- Streaming Apps Are “Investor Fraud” That Kills the Planet
- Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
- Things Get Increasingly Nasty at Microsoft Ahead of the Fake Results and May's Mass Layoffs Wave
- They try to get people to 'resign' so that they won't count as layoffs and the company's 'wellbeing' will seem better
- IBM's Debt Ballooned by 8.5 Billion Dollars in Just 3 Months!
- Hallmark of a company in a state of disarray, trying to spend its way out of trouble
- Big Trouble in GNOME
- even GNOME people admit the CoC went wrong
- Slopping the Trough: Disney Plus Loses Billions and the Decline of Physical Media in America
- Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 24, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, April 24, 2025
- Links 24/04/2025: GAFAM Problems and No Peace (or Ceasefire) in Sight
- Links for the day
- Slopfarms on the Web Almost Always Generate Anti-Linux FUD When They Produce "Linux" Output
- Welcome to the dying Web
- Richard Stallman's Oxford Talk Has Just Ended, Here Are Some Photos
- he might hop over to another European country
- Gemini Links 24/04/2025: Birthday and Good Work of Academia in Esotericism
- Links for the day
- Links 24/04/2025: EU fines Apple and Facebook, Another Microsoft GitHub Security Blunder
- Links for the day
- New Article Explains How the GPL Came About and WordPress Having Copyleft Obligations
- Having been involved in the WordPress development community since almost the beginning, I know why it chose the GPL and how it restricts abuse by Automattic
- IBM Gained Almost 6 Billion Dollars in "Goodwill" Value in Just 3 Months, According to IBM
- Congrats to the management!
- In Belarus, Yandex is Now Measured as 50 Times More 'Popular' (by Usage) Than Microsoft
- Yandex continues to gain, whereas Bing cannot even register at 1%. Last month it was registered or measured at a measly 0.65%.
- IBM Cannot Lie to Shareholders Anymore
- "I would not be surprised if we see a layoff every quarter this year."
- Dr Richard Stallman (RMS) Gives Talk in Oxford University in 4 Hours
- If you live nearby, go there (it's free as in gratis)
- Using a Law Firm's Licence to Exercise Politics Through Frivolous SLAPPs and Nastygrams (to Silence People, Remove Pages, Demand Fake or Forced 'Apologies')
- Things must be getting really bad when lawyers act for raving antisemites
- We're Working to Make Full-Site Search Available
- This site has over 1,000 'wiki' pages, many thousands of documents, several thousands of videos, and about 50,000 blog posts or articles. We need to make them easier to find/navigate.
- Links 24/04/2025: IBM Loses Many Contracts, Intel to Lay Off Over 20% (Not Counting Those Who Leave 'Voluntarily')
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman Can Explain to Oxford Artificial Intelligence Society Why LLM Slop is Not Artificial Intelligence and Why It Hurts Society
- another 'crop' of LLM slop that damages GNU/Linux and facts
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 23, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, April 23, 2025