02.24.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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That was written the year after I adopted GNU/Linux and he was right on all those points. I went from being a newbie to being able to do everything a teacher normally would do with that other OS in just a few days. The download took more time, 10 days of nights and weekends on dial-up… I replaced Lose ’95 on five old PCs in my classroom and never looked back. GNU/Linux was clearly superior to the software we were using on Macs and other PCs in the school.
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Automation is a perennial technical buzzword among System Administrators (SAs) and in management circles alike. Business owners and managers demand automation with the thought that it will save “man hours” and possibly decrease the need for a full technical staff. System Administrators realize that this is not the case nor is staff reduction the inevitable result of automation. The bad news is that the purpose of automation isn’t to reduce staff numbers. The good news is that there are several reasons for automation that make it a worthwhile pursuit.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Where oh where is the open-source support for the “Southern Islands” GPUs, a.k.a. the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series? It’s been over two months since the first hardware launched and there still is no open-source Linux driver support available.
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Earlier this week I shared a pleasant surprise in Mesa 8.1 Radeon Gallium3D with some significant performance improvements to be found in the current Mesa Git code-base for the “R600g” driver in some OpenGL games. In this article is a more diverse look at the current state of Mesa 8.1 development for R600 Gallium3D and comparative benchmarks from every major release going back to Mesa 7.10.
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Applications
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The nuts and bolts of Linux seem destined to be increasingly hidden away from the desktop user. The continuing development of popular desktop environments offering attractive interfaces and fancy features shows no sign of abatement. We note that one of the most popular Linux distributions, Ubuntu, is even going to replace its application menus with a “head-up display” (HUD) box. However intuitive and slick the HUD will be implemented, and how advanced, in general, desktop environments become, there is little prospect that the faithful terminal will be consigned to the recycle bin in the near future. There is simply too much power at the hands of a terminal for many experienced Linux users.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.10 for Linux today. Bordeaux 2.0.10 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have updated winetricks, fixed a bug in the Bordeaux GUI, fixed a bug in the Cellar manager and made other small bug fixes.
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Games
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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This week Ubuntu sponsor company Canonical released the results of its latest Ubuntu Server User Survey. Over 6,000 Ubuntu Server users from around the world responded. Possibly the most interesting result is that although VMware still leads, Red Hat’s KVM has overtaken the Citrix backed Xen as the most common host environment for virtualized Ubuntu Server instances. According to the report, this is the fist time in the three years that Canonical has been conducting this survey that KVM has beat out Xen.
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Oracle has reaffirmed that it’s in the Linux business to stay by extending the support lifecycle of its own-brand build to ten years, and tempting Red Hat users with a trial offer of its Ksplice patching system.
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Fedora
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Fedora 16 was released a while back, and I’ve finally gotten around to checking it out. For this review though I’ve opted for the KDE version of Fedora. As you may already know, Fedora comes in multiple spins including GNOME, Xfce, KDE and others.
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Early adopters of the Raspberry Pi $25 computer will be offered a cut down and customised Fedora ‘remix’ compiled to run on the system’s ARM microprocessor, it has been confirmed.
The first Raspberry Pi is just bare circuit board for now but developers at Toronto’s Seneca College have worked hard to fit a Fedora image on to a 2GB SD card to boot the computer into a GUI, complete with a small suite of applications and admin tools.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The popular Linux distributor is helping travellers turn smart phones into laptops, but we’ve barely imagined the potential
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It’s always nice to follow the development of Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora. But what about the people behind the scenes that use these operating systems. The developers. The community. The Users. Behind all those pixels that make up your display, there’s a whole wide range of interesting geeks with plenty of talent to contribute in many ways to the future of Linux development.
Geeks of all ages, young and old. I found one such person for which I briefly interviewed for Unixmen. A promising young developer who is still in his teens. Boden Matthews is a community developer who is currently working on a version of Ubuntu designed for the HP TouchPad. And it seems to be an interesting project with potential.
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical has acknowledged that Ubuntu’s shift to the Unity user interface was painful for many of its users but insisted it hasn’t led to a decline in the popularity of the Linux distribution.
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According to a development update posted on Ubuntu Fridge by the Ubuntu developer Daniel Holbach, Ubuntu 12.04 is on its way to release the first beta next week, on February 29, after the user interface freeze which occured today. “Today User Interface Freeze and Beta Freeze will kick in, next week we will do a test rebuild of the whole archive and Beta 1 will get out next week as well.”
Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin is a LTS (long-term support) release and it will ship with Linux kernel 3.2 by default, GNOME 3.2, Unity 5.4.0, LibreOffice 3.5. According to Ubuntu Kernel Release Manager, Leann Ogasawara, as soon as new stable versions of the 3.2 kernel branch will be released, they will be included in Ubuntu. “With Ubuntu 12.04 being an LTS release, our primary focus has been on stability. As such, we chose to ship with a v3.2 based kernel and will continue to rebase to the latest v3.2.y stable kernels as they become available.”
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Flavours and Variants
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Softpedia is once again proud to introduce a new Linux distribution based on the popular Ubuntu OS from Canonical, this time with a modernized GNOME 2 desktop environment.
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As one of the GNOME users who’s still fond of the old-school GNOME desktop, the recent release of Cinnamon 1.3.1 caught my eye. While it’s not exactly GNOME 2.x, it’s close enough that most users with a fondness for the 2.x days will feel right at home.
The GNOME Shell (and Ubuntu’s Unity) are making lots of rapid progress, and they may (or may not) be the bee’s knees for many users. I’ve been using Linux desktops for a long time now, so I’m probably not the target audience for GNOME Shell or Unity. Either way, I’d rather spend my time writing and learning about how to use server-side software than re-learning how to use my desktop.
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Throughout this smackdown, there are links to DeviceGuru’s in-depth reviews of all five devices. The reviews provide lots more detail on each device’s unique capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and also include comprehensive screenshot tours that demonstrate the device’s user interface and operation.
