11.08.13
Posted in GNU/Linux at 1:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The demise of the grassroots nature of GNU/Linux
Summary: The founder of SolusOS may turn from rags to riches owing to GNU/Linux skills that he acquired through development, but there is more to the story and a much broader perspective
THE LESSON of history is that once a movement becomes popular enough it will get abducted by opportunists and businesses. Ask former hippies about it. We see that in the Free software movement, which was officially abducted when it get branched/renamed “Open Source”. The previous post gives away the fact that I have a full-time job (FOSS-oriented), which limits my ability to run this Web site. Likewise, the person behind SolusOS is going to call SolusOS off [1], making it all end despite great success [2]. As Christine Hall reveals, there is a reason for this premature death of SolusOS [3]. The developer, Ikey Doherty, just couldn’t afford to develop it anymore. Instead, taking into account what developers can earn in the software market these days [3] (especially with GNU/Linux skills [4]), Doherty decided to move on, just like several other distro developers and even authors of GNU/Linux sites. It seems like yet more authors have quit writing about Free software this year, including The H staff, Groklaw, and Susan Linton, the founder of Tux Machines. Are Michael Larabel, Sean Kerner and a few others the last men (or women) standing? Have corporations taken over the development and news regarding GNU/Linux? Are the Linux Foundation staff members (PR) the principal corporations-funded messengers (no poor people invited [6]) now that the operating system outgrew its grassroots nature? First they marginalise Richard Stallman and the FSF and now we are left with just one major desktop distribution that is spying on users in exchange for money from the CIA’s close partner, Amazon. When Richard Stallman got pushed out from the movement he had created it was warped into a more ‘business-friendly’ strand or trend. Likewise, when Torvalds lost his independence in controlling Linux (his wage is now collectively paid by TPM and DRM supporters) all of us lost, except the corporations. Think about it. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
That distros come and go is not a problem for most of us, because there are other distros to which we can migrate. No one weeps that startup businesses fail at a very high rate for similar reasons: too little capital, manpower, niche product, minimal advertising etc. That’s just the way things are. It’s healthy that people make the attempt. It’s a learning experience for them and the world will benefit from better ideas.
-
-
Ikey has struggled for the past year or so…even to the point of putting food on the table. But even through his prolonged unemployment, Ikey worked steadily on SolusOS. Those of us who could donated money via his PayPal account so he could concentrate on his work.
Where I come into play within SolusOS isn’t news. Ikey approached me over a year ago and asked if I would like to help create a customized version of SolusOS for the Reglue project. In that our former Ubuntu LTS was speeding toward end-of-life, I jumped at the chance. I was a SolusOS user already so it was a great offer. Ikey and I became friends.
So what happened? What transpired between October 20th and October 24th that would make Ikey Doherty just slam the door and walk away?
If I were to guess, it would probably be a combination of a couple of things:
Ikey had recently landed a fantastic job. While it is public record for those who want to look, in the last conversation I had with Ikey he asked me not to make a big deal out of it.
So I won’t.
Suffice it to say that it’s probably Ikey’s dream job. I believe the demands of that position, along with the stress and constant shifting of SolusOS collaborators, finally took its toll. I believe that the combined pressure of these things rolled over him like a tsunami.
-
-
linux jobsLinuxCareers.com announced today a new job portal for Linux professionals effective on January 14th, 2014. Employers of Linux talent are urged to join now in order to receive pre-launch benefits. For limited time only employers can be rewarded with free 10 job postings a month for the first half of 2014. To express your interest go to linuxcareers.com and fill up the simple registration form.
-
Linux Australia, which runs the conference through various organisers in different parts of Australia, and occasionally New Zealand, is mum when asked what it intends to do to help pensioners and the unemployed attend the conference.
Its president, Joshua Hesketh, has not responded to a request for comment on this issue, which was raised on the Linux Australia mailing lists on October 16. Doubtless, Hesketh has a great many important things to attend to.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Site News at 12:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The previous Tux Machines server
Summary: Techrights turns 7, a milestone is reached again, and Tux Machines is acquired to help advance GNU/Linux
AS pointed out by some tech/FOSS sites, we are closing the deal to buy Tux Machines. The payment has been made and within days we should be running Tux Machines, advancing GNU/Linux by advocacy.
