Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-22 18:55:05 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-22 19:00:10 UTC
Summary: Today's news about digital freedom and openness
Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting -- a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
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Web Browsers
Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world's fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we'll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
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Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download ("Save link as") / upload dialog - in Linux that is, as I didn't try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I've noticed it.
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SaaS
There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion's Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.
In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
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BSD
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port--this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
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Project Releases
The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware".
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Government
Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
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Openness/Sharing
It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
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Open Data
Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Google Still Promotes Plagiarism From WebProNews and Prolific Slopfarms
- Google News seems lost and hopeless sometimes
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- EPO People Power - Part I - Identifying Corruption
- The EPO, at this stage, is a boat full of holes
- IBM Has Become a "Plantation"
- IBM is basically being destroyed for some cash at this point
- It's Not Too Late to Send an E-mail to Your European Representative Regarding European Patent Office Abuses
- If you live in Europe and have not done so already, please contact your national delegates, whose job is (at least on paper) to represent you
- Y Combinator (YC) Funds Scams, Run by Scammers
- Including Scam Altman
- Almost a Thousand EPO Workers Have Voted for Industrial Action
- Mandate given to SUEPO for action plan to stop the salary erosion of EPO staff
- Why So Many Software Projects Are Quitting Microsoft and GitHub
- Be more like LibreWolf. Move away from Microsoft and GitHub.
- Many of the Attacks on Us Apparently Boil Down to Jealousy
- Envy is a negative trait that leads people to self harm
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, December 09, 2025
- Valuing One's Work by the Effort or Budget Taken to Undermine It
- As long as what we publish is factual, nothing prevents its publication
- IBM Says It Buys Another Company for "AI", So Why Does IBM Fire Its Own "AI" Experts?
- As people rightly point out, this has nothing to do with "AI"
- The Boundaries of Criticism
- The harder the EPO will push back, the better the job we must have done
- New EPO Series: Mafia Culture, Mobbing, Nepotism, and Illegal Drugs
- The series shall start later today
- Richard Stallman Was Right About "AI"
- "Considering Stallman worked in the MIT AI lab in the era of symbolic AI, and has written GCC (an optimizing compiler is a kind of symbolic reasoner imo), I think he has a deeper understanding of the question than most famous people in tech."
- With 3 Weeks Left (Sans Extensions) the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Already Raised About Half of the Money Set as Fund-Raising Goal
- “Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it.” — Richard Stallman
- Gemini Links 10/12/2025: Cranberry Juice and Gramophones
- Links for the day
- IBM: We Lay Off Tens of Thousands of People the Very Same Week We Spend 11 Billion Dollars (Debt) on "AI" Fantasies, Hiring About 8,000 People at Cost of 1.3+ Million Dollars Per Employee
- Seems like IBM is run by fools
- Links 09/12/2025: Tariffs Causing Great Harm and "How to Leave the U.S.A."
- Links for the day
- Links 09/12/2025: "After the Bubble" (of Slop), "The Internet Forgets"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/12/2025: Lunar Observations and Programming
- Links for the day
- Linux Foundation Has Found a New Business: Pyramid Schemes
- Linus Torvalds should have known better
- They Won't Tell You This ("Revolution Won't Be Televised"), But the Slop Bubble Already Burst
- We already wrote about it twice this morning
- UbuntuPIT Started Experimenting With LLM Slop and a Month Ago It 'Died'
- This is the typical trajectory of slopfarms
- LibreWolf Will Turn Six in March, It Already (Probably) Has Millions of Users
- It's not possible to know the number of users LibreWolf has
- The Year of the New Dark Age
- Something isn't right
- Slopwatch May be Doomed
- Slop isn't changing the world, certainly not in a good way anyway
- BetaNews Still a Dodgy Site, It Seems to be Partly Run by Chatbots
- The company that took over apparently tries to "monetise" the domain with slop
- Tomorrow the EPO Administrative Council is Meeting to Discuss the EPO, Contact Your National Representative Today
- Final versions of the EPO Administrative Council photo gallery
- IBM's Total Debt is About to Hit Almost 80 Billion Dollars, the Company Can Only Raise $14.8 Billion Within 3 Months
- Route towards insolvency, not just irrelevancy
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, December 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, December 08, 2025
- IBMers Impacted by the Mass Layoffs (Which IBM Tries Not to Talk About) Are Livid as the CEO "Spends 11 Billion He Doesn’t Have"
- IBM dooms both its brand and its future
- Consumerism and Christmas
- Many of us yearn for prior decades when December was about family, not shopping
- 'Linux' Foundation 'Research' (Marketing) Has New Report About "Open Source" and It Was Made Using Proprietary Software and Not Linux
- what 'Linux' Foundation 'Research' is
- Links 08/12/2025: Cambodia-Thailand Air Raids, Japan/China Military Incident
- Links for the day
- The "Cut 10,000 Jobs" Clickbait and Microsoft Sites Now Speculating That Microsoft CEO Has Just Signalled More Mass Layoffs
- by our tally, Microsoft had more than 30,000 layoffs this year, not 15,000
- Canonical Outsourcing Ubuntu to Microsoft Results in Broken Ubuntu, Just as One Can Expect
- State actors and Microsoft prefer it that way
- Mocking a Software Developer for Using the Terminal or Programs Like Emacs
- A decade ago someone asked RMS (Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement) to send a screenshot
- OpenAI Traffic Collapsing (for 3 Months in a Row About 20% Down Per Month), Bankruptcy Likely Soon
- How much time has OpenAI got before its massive debt is too much for anyone to shoulder or bear?
- IBM + NDA = Laid Off Workers Saying "Thank You" for the Layoffs
- The important thing is, for now, more people become aware of it
- Monsieur Claude Sahl, Part of the Administrative Council of the EPO (Which Fails to Administer the EPO), Has Been There For Over 30 Years
- They have basically built themselves a very expensive palace in Bavaria (Germany), in which to grant European monopolies to billionaires and companies that aren't even European
- Open Letter to the Administrative Council of the EPO Calls For Action as Salaries Decrease (Just Like Patent Validity)
- Based on what I heard and spoke about with journalists, they accept there is a substance abuse problem at the EPO's management
- Links 08/12/2025: "Leaving Intel" (Exodus Continues) and Ways "to Civilize Digital Life"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 08/12/2025: Earbuds and Offline 'Smartphones'
- Links for the day
- Books About Bubbles
- calling things "AI" and "AIs" can mislead the reader
- Links 08/12/2025: Slop Failing and Windows Users Won't 'Upgrade' Due to Slop
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, December 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, December 07, 2025