Celebrate Software Freedom Today 107
An anonymous reader writes "It's that time of the year again: when we all unite regardless of the (free) licenses we cherish and go out into the streets to let people know how Free Software has changed our lives. With over 425 events in 80+ countries, communities as diverse as Joomla!, FreeBSD and The OpenDisc, to name just a few, will be celebrating all over the world. Don't wait; grab your best arguments and join the wild masses of freedom lovers to the software freedom parties. Where will you be partying today?"
On Saturday? (Score:3, Funny)
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Because it's a celebration...?
Linux's Birthday (Score:2)
Well, today I'll be celebrating Linux's 20th birthday. I guess all you people who celebrated earlier dates for Linux's birthday must celebrate your own birthday as the day yo mama told everyone she wasn't fat, she was pregnant.
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Girls?
Is that a git branch of the kernel? What is that?
-Hack
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GIRL: It's sort of like URL, except the resource is "generally infrequent" and possibly difficult to locate.
If you think about it, isn't a Freedom Day event a safer place to bring a date than a wild party? In which setting is a date more likely to run off with someone else?
Whether it be a girl, the Dell Dude, or just Hands Solo, bring your date along.
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GIRL is GNU in Real Life. Originally started by hippies by pooling their girlfriends, creating more competition and better services.
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and/or
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Open Source Definition vs Free Software Definition (Score:2)
open != free
Then why does each of the criteria of the Open Source Definition, as published by Open Source Initiative, echo one of the freedoms of the Free Software Definition, as published by Free Software Foundation?
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Most people don't follow the Open Source Definition when calling anything 'open'. The term 'open' has always been close to the dictionary definition and is a more relative term than that of Free Software. It's often coincidental that "open source", as defined by the average person, means the OSI's definition of the Open Source Definition.
In addition, 'open' is somewhat considered to be some sort of consumer inspired movement to go beyond just source code licensing and into allowing for a business model that
Party? (Score:3, Funny)
My basement. Alone. Where else?
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My basement
Technically, it's your parents' basement.
Free as in...? (Score:5, Interesting)
I do not mind if there was a charge for Linux, although being free is nice.
I decided to try Linux because as each iteration of Windows came about, more and more things get locked down so the user cant do things. For testing I still have a Windows install (used rarely), but by going from WinXP to Win7, even silly things like recording "What you hear" from the sound system have been locked down. It's this constant locking down of features that drove me to Linux.
Leaving aside major changes like KDE3 to KDE4, at least I am free to change the desktop the way I like, and not some way Microsoft wants you to "experience" in Windows.
One thing I will say, sometimes you can't get people to Linux no matter how many Live Distros you run showing their really old computer can be used again at a faster speed with up to date Linux compared to an ancient copy of Windows (and is too old to run up to minute Windows).
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I put Ubuntu on my mediaserver and started learning bits & pieces about Linux, after I got pissed off at Win7 bogging it down. So #fsd for me is about Linux and everything that I (didn't ;) ) torrent.
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BTW, the perceived "lock down" in Windows 7 of the audio system is in fact the ineptitude or unwillingness on the part of Microsoft to provide a media crossbar application for CoreAudio in Windows. The problem existed since Vista. The developer kit once contained a small application that solved the problem, but was removed, unfortunately. This is also one of the reasons for me why I've become a permanent Linux user for some years now.
Re:Free as in...? (Score:4, Informative)
It's totally on purpose. Microsoft have really bent over for the media cartels - the whole "Protected Media Path" gubbins is about this. You can't get an unsigned driver to load (outside of debug mode), which means you can't, for example, write a video driver that just dumps frames to disk.
Lubuntu (Score:3)
The current version of Ubuntu's system requirements are much steeper than XP's, and not far from Win 7's.