Days ago we also quietly crossed a milestone by posting our 17,000th blog post. That’s about 2480 posts per year! We have slowed down in recent years because readers’ help is needed. Yesterday this site officially turned 7 (depending on what data is considered most significant, boycottnovell.com’s creation date is 2006-11-07 14:21:00) and if you appreciate what we do here, please consider making a contribution. The sum of contributions to this site (over the course of 7 years) is just slightly above $100, so I must depend on another full-time job. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Credit: Financial Times
Summary: So-called ‘analysts’, including some from Goldman Sachs, are serving Microsoft’s FUD campaign by claiming that Microsoft makes billions of dollars from Android (without any proof)
IN ORDER TO scare companies and keep them away from Linux, Microsoft needs them to believe that Linux is somehow expensive, with the same going for Android and GNU. For a number of years now we have seen purely speculative reports which try to quantify costs that we know nothing about because Microsoft’s racketeering operation makes secrecy part of the protection racket. This is a pattern of FUD which we are very familiar with, having seen it in the Novell era as well.
Right now we have yet another so-called ‘genius’ trying to tell us that he has an exclusive insight into the income of the racketeering operation. This serves nobody but the racketeering operation and it’s not the first time that we see so-called ‘analysts’ doing this, sometimes even analysts close to Microsoft, including Goldman Sachs. It’s always them, like marketers in suits. We urge people to ignore those so-called ‘geniuses’, who just like secret services [1] want us to sometimes believe that they have powerful and valuable inside knowledge, even when they’re not inside-trading, which is against the law. According to Business ‘Insider’, “Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company.”
What are his sources? Did Microsoft’s racketeering operation tell him to write that? And is so, can it be believed? The Microsoft which was caught engaging in financial fraud after an employee had blown the whistle? It would be the perfect FUD. Only speculations are still being passed as ‘fact’ by some shallow sites that try to make Android look risky. We can recall many such examples, spanning at least 3 years (an early analyst’s speculation was the cost of Android to HTC after a patent deal with Microsoft). Since Microsoft-hired lobbyists like Florian Müller play a significant role in relaying those numbers, we can safely suspect that there is agenda at hand. Previously, when he spread some FUD about payments from HTC to Apple, he was proven wrong by the head of HTC. Patent deals are as much about generating FUD as they are about generating income (if any). Microsoft, along with Apple, is generating Android FUD and suing Android by proxy now. That’s a different thing.
Watch the type of stuff Apple is patenting right now:
Apple granted patent for location-based camera phone disabling
Last week I was frustrated in my attempt to take a screen grab of a frame from the cartoon Gravity Falls, which I was playing in iTunes on my Mac. The screen grab image showed the player window as gray-and-white checkerboard. Next, I downloaded a 3rd party screen grab application, and it gave me the same result. I ended up taking a photo of the iMac’s display with my camera. (The photo is in this post — it’s the one with the cartoony occult symbols). Thanks to Apple’s bullshit deal with the studios, the image has crappy video artifacts in it.
This type of patents from Apple were mentioned here before. Apple will help crush protests and also impede legal sharing of data. It is worse than DRM.
Speaking of DRM, Microsoft’s allies at Netflix (deep links between those two companies) are going aggressive with patents, seeking a ban (through the ITC) of something which is not even a physical product. “A trade commission investigated Netflix, although it imports nothing,” Joe Mullin correctly pointed out. Perhaps we’ll return to covering patents like we used to (not enough time/resources), but this is just another example of software patents doing their damage. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what’s going on in ways that we don’t.
It doesn’t matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux at 11:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Mageia, OpenMandriva, PCLinuxOS and others successfully succeed the success of Mandriva GNU/Linux
A LOT OF people forgot about Mandriva. Some key staff from Mandriva was hired by Red Hat and Google, the company’s ownership was moved to Russia, and some of the project’s successors took a very corporate-centric role, such as ROSA.
I first used Mandriva some time in 2002 and I later used it permanently in 2008 and 2009. It was one of the best distributions at that time and it received wonderful reviews. Many people these days tend to ignore Mandriva or simply dismiss it as inferior to Ubuntu and even Fedora. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Some might even think that it’s no longer possible to get one’s hands on Mandriva, even though several derivatives exist which are totally free with no strings attached. The most famous among those is probably Mageia, which gets favourable reviews [1], and it has just added an advisories Web site [2]. Mandriva itself has OpenMandriva [3], but due to its short life so far it is hard to say how much one can rely on it. The longest-running branch of Mandriva is actually PCLinuxOS, which is very much alive and well [4,5].