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Phones
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Android
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Rugged phones have been around forever, but melding extreme survivability into a true Android smartphone that’s not laughably large or looks like an off-road tire is a challenge. Samsung feels it has created a tough device that has beaten the odds.
The $99.99 Samsung Rugby Smart certainly has a rough and tumble name. The company claims it’s built to meet both the U.S. military Mil-spec 810f and the IP67 international standards for ruggedness. In a nutshell, that means the phone should be able to withstand submersion in 3 feet of water for 30 minutes, plus prolonged exposure to blowing dust, driving rain, extreme temperatures, and the odd drop onto hard surfaces.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It’s real: Tablet PCs have arrived. According to a recent DePaul University study, one in every dozen airline passengers is using a tablet PC or e-book reader at any given moment.
Like many of you, I got a tablet (a Nook, if you’re interested) as a gift this last December (thanks Jeanette!). It’s pretty nice. I read Wired on it now, check news, post tweets occasionally. But it’s moderately frustrating that I can’t really do anything worthwhile on this machine.
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Free and open source software such as Firefox, LibreOffice, and Linux is enjoying increasingly widespread adoption on business and home computers alike, but every once in a while a naysayer will still pipe up with one vague concern or another about open source quality, in particular.
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The Piwik development team has released version 1.7 of its open source web analytics suite. The major update brings performance improvements and adds a number of new features, including additional reports.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is about ready to invite developers to submit applications to be distributed on the Mozilla Marketplace, the organization’s upcoming app store. The Mozilla Marketplace will be a cross-platform distribution system that works on a variety of operating systems. By not nailing its store down to a particular OS, Mozilla says developers will have an easier time building and maintaining their wares.
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“The Web is the largest platform in the world. We are enabling the Web to be the marketplace, giving developers the opportunity to play on the biggest playing field imaginable,” Mozilla innovation chief Todd Simpson told theinquirer.net.
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SaaS
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Developers who are interested in testing their applications in an OpenStack environment can now do so for free and without having to configure their own cloud. TryStack is a free service that is supported by Cisco, Dell, Equinix, HP, NTT and Rackspace, and provides “156 cores, 1040GB memory and 59.1TB of disk storage” to allow developers to run their code on a reasonably substantial system. Equinix provides the data centre space and Dell provided the servers; HP plans to add a zone in a different data centre so developers can also experience geographic diversity in the system.
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Quantum is a networking component for OpenStack that delivers networking technologies that that no other cloud stack (that I know off) provides. It first showed up in the OpenStack Diablo release as an incubated project and now it’s set to be a core project for the Folsom release set for the fall of 2012.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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So, I see some good and bad in this. On the one hand AppUp does make it easy for users of that other OS to use FLOSS like LibreOffice and VLC. On the other it does nothing to promote FLOSS as a platform except to get end users familiar with FLOSS applications. That is a typical step in migration from that other OS to GNU/Linux but it also helps end users remain comfortable with that other OS. Ultrabooks are certainly not small cheap computers, either. They are netbooks on steroids with lots of non-free software and fire-breathing CPUs.
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Intel has begun distributing the open source LibreOffice suite via its online AppUp Store, and has joined the board of The Document Foundation (TDF) – a decision that will have many of the Redmond old-guard fuming.
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Education
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Thirty-five unemployed information technology (IT) graduates have boosted their marketability and chances of finding employment after an intensive, week-long open source software workshop organised by information and communication technology (ICT) incubator the Eastern Cape Information Technology Initiative (ECITI).
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Gotham Gal has been under the weather this weekend. Last night we made soup for dinner and decided to sit on the couch and watch a movie and go to bed early. After dinner, we fired up Boxee and checked out Netflix. Nothing good there. Then we fired up the Mac Mini and checked out Amazon Instant Video. Nothing good there. Then we went to the Cable Set Top Box and checked out movies on demand. Nothing good there. Frustrated and unwilling and uninterested in heading to a “foreign rogue site” to pirate something good, we watched a TV show and went to bed.
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Trademarks
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It was only yesterday that the European Commissioner Karel de Gucht made the surprise announcement that the European Commission would be referring ACTA to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) “to assess whether ACTA is incompatible — in any way — with the EU’s fundamental rights and freedoms.” Just a few hours after that, there are already signs of panic among ACTA’s supporters that the treaty may indeed be incompatible — and thus dead in the water as far as the European Union is concerned.
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Copyrights
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Australia’s commercial radio stations won’t have to pay out extra royalties for online “simulcasting” of recorded music following an important ruling last week from the country’s Federal Court.
Recording companies’ collecting society PPCA had sought a declaration from the court that Internet streaming of radio programs – or simulcasting — should not be regarded as a “broadcast” under the country’s Copyright Act and should there be subject to a separate music tariff.
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02.23.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A recent study from The Linux Foundation has found that Linux talent is a hot commodity among many hiring companies. The conclusions made sense to many on the Linux blogosphere. “Linux and open source are becoming strategic investments in many companies and have been for years,” said Chris Travers of the LedgerSMB project. Others, however, took issue with the study’s methodology.
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When Tomasz Sablinski was working in pharmaceutical R&D, he was often frustrated by the demand for secrecy in the clinical trials process—a misdirected effort, he says, to keep competitors in the dark about what drug companies were up to. “The price you pay when you hide what you’re doing is you only get feedback from a precious few people,” he says. “There is very little new blood in the ideation process.”
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Desktop
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Last year, Dell announced selling Ubuntu/Linux at 200 stores in China. Today Dell announced they will expand to 1000 stores.
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Kernel Space
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In his seminal work The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond put forward the claim that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He dubbed this Linus’ Law, in honor of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. It sounds like a fairly self-evident statement, but as the Wikipedia page points out the notion has its detractors. Michael Howard and David LeBlanc claim in their 2003 book Writing Secure Code “most people just don’t know what to look for.”