Nearly any desktop PC manufactured in the past ten years has a 1 GHz PIII or P4 CPU or faster and at least 512 MB of RAM (or enough slots for it), which is the minimum spec for mainstream Ubuntu. Lighter-weight Ubuntu flavors are also available: Lubuntu can run on a Pentium II with 128 MB. What are the specs of the machine that failed to meet the system requirements?
Or Puppy for that matter (Score:3)
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Recording audio from "what you hear" Ah... Memories.
I never could get it working in ALSA. It just... wouldn't. I could record from the synth channel of my Audigy 2, just nothing on the wave in channel.
PulseAudio, however... it was easy. One google search and I had a nice record command that'd record any applications audio out, and it seemed to work nicely.
Not that PA doesn't have its own problems
Ummm... (Score:1)
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In their defense, most people thought it was for Conan.
Hilarious (Score:1, Funny)
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It's Open Street Map.
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Speaking of MS Word, I looked at the list of celebrations for one in Microsoft's back yard. None are listed in Washington state. Time to get busy for next year. This year I'll looking to cross the river to Portland, but the link doesn't list a location for the event. Portland is a big place. I'll have to Google Wordpress to see if there is more info.
Top Four by Country (Score:3, Interesting)
Top Four by country:
India 53
USA 37
Philippines 28
Mexico 27
Looks like Open Source is quite active in the Philippines and Mexico.
How do I make money in a free software world? (Score:1)
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The small percentage of people who have found true success will tell you to use donations. For everyone for whom that didn't work, I have no idea. Perhaps paid support or extras?
How about if I withhold my software until you pay me? The free market will set the price. Is that OK?
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How about if I withhold my software until you pay me? The free market will set the price. Is that OK?
Of course. Why are you setting up ridiculous straw-man arguments?
First you ask about how you can make a living in a hypothetical world in which all software is "free," presumably meaning that it's free-as-in-beer (doesn't cost money). But that world doesn't exist, and never will, for fundamental reasons. E.g., nobody is going to write an application for free for a corporation's internal use, to do something that only that corporation needs to do. Furthermore, nobody is calling for a world in which all softw
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Actually, as Eric Raymond pointed out in 'The Cathedral & the Bazaar', the usage of the term 'Free' was an unfortunate choice of words, given that it more intuitively implies free of cost, rather than free to re-engineer. What made it worse was that most 'Free' software was actually free (as in beer), making the differences b/w the two even more nebulous.
On RMS, he was once asked about the competitors to GNU, and when he listed some and was asked about Microsoft, his response was that they don't have
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Thus, if we need structural analysis software, developers get paid to do it and maintain it by tax money, and everyone has it for free.
Things change. Noone has a god-given right to earn money, if they do something that people don't care. To see how ridiculous is the asserti
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You go ahead and withhold your software, Galt, the world won't miss you.
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Wait, what? Those people get paid for their work? fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.
Seriously, though: you write a product wanted by a corporation - like Google giving hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for Mozilla Development, or companies spending millions on Linux development. Donation-based money from consumers is basically a way to poverty. So, I guess that pretty much lim
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I write code for a living, too. I write middleware for a large banking conglomerate and they really have two choices:
1) they pay me to write all the code needed from scratch
2) they pay me to extend GPLed code where possible and write just a little code myself (also GPL, as is required by the license).
They consistently chose 2) so far, although if they chose 1), I'd be happy too, safe busy employment for the next 5 years or so...
Someone has to write the software in the first place and for that, they get paid
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I need to feed my family. I write code for a living. How do I get paid for doing this in a world where all software is free?
You don't, but that world does not exist and never will. All the software I *directly* use in my daily life is already free; all the software I produce as a hobby is free. Yet I have no trouble finding things to do at work.
Re:How do I make money in a free software world? (Score:4, Insightful)
I need to feed my family. I write code for a living. How do I get paid for doing this in a world where all software is free?
I would think the answer was pretty obvious. Write software for which there is no free equivalent, or write software that is better than the free equivalent.
Re:How do I make money in a free software world? (Score:5, Insightful)
You provide services to install, configure, maintain, and customize the OSS core.