If you look for a distribution which is practical to use and is not necessarily free-respecting as judged by the FSF, give one of the Mandriva derivatives a try. Mandriva is still in the game. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
Mageia 3 has been out for a while, and I’ve finally had time to do a review. Mageia is a fork of the Mandriva distribution, and offers quite a bit to desktop Linux users. It comes with a great selection of preinstalled software, and it is available in 32-bit or 64-bit versions on DVD (3.96 GB). You also have the option of getting it on CD (700 MB).
-
The advisories published before June 2013 are not available on this website, but are still available on the wiki.
-
According to this post, OpenMandriva Lx Beta 1 is now available for downloads.
-
Now, armed with both Desura and Steam, this laptop with PCLinuxOS has turned itself into a nice source of entertainment.
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
11.07.13
Posted in Microsoft at 7:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Big Brother gets even more aggressive amid the departure of Snooper in Chief
Summary: The Mafia of Keith B. Alexander (outgoing NSA head) is facing more public shaming as surveillance grows and the public pushes back
THE NSA, the criminal and murderous organisation which we are supposed to think of as “against terrorism” when it’s actually about espionage, finance, and imperial militarism, can’t get a break. It’s probably one of the most appalling monsters to have silently developed behind closed doors for several decades, enjoying journalists’ inability to cover the simple facts (newspapers would not publish these). Here are some of the latest tidbits which people ought to be aware of.
Pro-privacy groups like Big Brother Watch warn us that even the elderly may soon be under constant (24/7) surveillance at home ‘for their own protection’ [1], showing that there’s no limit to how far Big Brother goes [2]. Anyone up for Xbox One/Kinect now? In a sense, Facebook already acts like in-house surveillance (photos, videos, geo-tagging, face recognition, inter-person connections), but apparently that’s not enough. If we don’t submit to the equivalent of full rectal examination, the “terrorists” will win!!!
Microsoft will soon be making it possible only for the NSA et al. to record people’s video and audio chats in Skype (inside their homes) [3], showing again what type of monster Skype has become since it left Europe (through a rather worried Luxembourg). The only thing worse than Skype surveillance in one’s own home would be a wireless-accessible chip implant in every person, or a microphone in every ear, not just every phone (which has back doors for authorities to eavesdrop through).
In a sort of ironic turn of events, Snowden now turns his attention to Germany (made infamous for what the Nazis did) [4,5], perhaps hoping — like Tor developer and Wikileaks activist Jacob Appelbaum — that Germany would grant him asylum after his one-year asylum in Russia expires. Despite the fact that Snowden’s actions have helped the US by reforming unconstitutional laws and practices [6], the US still treats him like a criminal and abuses anyone who ‘dares’ to respect his freedom of speech. Here in Techrights we generally regret to see that the US has become similar to the USSR when it comes to its attitude towards journalism. Techrights will soon move off WordPress because of back doors which are now being acknowledged elsewhere [7] and it will continue to cover matters of privacy more than ever before. If the US government wants privacy crushed, then we should fight with a strong passion for privacy and against those who oppose it. It turns out that former British colonies, like Britain itself, are still going along with the NSA/USA. In New Zealand, for example, people in power are legalising what they did (for Hollywood/NSA/USA) which was illegal [8]. They simply show their total disregard for the law and not just for human dignity. Here in the UK, the government is attacking the messenger (Greenwald or Snowden) by associating him with paedophilia [9]. Old tactics. As for Lavabit’s Dark Mail, which seeks support from the public [10], Ars Technica helps the NSA by attacking the messenger (Ladar Levison) [11]. This wouldn’t be the first time Ars Technica does this. It also attacked Snowden by digging up irrelevant dirt about him from the past; completely off-topic ad hominem that was (we would rather not link to that). And watch the hypocrites from Google berating the NSA [12]. Well, nobody forces them to work with Google, just as nobody is born a Microsoft employee. If they are against the NSA, then they can quit their job and stop helping the NSA. All of us are consciously obliged to weaken those who abuse power or help those who abuse power.