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While the Linux 3.3 kernel is still weeks away from release, there’s more building up to look forward to with its successor: the Linux 3.4 kernel. A few months down the road when Linux 3.4 makes it out, there will be some additional Intel performance improvements.
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Graphics Stack
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Remember the proof of concept PRIME multi-GPU rendering / GPU offloading work that was being hacked on two years ago? Work on it has been resurrected and could make it into the kernel when the VGEM driver is ready.
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The 12.02 graphics driver is basically what was Intel’s quarterly package release under a new numbering scheme. Instead of being the “2012Q1″ Linux driver package, it’s now 12.02 to reflect its release in February of 2012. Back in October I wrote about Intel working on a new release cycle and this is part of their new development process.
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Applications
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Oracle has released a second beta version of “DTrace for Oracle Linux”. The Linux port of the tracing software that was originally developed for Solaris now implements a provider for SDT (Statically Defined Tracing), providing in-kernel static probes; the developers say that they have also fixed a number of bugs.
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Games
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A few days ago, I experienced a motherboard failure. This gave me ample opportunity to do a fresh Linux installation. The first disk on hand was Pardus Kurumsal 2 for AMD64. I thought it would be interesting to give the distribution another spin.
Upon a first boot attempt of the Pardus Kurumsal 2 installation disc, I was met with a black screen and a blinking cursor. Using ALT+Left, I determined that this was merely a failure of Xorg to start. The disc was automatically set to attempt usage of the best drivers possible, but at the time of the Pardus release, the NVIDIA GT520 was no where near the market. Running X -configure and then setting the driver manually to vesa allowed me to run the installer without further complication. Although, this problem did reassert itself after installation and upon the first boot of the newly installed system. This time, I wanted to have higher resolutions and improved performance, which prompted me to fire up Lynx. After navigating to nvidia.com, I downloaded the driver I needed. The next thing is the installation of the Pardus equivalent to Slackware’s D package set as well as the required kernel headers for module building.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“Canonical doesn’t intend to offer a public cloud as part of our business strategy,” Jane Silber, the company’s chief executive, said on Wednesday. “We have no plans to do that right now.”
Because of Canonical’s close ties with the OpenStack cloud project, it doesn’t want to go down the Red Hat route, Silber said.
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Ubuntu 12.04 development hits the User Interface freeze tonight. This is also evident from all the user interface updates trying to meet the deadline. One such update brought a significant update to the Ubuntu One control panel.
We all know about Ubuntu One, sync service developed in house by Canonical. In this update, the Ubuntu One developers have released a new interface based on the toolkit QT. This new interface is going to be the standard interface on all platforms like Windows, Ubuntu and MAC OS. A step in trying to bring about some integrity and commonality in the Ubuntu One usage on all platforms. It also helps with the Ubuntu One branding.
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Phones
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Android
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We recently came to know about HTC’s new name branding, and the two phones under this branding are HTC One X and One S. HTC One X is actually the HTC Endeavor/Edge which will be launched at the Mobile World Congress next week. Our friends over at Pocketnow managed to get their hands on leaked shot of the HTC One X, and the device looks familiar (reminds me of Sensation).
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Toshiba is now telling customers it’s targeting the “end of spring” to provide the Android 4.0 upgrade to its flagship 10-inch tablet. Company reps have been openly discussing the Thrive’s Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade plans via the official @ToshibaUSA account on Twitter in recent days. Up till now, Toshiba hadn’t said much of anything about if or when the Thrive would get ICS.
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We’re at t-minus three days until the festivities start in Barcelona, and Asus isn’t letting the likes of HTC and LG have all the premature fun. In a new video posted to YouTube, the company teased a high-resolution tablet with an abstract, 17-second commercial before Mobile World Congress. There’s no hardware on display (a drawer with colored balls stands in for a Honeycomb/ICS home screen) but the teaser “twice the detail, twice the fun” leaves little room for doubt. Presumably, Asus is talking about a tablet with more than the standard resolution – i.e., more than 1280×800.
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Most interesting among the bunch is without a doubt the “Best Cloud UX Device,” which offers two 4.3-inch displays that open and close like a book — a hell of a lot better than Kyocera’s attempt, if you ask us. Also among the mix will be a 5-inch “Large Screen in One Hand” model, along with another 4.3-inch “Stylish” unit. Unlike previous products, the latest trio fully embrace the design philosophy of Ice Cream Sandwich and eschew the dedicated navigation buttons from bygone days.
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Any conviction that open source software (OSS) is somehow inferior to proprietary code, or vice versa, depending on which side of the development fence you sit, is being dispelled by a report from Coverity.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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One of the challenges companies often face when using Hadoop to aggregate massive volumes of structured and unstructured data is finding a way to efficiently control and manage user access to that data.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice, the OpenOffice fork, is a very popular open-source office suite. But, while it has great support from Linux distributors, like openSUSE and Ubuntu, LibreOffice has never had a major corporate backer on the Windows side… until now. Intel is now offering LibreOffice to Windows users via its AppUp application store. I wonder how Microsoft feels about this.
According to The Document Foundation (TDF), the newly incorporated group behind LibreOffice, “LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE is available in Intel AppUp Center as a special, five-language version featuring English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. As a validated Intel AppUp Center app, LibreOffice for Windows from SUSE features a new, smooth, silent installation flow and improved un-installation cleanup.” This version of LibreOffice for Windows is now available from the Intel AppUp store.
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Public Services/Government
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“By challenging developers to leverage government data in new and innovative ways, they’ll help businesses fund new activities, learn about and evaluate opportunities in the US and abroad, support education and training, and more,” the contest announcement says.