Or you use the OSS components to build custom solutions.
Except for wildly successful proprietary solutions, the money has always been in the customization. The only difference with OSS is you may have competition because other people also have access to that same OSS core.
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You are selling a *service* and *domain expertise*, not "software". Consulting as a signal processing / applied math guy, I use 90% free source hosted on girthub. Its too complicated and lacks documentation for anyone but a handful of friends in other places to understand, source is worthless to the client. They need
it to add the 10% that makes it work on their hardware in the field and do so reliably.
Re:How do I make money in a free software world? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, if it weren't for RMS, there would be no free BSD licenses either.
RMS tried to convince the Berkeley folks to go with a GPL type license. He failed that, but some of his argument for free software sunk in with the folks at Berkeley.
Personally, I like the viral component of the GPL license, because I don't want bigcorp stealing my code as a base, and then charging me if I want access to their improvements. If you are ok with such things, then BSD is for you. But, even if you prefer the BSD license,
Ahem... (Score:4, Funny)
Richard Stallman had a printer,
whose code he could not see.
So he began to tinker,
And set the software free.
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More like "Xerox created printer, which could not print". Lets thank Xerox and other commercial software/hardware vendors for what they did to OSS.
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"The most merciful quality of the human mind is its inability to correlate its contents" --HPL
who? http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hpl [google.com]
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Seventh one down: http://www.hplovecraft.com/ [hplovecraft.com]
What terrible comments (Score:4, Insightful)
Half are trolls, most are useless, and few are above +3. Slashdot's demographics seem to have rotted out completely.
Free Advertising! (Score:1)
FOSS (Score:1)
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Mod. Parent. UP.
Actually, on top of the above, I think it also has to do with the personality-type of the user: Aside from a slight bit of DOS when I was about 8(i.e. "a:, install" etc), I'd been windows-only and rarely used a command line until I tried Linux at about 15. Sometime in the next year I ended up switching to it, and now, five years later, I can't live without my command line handy. It's just /so/ convienient to have all that scripting power right there, and access to everything I want, instantl
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Well, see.. I, for one, don't care. It works for me, and I'm just as glad not to have to provide support for the idiocy I see in a number of the unwashed Windows-using masses. /I/ want to use, and if they happen to require some CLI to use, well, so be it.
I will put my coding time into making tools
If you, or anyone else wants to make a noob-friendly version, I'm not stopping you. You can take from the massive amounts of applications, desktops and other things, choose whatever you want, patch it, and distribu
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Yeah, I know, I shouldn't be feeding the trolls.
- - -
Thing is, I don't *need* numbers. Why in the heck should I care whether 5;000 people use it or 500,000,000? So long as it does what I want, I see no reason to use something else. And until I see stuff like Teamspeak *dropping* support instead of adding it... I have no need to worry.
Also, please realize that I am not "the linux community". I have never provided code to an existing product, or properly compiled my own kernel. I'm just a guy. I have no real
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Microsoft has likewise failed (Score:4, Insightful)
even lower than a Java based phone OS?
I clicked the link and got "There was a problem retrieving your account information. Please contact support."
If there is ANY CLI then YOU HAVE FAILED.
Then Microsoft has likewise failed because the Windows recovery console is not graphical, and because the process for specifying arguments to a program run as a scheduled task (Start > Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks) is not graphical.
How about a "find drivers" button, both of which your competitor has had for years?
Ubuntu has one of those: System Settings > Hardware > Additional Drivers. So how does one convince device manufacturers to make working Linux drivers available to Linux distributors from day one, as opposed to Windows and Mac OS X on day one and Linux as an afterthought? The only way to get a "find drivers" button is to make a kernel that can use another operating system's drivers, and ReactOS has a chance to succeed where Linux failed because ReactOS aims for compatibility with the NT 5.x kernel used in said ten-year-old version of Windows.
Its just human nature folks, humans are visually oriented creatures that like to touch and explore.
