Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-22 18:55:05 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-22 19:00:10 UTC
Summary: Today's news about digital freedom and openness
Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting -- a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
-
Web Browsers
Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world's fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we'll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
-
Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download ("Save link as") / upload dialog - in Linux that is, as I didn't try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I've noticed it.
-
SaaS
There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion's Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.
In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
-
BSD
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port--this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
-
Project Releases
The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware".
-
Government
Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
-
Openness/Sharing
It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
-
Open Data
Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Manchester United Dumped Microsoft Because Qualcomm Sort of Did
- The Windows PCs were an utter failure
- Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
- Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
- Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
- now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
-
- Gemini Links 27/12/2025: geminiprotocol.net Downtime and Capsular Gemlog Manager
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 26, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, December 26, 2025
- Tossing Embarrassing News Under the Christmastime Bus
- This isn't just some coincidence; those are conscious choices
- Victim-Blaming in Debian
- Verhelst previously did blame-shifting when Debian suicide clusters happened
- IBM Cuts in Japan, Red Hat is Attached to a Sinking Ship
- IBM, which controls Red Hat, is a rapidly shrinking company
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Supported by Unconventional Digital Bartering Communities
- But no strings attached
- Geminispace: 5,000 Capsules in 2026
- There are 4.8k now
- Gemini Links 26/12/2025: Careful What You Eat and "My Secret Santa"
- Links for the day
- The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
- Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
- Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
- Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
- The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
- older articles
- Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
- FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
- Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
- Links for the day
- Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
- Links for the day
- Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
- I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
- Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
- "Quantum" is the future
- The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
- The important thing is optics
- So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
- In light of recent experiences
- Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
- So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
- An "AI-Infused" Windows
- Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
- Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
- Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
- Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
- Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
- The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
- What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
- And as the Year Turns...
- The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
- Appliances Versus Computers
- Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
- A Dark Side of Europe
- They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
- Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
- I will continue to publish for many decades to come
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
- Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
- Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
- A Tribute to Richard Stallman
- It's about knowledge and sharing
- Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 25/12/2025: Hibernation and TV Detox
- Links for the day
- Canonical is Making the Cost of PCs Very High, Due to Unnecessary Ubuntu Bloat
- They say the reason for the price surge is LLM hype/frenzy
- Canonical's Ubuntu is Bloatware
- How did Ubuntu get so fat?
- The EPO is a Very Vicious Organisation You Neither Wish to Join Nor Stay in for "Too Long"
- Consider what the EPO thinks of its own workers, the staff that actually does real work
- 2026 Will Hopefully Turn Out to be Slopless
- we seem to be starting the post-Christmas period on the right footing
- Links 25/12/2025: Mail Carriers in "a Murky Future", Dihydroxyacetone Man’s "Chip Embargo Against China Backfiring Spectacularly"
- Links for the day
- The Register MS: All I Want For Xmas is Microsoft
- they actually put effort into it
- How to Win Nobel Prize for Peace
- Do you get to Heaven (or peace platitudes) by sleeping with 72 virgins?
- The Right to Repair (Especially When Products Are So Poorly Made)
- Many electrical appliances fail often/quick and are nearly impossible to repair
- Links 25/12/2025: Ample Cover-up Found in Jeffrey Epstein Files; ChatGPT Causes Psychosis, Not a Good Use Case
- Links for the day
- Giving Money to Free Software
- In life, people must make sacrifices to do what's right and just
- The Register MS: Don't Use Linux
- That really says a lot about The Register MS
- EPO People Power - Part XV - EPO Cocainegate to Resume This Weekend
- The next installment (number 16) will probably come out this weekend
- Microsoft: XBox is Going "Online", "Cloud"...
- XBox as a console is pretty much dead
- The Year of the Bubble
- We hope that in 2026 the marketing liars will find some new buzzwords to latch onto and quit calling everything "AI"
- Mozilla Firefox is a GAFAM Browser With Slop, Move to a Free Software Web Browser
- on mobile the options would be more limited
- libera.chat Was Under Attack Last Night
- Several months from now libera.chat turns 5
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raises Over $300,000 Before Christmas
- the FSF made it past $300,000
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 24, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, December 24, 2025