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Open Access/Content
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Finance
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Although last week’s $26 billion settlement between the Obama administration, attorneys general from 49 states, and five large banks over unscrupulous lending practices appears to have been deeply flawed, it may provide a modicum of relief for two million homeowners nationwide, including a half-million Californians. The agreement, however, does nothing for cities like Oakland that are trapped in expensive and toxic financial deals with some of Wall Street’s biggest players. Oakland’s bad lending deal is with Goldman Sachs, and it’s already cost the city $26 million. By 2021, the total pricetag for local taxpayers could reach $46 million.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Late in the evening, on February 22, the Wisconsin Legislature turned back the clock gutting key provisions of Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act (Act 20).
Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison), a long time women’s rights advocate lamented: “It’s like we’re going back to 1912. We are fighting the same fight our mothers fought, just to be treated equally.”
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Censorship
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Last month, we noted the odd propaganda film from ICE director John Morton, in which he seemed to be trying to pat himself on the back and pump up the morale of ICE agents for their hard work in illegally censoring the internet. Perhaps it’s because he knew that ICE agents apparently hate working there. An anonymous person pointed us to the news that in a recent ranking of government agencies, ICE ranked very near the bottom — 222 out of 240 agencies. It seems that morale isn’t particularly high there.
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Privacy
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Good news today as the White House supports efforts for online service providers and web browsers to implement a “do not track standard”– just as we have been doing here in the EU.
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On March 1st, Google is going to combine its 70 different product-specific privacy policies and terms of service into one super-duper privacy policy. You’d think from all the screaming out there that Google was kicking in your door, ripping your credit cards out of your wallet, and taking your children hostage. Would everyone please chill already!
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation is touting a victory in a copyright lawsuit that had the potential to shut down the database that all Linux and UNIX-based platforms and many time-based applications use to keep track of the ever-changing global timezones.
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Copyrights
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There’s proposed legislation in the US (sponsored by Lamar Smith) and in Canada (sponsored by Vic Toews) and in the UK that uses various flimsy justifications for the mass collection of data on telecommunications users. The data covered by these proposals varies, but includes things like URLs, phone calls, text/instant/email messages, and other forms of communication. Some of this proposed legislation deals with communication metadata, e.g., sender, recipient, time, etc.; some of it deals with communication content, e.g., the full text of messages.
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Not this again. Ever since SOPA/PIPA were shelved, we’ve been hearing from MPAA and RIAA officials about how important it is that they “sit down and meet” with “the opposition.” Part of the problem is that they still can’t figure out who the opposition really was. They usually blame Google. And sometimes Wikipedia. We keep hearing these requests to work together, but when people take them up on the offer and agree to meet… they seem to chicken out. Another big part of the problem is assuming that the only answer to the challenges they’re facing is more legislation… but that’s clearly not true.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So for now, lets not make a mountain out of something that very well appears to be nothing more than a molehill.
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Desktop
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My name is Eugeni (which is sometimes written as Evgueni or Eugene and with all the possible variations of it) Dodonov. I am 30 years old right now, and I was born in Moscow, Russia, but I live in Brazil since 1996. While in Brazil, I did my bachelor and master degrees at the UFSCar University, working with distributed parallel file systems; and my PhD in the USP University, proposing a prediction approach to allow computing systems behave autonomously, without any human supervision. It was really interesting research, and one of the most curious questions I got about about it was if I had thought about safety measures, because the overall autonomic approach we did looked similar to Skynet to some of the PhD thesis readers :).
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Applications
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The first beta release of Mageia 2 was made available for download yesterday (February 21). The final stable release is not due until May 3, but from test installations of this first beta, in both real hardware and virtual environment, I can tell you that Mageia 2 may very well turn out to be the best desktop distribution of 2012.
For a beta edition, almost everything I tested worked smoothly, though there are a few packages that are not in the repository. These are Stackfolder and Takeoff Launcher, two applications that make a KDE desktop a lot more fun to use. Aside from those missing packages, there is a minor issue during the boot loader configuration step of the installation process. Bug report on that is on its way.
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Red Hat Family
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As the world’s first and only billion-dollar fully open source company, Red Hat has a unique corporate culture. The employees collectively have more power than any one person, even the CEO.
No one is more aware of this than Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst. He calls it a “meritocracy” meaning leaders arise based on their brains, not their spot on an org chart.
Whitehurst took the CEO job in 2007 after being COO of Delta Airlines, a cultural shock if ever there was one.
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Does Red Hat Enterprise Linux perform any better (or worse) than the various “Enterprise Linux” distributions that are derived from RHEL? Now that Scientific Linux 6.2 was released, here is a performance comparison of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, CentOS, and Scientific Linux across three different systems.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The jury may still be out on what exactly cloud computing even means, but that isn’t stopping most IT movers and shakers from churning out incessant reminders of how important the cloud is. Canonical, which this week released a new publication highlighting the way Ubuntu fits into the cloud, is no exception. Here’s a look at this latest effort to market Ubuntu to a cloud audience, and what it says about Canonical’s strategy over the longer term.
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The ClearPass solution is not part of Aruba’s existing ArubaOS based product line that delivers wired and wireless network connectivity. ClearPass is a server appliance that runs on a CentOS Linux base and it’s also available as a virtual appliance.
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Web Browsers
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Public Services/Government
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NASA, like any other major enterprise, is a heavy user of open source and Linux. Now the agency is planning to open source its main portal NASA.gov and internal Intranet insidenasa.nasa.gov.
The space agency recently (Feb 6) posted a draft Statement of Work (SOW) seeking vendors to submit their response to the request for information.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Obama Administration’s innovation agenda is aimed at finding, testing, and scaling new ideas that change the way government conducts business and delivers services through engagement with the American people. An innovative government incorporates an entrepreneurial mindset into its daily work – taking risks, building lean organizations, and developing innovative products and services faster than the rest of the world.
On his last day in office, then-U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra released the Open Innovator’s Practitioner’s Toolbox. It contains 20 of the best disruptive innovation practices conceived and built by entrepreneurs across government. They provide a rich set of guiding principles that any Federal, state, and local government can use to support rapid innovation supporting economic growth and job creation.