One thing is clear now. The NSA views the population as the enemy. We, in turn, must view the NSA as the enemy. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has announced plans to install hidden cameras and ‘mystery shoppers’ in care homes in a bid to increase the regulations of social care. Care homes and social care premises are home for some of society’s most vulnerable people. To subject them to covert surveillance where there is not reasonable cause for suspicion would be both an attack on their privacy and dignity.
-
Yesterday you said that you would be happy to listen to ideas to improve the oversight and operation of safeguards concerning our intelligence agencies.
-
Skype has confirmed it’s shutting down all third-party access to its desktop API at the end of the year
-
-
But Snowden tells Der Spiegel he’s justified due to the call for reform he sparked.
-
A Washington Post article reveals that the National Security Agency has been siphoning off data from the links between Yahoo and Google data centers, which include the fiber optic connections between company servers at various points around the world. While the user may have an encrypted connection to the website, the internal data flows were not encrypted and allowed the NSA to obtain millions of records each month, including both metadata and content like audio, video and text. This is not part of the PRISM collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act or the business records program under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, but a separate program called MUSCULAR under what appears to be Executive Order 12333 (“12333″).1
-
The latest and greatest version of WordPress has been released, a major point upgrade, and within days after that a security/bugfix followed, bringing the version number up to 3.7.1. The most interesting thing with this release is that it autoupdates everything without requiring any prompting from the site administrator. If there’s a new version of a plugin available, WordPress updates it silently in the background. Ditto if a new minor or security release of WordPress itself is released.
[...]
In our opinion, this is not good as it takes control away from the user, especially users with limited technical skills. We’d have no problem whatsoever with this feature if it could easily be disabled through the interface. Unfortunately, the folks at WordPress don’t want to trust their users with this ability.
-
The New Zealand parliament on Tuesday narrowly approved a new series of measures designed to provide their version of the National Security Agency greater access to the country’s telecommunications companies’ data.
-
-
-
Ladar Levison stood up for users’ privacy—but perhaps a little too late.
-
If Snowden revelations are ‘assisting’ companies like Google and countries like Germany, should not these companies and countries defend Snowden?
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux at 7:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) helps show us just how much of an impact GNU has had not just on the development community but also society as a whole
If it weren’t for GCC, Linux would need proprietary compilers to be executable. Always remember that when the Linux Foundation downplays GNU. GCC 4.9 is just months away [1], challenged only by projects like LLVM (the BSD-leaning camp). It is not yet clear when version 5 of GCC will be out, but it is not far over the horizon and it promises plenty of freedom-respecting conversions from human-readable code to machine-readable code. Without GCC, the likes of the NSA would find it easier to put back doors in software as part of the compilation process (we already have evidence showing that the NSA infiltrated and subverted standards for this purpose). GCC is an enormously important project, perhaps more than Linux (depending to whom). I first used GCC when I was 18 (it used to be known as the GNU C Compiler), having used Pascal for the most part before that (it was a common teaching tool at the time). GCC has since then become the Swiss army knife of millions of developers (the same goes for projects like GNU Awk [3]) all around the world and companies like Intel just had to pour code into it, trying to stay relevant in the hardware market.
Imagine a world without GCC. Or never mind; such a world never came to exist, so we cannot truly imagine it. With microcode and firmware we can easily see that those in power are determined to abuse it, but it’s software freedom that keeps standing in their way. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
GCC 4.9 will likely not be released until later in H1’2014, but already a lot of compiler changes have been queued up to make this next major release of the GNU Compiler Collection exciting for developers and also benefiting users of the generated binaries.
-
Having yesterday covered the features so far of GCC 4.9, here’s a look at the features baking for LLVM 3.4 — the next major compiler infrastructure update due out likely around the end of the year.
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Apple, BSD at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A leading force in the BSD world, FreeBSD, is celebrating an important anniversary
“FreeBSD was released 1 Nov, 20 years ago,” writes iophk, “if Wikipedia is accurate.”
Here in Techrights we generally support FreeBSD, whose 10th version (as in 10.0) is almost ready [1]. Like PC-BSD 9.2, whose reviews are improving [2], FreeBSD is mature enough for people to use on the desktop (as colleagues of mine do). FreeBSD contributed towards creation of proprietary operating systems like Mac OS X, which misuse the word “free” to simply mean gratis (no cost, except the hardware that’s tied to it [3]). Therein lies some common opposition to the BSD licence, which is liberal to the extent that it allows companies to remove the liberty of downstream users. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
The latest beta release of FreeBSD 10.0 is now available for testing.