So how does one automate a task by touching and exploring? I thought the whole point of using a computer was to automate repetitive information processing tasks.
CLIs are about as UNINTUITIVE an interface as you could possibly design
That's like saying giving someone instructions in English is about as UNINTUITIVE an interface as you could possibly design. Better to point and grunt.
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That's like saying giving someone instructions in English is about as UNINTUITIVE an interface as you could possibly design. Better to point and grunt.
Your analogy is flawed. Better to draw, point and explain. Like, an icon with tooltip when moused over.
Scripting (Score:2)
Better to draw, point and explain. Like, an icon
So when a user tries to automate a complex task, how does the user combine such icons into a larger whole?
with tooltip when moused over
Or we can go in the other direction, where Linux in the form of Android has been arguably more successful: What's the counterpart gesture to a mouseover on handheld devices that rely on touch input?
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Actually, I'd say the lack of a "find drivers" button is usually a *good* thing... because you shouldn't need it.
With Linux, all of the nice, up-to-date drivers come with the kernel, so any time you upgrade you get them upgraded too!
In fact, the only time we need such a button is when we have the stupid non-free drivers which can't be distributed with the kernel. I, for one, would be plenty happy to have the Nvidia driver included with the kernel by default, but until Nvidia decides to open-source it, I gue
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Wow, calm down :)
I don't think many Linux users are concerned about becoming the number 1 desktop market. We care more about using open standards which will enable us to use Linux if we want. One way of encouraging open standards is to get people to use Linux, OpenOffice, etc - but who cares what OS other people are using, as long as things are set up so that you can communicate freely with them, sending and receiving data in a format that anyone else can understand?
Having said that, when using Ubuntu I nev
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Oh fuck off, hairyfeet.
Re:My description of SFD (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll elaborate: despite your vendetta against the command line, do you use sign language instead of talking to people? The command line is far more natural and powerful than the GUI- it's like speech. Hell, even MS is implementing better command lines, does that mean microsoft is in decline? Or rather, is that the reason that microsoft is in decline? Not even, powershell is one of the most useful- or perhaps, the only useful administration tool they've introduced in years.
Ignoring your disgusting double standards and logical fallacies, your argument, or rather, conviction, is wrong as well. You hardly have to use the command line on linux if you don't want to, anyway, what- do you think this is still '95? One should never have to open the terminal in ubuntu, or mint for instance, to fix anything- it just makes it easier. What's more intuitive, "open up this program, browse to this menu, you sould see this, browse to this sub menu, click this button..." or "type this into bash and you're done"? Even if you maintain a CLI-free usage, you can still fix any problems that crop up in a... roundabout way. Your argument is both poor and totally irrelevent.
And, I know you're not likely to understand this as the biggest Microshill on slashdot, we don't want to castrate our OS for market share. Believe it or not, I, and many others, could not care less about being the most popular OS in the world- in fact, that'd take the fun out. I just want a solid OS kernel that powers distributions that I can run on stuff dating back to the 486, without issue- with good hardware support. What's the point of using linux if we've made it as unstable, crashy, bloated and locked down as windows, in a quest to emulate the biggest triumph of marketing over technology the world has yet known? Market share is irrelevant. What is relevant is making the best damn OS out there.
As for your bashing of OS market shares, even maintaining 1% is growth, as the number of computers in the world is much higher than it has ever been- however, the actual linux market share is 2%, most of that gained even in the past 3 years. Not to mention that little success that was linux on the phone, which you consistently refuse to acknowledge in your postings.
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Wow, PMS much?
Basically, I don't care much about linux being popular as an operating system, I just want people to use open standards so that OS support will never be a problem again, no matter what I'm on. And this, I think, has already begun. It was hell 5, 10 years ago, when people stopped, inexplicably, making native linux applications in large measure., and little-to-no cross-platform compatibility existed inherently.
The reason why I don't think I would like linux becoming popular is well, android. Fro