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Twitter (as well as Xanga, Odeo, and Blogger) co-founder Biz Stone keynoted this week’s 2012 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference with the history of Twitter alongside advice on the future of the social web and what it means to be successful.
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Censorship
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According to Moroccan Blog, Moroccan Geeks [French], Skype and all other VoIP services have been blocked in the country, pointing to an article from Moroccan newspaper Al Sabaheya confirming the news [Arabic].
While services are more often than not blocked as a result of authoritative governments, Skype usually finds itself targeted by mobile operators and telecom providers, as was the case for Skype itself in Egypt. In Morocco, it would appear the move has been made in an attempt to create a monopoly on calling options available in the country.
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Civil Rights
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When the government placed the Internet surveillance bill on the notice paper one week ago, few would have predicted that within days of the introduction, the anger with the legislative proposals would have been so strong that the government would steadily backtrack on its plans, with Public Safety Minister Vic Toews yesterday telling the House of Commons the bill will go to committee before second reading to ensure that there is greater openness to amendments (changes are more restricted after second reading). While the battle is only beginning, the overwhelming negative reaction seems to have taken the government by surprise.
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DRM
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A new Web standard proposal authored by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix seeks to bring copy protection mechanisms to the Web. The Encrypted Media Extensions draft defines a framework for enabling the playback of protected media content in the Web browser. The proposal is controversial and has raised concern among some parties that are participating in the standards process.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Despite the EU Commission’s attempt to buy time and defuse the heated political debate by referring ACTA to the EU Court of Justice, this Saturday February 25th will be one more opportunity for hundreds of thousands of citizens across dozens of cities all around the European Union to take to the streets and protest against ACTA. For all of us, ACTA has become the symbol of corrupt policy-making, and the evidence that it has never been more urgent to reform copyright so as to protect our fundamental rights online.
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We welcome the decision to release the European Parliament legal service’s opinion on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). We have compared the legal service’s opinion with multiple academic opinions on ACTA and some civil society analyses.
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The European Commission considers asking the Court of Justice an opinion on ACTA. This would be irresponsible, it could seriously compromise the Court. The Commission should withdraw ACTA in stead.
The 1994 WTO TRIPS agreement spread out the enforcement of intellectual property rights over the world. Countries lost the ability to abolish their copyright and patent systems. For instance, the Netherlands abolished its suffocating patent system in 1869, and reintroduced patents in 1912. Since TRIPS, this is no longer possible.
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Posted in Patents, Videos at 11:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The final part of “Everything is a Remix”
Everything is a Remix Part 4 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.
As one pro-Apple site puts it (yes, pro-Apple, ironically):
In case you haven’t seen it yet, the fourth episode of Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix” series went live in mid-February on Ferguson’s site. As in the previous three episodes in the series, Ferguson examines modern attitudes toward “intellectual property” and how these attitudes rather counterintuitively stifle creativity rather than fostering it.
Part 4 of “Everything is a Remix” deals largely with the contentious subject of software patents, a subject we’ve covered many times here at TUAW. According to Ferguson, 62 percent of all patent lawsuits are now over software patents, and he estimates the total wealth “lost” (read: siphoned off from “infringing” companies and individuals towards patent holders and their lawyers) at half a trillion dollars.
“We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
–Steve Jobs
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Just because you had what it takes for a good Linux-related job a decade ago, it doesn’t mean that you have what it takes today. The Linux landscape has changed a lot, and the only thing that’s really stayed constant is that a love of learning is a requirement.
What employers want from Linux job seekers is a topic I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, but this post by Dustin Kirkland got me to thinking about just how drastically things have changed in a very short time. The skills that were adequate for a good Linux gig in 2002 may not be enough to scrape by today.
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Google is working with Adobe to keep its proprietary Flash player alive on Linux. The two companies have been working closely to develop a single modern API for hosting plugins within the browser (one which could replace the current Netscape plugin API being used by the Flash Player).
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Adobe today said that it would stop offering direct downloads of Flash Player for Linux, telling users to move to Google’s Chrome browser, which bundles Flash with its updates.
Today’s demotion of Flash Player on Linux to Chrome-only was the second time in the last three months that Adobe has withdrawn some or all support from a version of the popular media software: In November, Adobe announced it was abandoning development of Flash for mobile browsers, including the new Chrome for Android.
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Adobe has issued a statement this morning that they will effectively be abandoning Flash Player support on Linux. After Flash Player 11.2 they will no longer be providing updates for Linux users but just maintaining the 11.2 release. Google is expected to take over with a Flash Player implementation based upon a new API, but only for Google Chrome-based web-browsers.
Hitting my inbox this morning was Adobe and Google Partnering for Flash Player on Linux. The statement is brief but basically it says Google and Adobe have been working to develop a modern API for web-browser plug-ins. The result of this collaboration is PPAPI (codenamed “Pepper”) and is designed to be work for different web-browsers and operating systems. The Pepper Plug-In API is something that Google has been working on for at least the past three years to replace NPAPI (the Netscape Plug-In API).
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Linux is dead on the desktop…and it died long ago. Who hasn’t heard that?
Apparently, the 1,500 school children whose happy faces could not hide the illusion of using a laptop for the first time didn’t. They just received their own Linux-powered computers…wow! That’s a lot of dead computers!
True…1,500 dead PCs is far too modest to worry about…but the total number of Linux computers that the government will give to students for educational purposes is 25,000! Whoa! Now, that is more than enough to call it a zombie apocalypse!
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Server
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A set of open source designs for the RECS Compute Box, a high density server developed by German start-up Christmann Informationstechnik, will also be created. It is hoped that these designs will allow other projects or commercial data centre operators to build on the research conducted by the CoolEmAll project.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Btrfs and MD code offers new ways to change RAIDs while keeping data intact. Ext4 filesystems can now be expanded more quickly. The kernel also gained a driver for an upcoming storage device interface.