FreeBSD 10.0 Beta 3 features many bug-fixes, a POWER hypervisor interpartition ethernet driver, an Altera Triple Speed Ethernet MegaCore driver, a “pkg bootstrap” command, and numerous other system-level changes.
-
As to running PC-BSD, my experience had me constantly swinging back and forth between two thoughts: “Wow, this is a great feature, I wish more projects did this!” and “Drat, another bug, this is frustrating!” There was not a lot of middle ground between these two thoughts while running PC-BSD. It seems as though the developers tried to supply several new features for this release, all of them good ideas, but some of the implementations still have problems. Let’s start with the system installer. This is a fine piece of software. I really like that the installer can detect our hardware and warn us if some hardware support is missing. I also like the various guided disk partitioning options and the optional package selection screen. Both of these features were well implemented and I had no issues at all with the installer.
-
Two of the three major desktop operating systems are now free. And it’s likely to be a trend
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
Hectronic will soon begin sampling a Linux-compatible Qseven computer-on-module based on AMD’s dual-core, 1GHz G-Series SoC. Claimed as the first Qseven COM to use the new AMD SoC, the H6069 is equipped with 2GB of soldered DDR3 RAM and an optional 32GB SSD, and features dual display support, 12 Watt power consumption, and optional industrial temperature range operation.
-
-
-
Automakers want to standardize on a Linux-based OS that would make vehicle infotainment systems act more like smartphones
-
-
Sage Electronic Engineering, has released a free board support package for AMD’s community-backed Gizmo SBC equipped with the open source, Coreboot-based SageBIOS bootloader. SageBIOS BSP for Gizmo further supports the $189, G-Series-based Gizmo board with “free payloads and drivers to enable peripherals,” says the company.
-
Digia announced an Android and Linux-targeted embedded version of its cross-platform Qt GUI framework called Qt Enterprise Embedded that combines a Qt Creator based IDE with a new embedded Boot to Qt stack. The Digia-backed Qt project also released the beta of Qt 5.2 with a new Scene Graphic renderer and the first production-ready support for Android and iOS.
-
Wind River announced Wind River Linux 6, featuring Yocto Project 1.5 Linux kernel and toolchain, and expanded multi-architecture hardware support including 64-bit ARMv8. Wind River also announced a faster new Yocto-compatible version of its carrier-grade Wind River Open Virtualization software.
-
But the less obvious engineering feat was achieving cross compatibility between the board’s custom Linux OS and Arduino’s application development software necessary to port C code to the device from Windows and Mac, as well as Linux.
-
In August Intel launched the Yocto Project Innovation Challenge to help showcase developers who are building – or simply imagining — Yocto-based embedded Linux applications and devices.
-
Wind River announced Wind River Linux support for Cavium’s newly shipping Octeon III system-on-chips. Aimed at high-end networking applications, the 28nm-fabricated Octeon III SoCs offer as many as 48 MIPS64 cores clocked up to 2.5GHz, support MIPSr5 architecture features like hardware virtualization, and integrate accelerators for deep packet inspection (DPI), packet processing, security, search, and QoS.
-
Portwell announced a computer-on-module along with a pair of single-board computers built around Intel’s new embedded-specific Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips. The three Linux-friendly boards include a Type 6 COM Express Compact COM, a Mini-ITX style embedded motherboard, and an SBC implemented in the rarely seen Nano-ITX form factor.
-
Suitable Technologies is offering $50 rentals of its “Beam” mobile telepresence robot, so 50 robotics enthusiasts can remotely attend the RoboBusiness conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Oct. 23-25. The Ubuntu- and ROS-based Beam will be available to the first 50 applicants, letting them explore the show at up to 1.5 meters/sec and interact with others via video conferencing.
-
ISEE announced a highly compact single board computer powered by a 2GHz dual-core Cortex-A15 based Texas Instruments OMAP5432 system-on-chip. The IGEPv5 SBC ships with a Yocto-built Linux stack, but also supports Android, and is packed with I/O including five USB ports, mSATA, microSD, HDMI, DisplayPort, audio in/out, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi and Bluetooth wireless, and more.
-
-
In August Intel launched the Yocto Project Innovation Challenge to help showcase developers who are building – or simply imagining — Yocto-based embedded Linux applications and devices.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA