Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the NSA Spying Scandal closely. In fact, I’ve been following it for several years, since before I first ran into Barrett Brown. Seriously. The leaks about go back a long way, and most writers appear to have missed the implications.
Category archives: Open Source
Getting the Desktop Back Up And Running
Due to various exigencies, my desktop got loaned out. In other words a friend’s gaming rig died, he needed something with lots of horsepower, and didn’t have the cash to buy a replacement. So he got my desktop as a loaner.
The Charge of the Tablet Brigade
With apologies to Alfred Lord Tenneyson Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Shops Rode the six hundred. “Forward the Tablet Brigade! Charge for the consumers!” he said. Into the valley of Shops Rode the six hundred. Let’s talk about tablets.
Software Licensing – Don’t Complain If You Don’t Like The License
Over and over again, I hear complaints about software licensing. The two main complaints are always the same: 1) Proprietary Licenses are too restrictive. 2) The General Public License is too restrictive. Do you see a theme here?
SCOicide – The SCO Group vs the World
On June 28, 2002, Darl McBride became the Chief Executive Officer of Caldera International, and proceeded to kill the company. The above statement may seem rather strong to those who don’t know the background. Caldera International was a Linux Distributor. The company had made many improvements to Linux (including the first GUI installer), and while […]
Open Source vs Free Software – a Philosophical discussion
Everyone is aware of the huge fuss going on at present. What we have appears to be a conflict between two philosophical viewpoints, fueled by claims that one community is under attack by the other community. This is wrong, and here’s why: Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, with the aim of […]
Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists
What’s This About? Our community and the people in it, are under attack. We are being disrupted, we are being defamed, we are being lied to, and, in some instances, we are even having our lives invaded. Sounds serious. Can you supply any examples? More importantly, there is a consistent thread running through these attacks, […]
The Mono Firefight
Well OK, it’s not a movie. But with all the excitement we’ve had lately about Mono I decided to do some research. to find out how it all started. Many links later, I think I’ve located the start of the current controversy, and a bit better understanding of it. This set of links is not […]
Think of it as Evolution in Action
Bryan Lunduke is of the opinion that Free Software programmers are wasting their time. That we should do things once, and avoid re-implementing the wheel. Curiously Helios wrote a blog post about Bryan’s presentation, in which he seemed to back Bryan (and a later post which appears to disagree). Now I don’t know either of […]