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Graphics Stack
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When running some tests on the latest Mesa 8.1-devel Gallium3D code-base for the “R600″ Radeon Gallium3D driver, I was surprised by some of the results.
Coming up in the next few days will be benchmarks of Radeon Gallium3D using Mesa 8.1-devel compared to the recently-released Mesa 8.0.1 and the previous releases of Mesa going back for as long as the R600 Gallium3D driver has functioned. While Mesa 8.1 has just been in development for about one month, there’s already some interesting improvements for at least Radeon Gallium3D.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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About 10 years ago I decided I didn’t feel comfortable running a proprietary operating system on my computer anymore and made the leap to Linux, and like many converts, I had to give up PC gaming. I moved over to the next best thing, joining the legion of console gamers, but once and awhile there would be that one big PC game that I would miss out on.
The OnLive MicroConsole promises to change all that. With this device, it’s now possible to play some of the hottest titles on the PC…without the PC. For those of us running free and open source operating systems, this little device can get you back in the game (literally), and it even runs Linux!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Plasma Active looks so nice in so many of the details, but there is one place that sticks out like sore thumb an which we really haven’t been able to get replacement artwork for: those icons in the upper right corner.
The Home icon is nice enough and looks like it belongs. It won’t be there on all Plasma Active devices either: on Spark we have a Home hardware key and so will probably be using that exclusively instead of an icon in the panel.
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In the middle of cold January, the team behind DigiKam met in Genoa, the sunny old port city in northern Italy. DigiKam is the award-winning KDE photo management application. Participants started gathering in the evening on Thursday 12 January, getting together over dinner to form new friendships and to find out how people’s lives were going. The next day, real work started.
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New Releases
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François Dupoux proudly announced last night, February 21st, a major release of his popular SystemRescueCd Linux-based operating system for rescue and recovery tasks.
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I am announcing the release of ConnochaetOS 0.9.1. This is a maintenance release. The ConnochaetOS 0.9.0 ISO was downloaded 20,000 times. The Free Software Foundation examined every package very closely and said, that we meet the FSF’ criteria at this point. So we consider that the ConnochaetOS project is a success.
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The DragonFly 3.0 release is here! This release was delayed from our regular schedule for tracking down what appears to be a AMD CPU bug. As a pleasant side effect, the giant kernel lock has been removed from much of the system and this release performs significantly better on multi-core systems than previous DragonFly versions.
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DragonFly 3.0.1 is now available! This release has superior multiprocessor support compared to previous versions. Speed has improved significantly. Binary packages from the 2011Q4 release of pkgsrc are available. Check the release notes for details.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia development team has announced the arrival of the first beta of version 2 of its Mandriva Linux community fork. This beta 1 release is aimed at developers and testers, and is based on the current stable 3.2.6 Linux kernel, which will be upgraded to Linux 3.3 before the final release.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Cornell University Institute for Biotechnology and Life Science Technologies is using Red Hat Storage, formally Gluster, technology to manage data-intensive research projects. With Red Hat Storage Software Appliance, the department is experiencing cost-effective, highly available and scalable storage, and using it for such projects as DNA sequencing. It has delivered flexibility and reliability that has allowed the Institute to achieve the growth needed to continue its research programs, while increasing researcher productivity due to the high availability of the data.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A representative told Linux User & Developer that there are currently no plans to release Ubuntu for Android on the Android Marketplace, but that they are in talks with phone manufacturers to include it with specific devices.
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical will show off a Motorola Atrix 2 running its Ubuntu for Android Linux operating system to mobile phone vendors at Mobile World Congress (MWC).
Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution is arguably one of the most popular consumer friendly versions of Linux available, and the firm will tip up at MWC with a Motorola Atrix 2 smartphone that when placed in a dock can run a full-blown desktop Ubuntu Linux installation. According to the firm, smartphones will be able to ship with Ubuntu for Android this year.
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Canonical announced last evening, February 21st, the Ubuntu for Android product, allowing users to connect a multi-core Android phone to an Ubuntu desktop.
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As part of the on going work to improve the Gnome Control Center, there has been an update today which brings some new features.
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People in FOSS circles don’t like to talk about that kind of thing openly; making money is fine if it is done quietly, but pointing out that developing free or open source software can also be as crassly commercial an activity as, say, the activities of Microsoft, is considered to be, well, not kosher.
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This week a new Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix has been launched providing a complete software environment for the new $35 Raspberry Pi computer which will soon be launched.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung is using Wind River’s Android testing software and expertise to speed its smartphone development and test for Android software quality, performance and compliance.
Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST) for Android and Wind River User Experience Test Development Kit are currently in use to rapidly and efficiently test Android software for Samsung smartphones. A global leader in high-tech electronics and digital media, Samsung Electronics is a top smartphone manufacturer worldwide.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Even though Amazon’s Appstore has far fewer wares on its shelves than Google’s Android Market, many developers of top apps have found Amazon’s platform to be more lucrative, according to a recent study. The hot-selling Kindle Fire seems to have played a part in driving Appstore sales. The curated nature of Amazon’s Appstore may also appeal more to users willing to pay a buck or two for their software.
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Huawei‘s 10-inch MediaPad 10 tablet wasn’t expected to show itself until MWC 2102 next week, but that hasn’t stopped the Android 4.0 slate from sneaking out for a quick pre-show flaunt. The tablet – which reminds us of HTC’s Flyer with its combination of brushed metal and white plastic inserts – has been previewed by Hi-Tech Mail, who confirm the 8-megapixel camera and solid build quality.
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Ford (and other automakers) envision future cars with high tech infotainment systems galore where car dashboards could have downloadable app’s just like todays smart phones and tablets. With the OpenXC platform Ford is creating a channel for open collaboration with 3rd party application developers, allowing them to use cars like the Ford Focus to prototype their gizmos.
