Juan J. Martínez used to talk here about Open Source and Other Things.
This is a blog in archive mode, you can read new posts at en_GB@blog
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From The story behind the story behind the news today by Michael Meeks, regarding The Document Foundation.
Good news! (and about time!)
Free Software Street is a street about 300 meters from the city of Berga, in the province of Barcelona (Spain) […].
It is the first in the world dedicated to the Free Software movement, and was officially opened by Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman on 3 July 2010.
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From Free Software Street entry in the WIkipedia.
Please, notice the Gnome icon in the street sign. You can find the Gnome icon in Podiatry Clinics too.
Yes, I agree that Spain is different.
This is a must see, really.
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Continues:
This ruling demonstrates the weakness of the arguments of those who, until now, have opposed the adoption of rules aimed at promoting and favoring Free Software arguing that they conflict with the principle of “technological neutrality”.
Brilliant. Software freedom as a legal feature.
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From Back Home, with Debian!, by Bradley M. Kuhn.
Bradley explains his reasons to leave Ubuntu, see: Ubuntu One server side software (non-free, and it’s future strong integration in Ubuntu Desktop), Canonical’s copyright assignment policies, ‘restricted’ is too close to ‘main’, and finally that all those problems come from a community oriented distribution based on a for-profit company.
I’m not sure if I agree with a for-profit, corporate-controlled distribution can never remain community-oriented
. What do you think? Is Fedora different with Red Hat?
Canonical did it well in the past releasing Launchpad’s code, what’s the difference with Ubuntu One?
Lemme add: while possible.
--------------------- Kernel Begin ------------------------
WARNING: Segmentation Faults in these executables
npviewer.bin : 1 Time(s)
WARNING: General Protection Faults in these executables
npviewer.bin : 9 Time(s)
---------------------- Kernel End -------------------------
This is an extract of the logwatch report that it’s generated every day in my Fedora system (do you read it, don’t you?)
Yes, it’s the flash-plugin 10.0.42.34-release (non-free, from Adobe repos), and yesterday crashed 10 times and I don’t remember I browsed any page with intensive flash stuff on it (that’s very vague, because almost any page in the Internet has Flash on it).
Anyway, it crashes, it sometimes eats all my CPU (and/or the sound it’s choppy), and it piss me off that I can’t see Vimeo stuff on HD (may be it’s my 3 years old laptop), but there’s no replacement right now that doesn’t exclude you from being a normal web citizen.
I think it’s too late for Flash, but we must learn from this story and try doing something so it doesn’t happen again. I bet you’ve seen links to Spotify, haven’t you? What happens when you click on it? Disappointment.
I don’t know what’s the formula to stop this kind of viral closed source adoption that leads to de facto standards that finally avoids you to be free to choose, but I know that Gtalk and XMPP advocacy helped with the Microsoft Messenger issue.
We may need both: a free implementation of the idea, and a cool company to promote it.
The linked text is in Spanish, the title says: Windows in the schools for 8 Euros, whatever happened to open source?
According to the text, Microsoft is selling Window 7 to Spanish education system with about a 90% of discount over the market price (8€ per student/year).
The education Ministry and Microsoft have signed today an agreement that will allow the different Spanish autonomic regions to acquire Windows 7 within the “Escuela 2.0” program -School 2.0 (sic), the government new program for digitalization of the education-.
What can I say? After years of free software support and advocacy, this is very sad and I feel ashamed of the government of my country.
And they keep saying that the laptops they’re going to provide to the students will have dual boot so privative software and free software have the same opportunities. WTF?!
The Franklin Street Statement (named for the FSF’s office address) is something like a definition of what should be a free service, as a network service that it’s the result of free software and which shares free data.
Overall I like the idea, although I don’t think some parts are a good idea (we hope to work with organizations including the FSF to provide moral and technical leadership on this issue
; I’d have liked it better being just in the open source arena… is there a definition for a open service?).
Yes, I endorse the Franklin Street Statement.
This press note it’s very impressing for me, and it’s not for the success story with a bank in Spain but because very often customers in Spain don’t allow you to disclose your work with them. So the fact Red Hat is doing business with a bank in Spain is good news, but making it public it’s a double win!
I know some guys inside Red Hat Spain, and I know they’re working in some awesome projects (believe me when I say awesome, and Fedora it’s involved in this awesomeness), but the customer doesn’t allow Red Hat saying it in public.
I think this is a big deal, because we all know the success stories of the privative software vendors, but we need to know that free software is for real and that there are real solutions working out in the real world.
We know all companies look for the business, but as free software advocate and supporter I feel it’s a pity nobody knows that the free software it’s kicking ass.
So congratulations for Red Hat, and keep on rocking (even we don’t really know how much you’re rocking!).
Yes! Five years since I started to use this distribution. We’re far away from the following joke:
Ubuntu: African word that means
I can’t install Debian.
But the feeling remains the same: an easy to install and easy to use distribution, that keeps pushing the Linux desktop and the free software forward in each release.
I think Ubuntu success is the success of all the free software, and I’m sure their pushing has been good for all the related projects distributed by them.
Happy birthday Ubuntu and keep going!