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I have been using OpenOffice.org and lately LibreOffice for years with no ill effects and plenty of benefits like working well with PDF and using proper open standard file-formats. The only problem the VA will have if it switches over is what to do with the bulk of archived documents in M$’s various formats. My recommendation is to convert as many of them as possible to PDFs and leave them as archives. They rarely have to modify old documents. They should be able to do that using their present software and some “print” function. The cost of the migration would largely be the cost of processing those archives. That cost should be chalked up as a mistake of the past because it will not be an on-going cost.
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Inspired by the success of the open source development model, criminals are creating similar community models and, in doing so, opening up a new avenue for malicious software and malware incubation, industry insiders warn.
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Events
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COSCUP is the largest Free software event in Taiwan and based on my experience from attending last year I can certainly say that it is one of the most well organized and vibrant F/OSS events in the world. It’s in the same category level as FISL in Brazil or Linux Conf Australia in my mind.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Enterprises are finding business-changing ways to put the power of Hadoop, an open source Apache project for storing and processing large amounts of data, to good use. They are using Hadoop and Big Data to reduce risks, better serve customers and even change the Internet.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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Joomla is one of the most widely used open source content management systems available today. Though it’s not as popular as the MIGHTY WordPress, we are yet to discover the hidden treasures that lurk beneath. I am going to discuss the Pros and Cons of using Joomla in this article, so the next time you’re planning to invest on your online presence, you should have an idea where to spend and why!
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Healthcare
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In this entry I will briefly talk about how GNU Health can help the professional in making the best decision, and how to minimize mistakes.
I will focus in prescription writing and how we’re incorporating DS (Decision Support) to GNU Health.
GNU Health uses the WHO (World Health Organization) essential list of medicines by default, so you already have a very nice and updated set for your daily practice.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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NASA has released an RFI (Request For Information) asking for help reimplementing the nasa.gov web site using open source software and open standards. With 600,000 unique visitors and over 1.29 TB of traffic a day, 140 different web sites and applications and over 700,000 web pages, the task is large. As the first stage of an acquisition process, NASA has therefore published the RFI looking for companies that, according to Nick Skytland, Open Government Program Manager at Johnson Space Center, are “visionary, that get open source, cloud computing, and citizen engagement using the latest online technology”.
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Obviously security, supportability, and interoperability are among the factors the VA must take into consideration, so the department is only soliciting white papers right now. “The white papers should merely be focused on the per seat cost for services/tools provided, current state of the technology in terms of Office productivity suite benefits, supportability, security, ease of use, and interoperability with Microsoft based products,” the announcement says.
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Openness/Sharing
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How confident are you in your knowledge of open source geospatial software? How about a quick introduction or refresher? Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg offers 10 points that are important to understand about open source software.
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From the beginning, Civic Commons has been a dynamic community initiative. What began in January 2010 as a simple wiki of open government policies and practices (originally called “OpenMuni”, domains for which were simultaneously and independently obtained by Code for America and OpenPlans), grew into a partnership between the two organizations to support the growing open government technology movement, and is now an open community of civic hackers, government technologists, entrepreneurs and many others.
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Regular Hypebot readers know how excited I get about Cash Music. It’s hard to imagine anything closer to what this blog is about than a non-profit group building free tools that help musicians to market and sell music online. That’s exactly what Cash Music is; and for one of the first time’s ever, they’re asking for help via a Kickstarter campaign.
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Programming
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Sonatype Nexus Professional 2.0 for “component intelligence” in repository management
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Kotlin, the JVM-targeted programming language introduced last summer by development toolmaker JetBrains, is now open source. The Prague-based maker of the venerable code-centric Java IDE, IntelliJ IDEA has been developing Kotlin since 2010, and will continue to be a major contributor.
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You have to hand it to Microsoft. Their latest attacks on Google Apps are at least an attempt at comedy, but when you peel back the humor, what you have is just good old-fashioned Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD), YouTube style.
I won’t discuss the irony of Microsoft going off on Google services using Google’s own YouTube channel. That’s fairly rich in itself, but as we shall see, Google has opened itself up to these attacks with its own behavior.
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Late last week, the Washington Post reported that The Smithsonian had acquired “tapes, documentation, copyrights, and over 50,000 lines of code from V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who both the Smithsonian and the Washington Post insisted was the “inventor of e-mail.” There’s just one problem with this: It’s not actually true. Lots of internet old-timers quickly started to speak out against this, especially on Dave Farber’s Interesting People email list, where they highlighted how it’s just not true. As is nicely summarized on Wikipedia’s talk page about Ayyadurai, he was responsible for “merely inventing an email management system that he named EMAIL,” which came long after email itself.
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Health/Nutrition
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Isabel Salas reported to the non-profit Cornucopia Institute (Cornucopia) the difficulties she faced when her infant daughter reacted badly to a set of additives present in most baby formulas: DHA and ARA oils. Containers of formula containing these additives say things like, “Our formula is proven in clinical studies to enhance mental development” and “as close as ever to breast milk.”
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Finance
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CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95 percent of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs. The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up. CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald are pushing for radical changes in Wisconsin’s current mining law to benefit a single out-of-state company.
Gogebic Taconite, based out of Florida, has proposed a massive twenty-one mile long iron-ore strip mine in some of the most beautiful and pristine land in the northern part of the state. Walker and the GOP are promoting the mining bill as the most important “jobs bill” of the session. Since Governor Walker’s austerity budget kicked in on July 1, Wisconsin has lost jobs for six straight months, the worst record in the country.
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Censorship
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Hanno alerts us to the news that Techdirt has apparently been deemed harmful to minors in Germany. The German Media Control Authority has apparently been pushing internet “youth filters” to protect kids from dangerous things online. So far, it has officially approved two internet filters. Hanno got his hands on one and discovered that Techdirt was one of many blocked sites (Google translation from the original German) — as the filter declares that Techdirt has pornographic images and depictions of violence. We do?
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One of the things I’ve never liked about copyright is its potential to be the functional equivalent of censorship. Sometimes this censorship comes about because an author didn’t get permission to create his work in the first place (see: Richard Prince, JD California). While this unfortunately turns judges into cultural gatekeepers, it’s been deemed a necessary balance between copyright law and the First Amendment, and harm to the public is arguably lessened by the fact that we don’t know what we’re missing; because the censored work is never able to reach and impact us, we’ve only lost the potential of its cultural contribution.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Hockey may be Canada’s national pastime, but criticizing the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) surely ranks as a close second. From the substitution of Canadian commercials during the Super Bowl broadcast to Canada’s middling performance on broadband Internet services, the CRTC is seemingly always viewed as the target for blame.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland sent a letter to his fellow leaders in the EU Friday urging them to reject ACTA, reversing Poland’s course with the controversial intellectual-property treaty, and possibly taking Europe with them.
“I was wrong,” Tusk explained to a news conference, confessing his government had acted recklessly with a legal regime that wasn’t right for the 21st century. The reversal came after Tusk’s own strong statements in support of ACTA and condemnation of Anonymous attacks on Polish government sites, and weeks of street protest in Poland and across Europe.
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The European Commission just announced its intent to ask the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for an opinion on the conformity of ACTA with fundamental freedoms. Beyond the obvious intent to defuse the heated debate currently taking place, this move aims to make the ACTA discussion a mere legal issue, when the main concerns are political by nature.
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So the European Commission thinks that tens of thousands of people on the streets somehow don’t reflect the wider community — presumably unlike the small band of negotiators and lobbyists behind closed doors that drew up ACTA in secrecy for years, who do represent the European Union’s 500 million people.
And the Commissioners are just shocked that the opponents of ACTA, who have been denied any meaningful transparency about what was being agreed to in their name during those now-concluded negotiations, are desperately trying to make their voices heard by the only institutions left that can listen: the EU nations that haven’t signed ACTA, and the European Parliament that must still ratify it.
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Of course, other parts of De Gucht’s statement are pretty questionable. He talks about how the EU Council “adopted ACTA unanimously” leaving out that they did so by hiding it in an agriculture and fisheries meeting. He talks about how ACTA “will not change anything in the European Union” but is merely about “getting other countries to adopt” stricter laws. However, some EU countries have already noted that they would have to change their laws to comply with ACTA.
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Posted in Site News at 3:47 am by Guest Editorial Team
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If one could show a decline in the percentage share of the GPL license family, what would that show? More free software overall! Even data on the other side shows absolute numbers in both GPL and non-GPL category increasing. More corporations doing free software and encouraging licenses that let them make proprietary software New software distribution structures – Apple’s App Store for example prohibits distribution of copyleft software. The first is a clear win. The second can still be a win, because the companies are making free software possibly instead of proprietary. The third is a problem.
John also shows us that GPL use is growing in Debian. Between 2005 and 2011, the proportion of GPL’d software went from 71% to 93%. If GPL3 drove developers away, it does not show in projects that matter.
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“pro-business” parasites would have us believe that working for free for M$ and the like is just great for the world of IT. … The GPL is great for business, competition, startups, individuals and end-users. There is no downside to using the GPL in FLOSS.
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due to the increase in browsing from mobile devices … earlier this month, analysts at Canalys reported two major shifts in computing trends: one, that smartphone shipments outpaced PCs for the first time ever, and two, that Apple has become the world’s largest PC maker, assuming iPads are counted as PCs.
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the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed. … Microsoft’s biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really.
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With Ubuntu for Android, Ubuntu and Android share the same Linux Kernel on an Android phone. When you carry the phone with you, it acts just like a normal Android phone. Nothing special about that. However, when you connect the phone to an external monitor with keyboard and mouse Ubuntu OS boots and runs concurrently with Android. This allows for both mobile and desktop apps to run at the same time.
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Science
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NASA announced it has shut down its last mainframe to complete its move to smaller, distributed systems running Linux and other systems.
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Health/Nutrition
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Polls show that more than 90% of Americans support mandatory labeling. Such near-unanimity in public opinion is rare. Please listen to the American public and mandate labeling of genetically engineered foods.
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They are highly educated, interested in health and environment, and see not only the need – and the opportunity – for small-scale farming, but feel the pull to get personally involved and heed that call. … Part of what makes small-scale farming possible is CSA’s. CSA stands for Community-Supported Agriculture, and it is just that: community members purchase a share of the upcoming season’s crops, sort of like purchasing a subscription for fresh herbs and vegetables. Their advance money aids the small farm in purchasing the seed, supplies and labor they need for the season
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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two departments with overlapping jurisdictions responded to this complaint: One came at us based on a community policing approach where she walked up calmly, asked a few questions, and according to her report was satisfied and had begun to return to her shift until she heard on the radio APD was coming. By contrast, APD handcuffed first and asked questions later.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Somehow non free software vendors have pulled the FRAND whool over EU Parliment. Contact your representatives to change this if you can.
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Researchers attending one of the world’s major academic conferences ‘are scared to death of the anti-science lobby’ … university and government researchers are hounded for arguing that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are changing the climate. Their emails are hacked while Facebook campaigns call for their dismissal from their posts, calls that are often backed by rightwing politicians.
Those of you who still doubt global warming can catch up with every science organization in this wonderful collection.
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Don’t call it a bribe.
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Censorship
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Privacy
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we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works
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and they want to be that way.
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Yet anther attempt to pass laws to justify current, illegal practice.
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Path was crucified for a practice that has become an unspoken industry standard. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting, Yelp, and Gowalla are among a smattering of iOS applications that have been sending the actual names, email addresses and/or phone numbers from your device’s internal address book to their servers
Richard Stallman notes, “So much for the idea that Apple’s total censorship will protect users. The only defense for users is to have control over the software they use: that is, to insist on free software.”
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Civil Rights
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Copyrights
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