Showing headlines posted by zigzag

Are you winning if you own ninety-nine percent of a moribund market? I don't think so. Linux and Open Source/Free Software has crossed the chasm now. It has become the mainstream. Every Android tablet or phone out there is a Linux and Open Source/Free Software platform, and in the next few years I fully expect this to become the most common form of computing for most people worldwide.. So have we won? Should we just pack up the advocacy tent and go home? Unfortunately not. Most of the applications running on these devices are still proprietary. Most people using mobile devices, although they might be running a Free Software operating system underneath, still don't realize why Free Software is important.

Censorship is practised for all kinds of political, social and commercial reasons, and all societies have limits on acceptable behaviour, but the point of the web is that there are no walled gardens and no limits to what we can access. If information wants to get out there, it will.

The course of open-source software does not always run smoothly, especially when the development of software becomes entangled with broader corporate strategies.

Good design captures the Zeitgeist, and sometimes leads the way in forming and informing popular taste. But it should not be the subject of patent or intellectual property spats, or be allowed to spread the notion that the rights to ideas and tastes or look and feel can be owned. When one company, or one technology, is allowed to lock down the market and own the way we do things, the result is ossification.

Linus Torvalds has been saying rude things about GNOME, and Benjamin Otte has been staring into the abyss. GNOME 3 hasn't been the easy success the GNOME developers might have hoped for, and users are said to be leaving for Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon, all of which replicate in some aspect or another the GNOME 2 user experience.

Not for the first time, Mandriva, the Paris-based Linux company, is fighting its way back from the edge of bankruptcy. This time the outcome might be different as the company sets about constructing a sustainable business model, building bridges and healing rifts with the community.

For a variety of reasons business is often seen as antipathetic to copyleft licensing. The GPL - the GNU General Public License - the most popular copyleft licence, sometimes gets a hostile press, often for reasons that don’t reflect its real and positive effects.

Nokia may recover but hope may lie not so much with Windows Phone, which has a mountain to climb to compete with the iPhone or Android at the high end of the market, but with a high-performance Linux-based replacement for its low-end S40 operating system.

Fedora 17 is to be known as Beefy Miracle, which is a contentious break from the Fedora tradition of giving each release a name that shares a relationship with the name of the previous release. Beefy Miracle's only link with Verne (Fedora 16) is that both were proposed as names for Fedora 16. The virtue of the name is that it is a meme that has been circulating for some time, and is meant to be a bit of fun. "The user will be amused by the constant presence of the Hot Dog. The mustard indicates progress."

Although current discussion of the Linux desktop tends to focus on the disharmony around Unity and the GNOME shell, the true revolution on the desktop is taking place out of sight of users. The Wayland display server is expected to reach version 1.0 later this year, and is seen by many as the long term replacement for the X Window System, with real potential to improve and transform the performance of the desktop for Linux users.

Mint is popular for many reasons. The distribution is easy to use, and its software choices are community driven. The core distribution is based on Ubuntu, and remains sufficiently like Ubuntu to catch the imagination of escapees (permanent or temporary) from the GNOME shell and Unity. But where Ubuntu (and GNOME) have taken a leap of faith in an attempt to anticipate the desires of future users, Mint is intent on satisfying the demands of its current users, which is to produce a desktop that is both innovative and closer to GNOME 2.

GNOME and KDE may be the high profile Linux desktop environments, but they are not to everybody's tastes. Richard Hillesley describes the different approaches taken by a couple of the more prominent alternatives.

Richard Hillesley talked with Dave Neary about his experience working with open source communities and companies, and discovered that the important thing is not so much what the rules are, but that everyone knows what they are.

Shuttleworth's gamble is that users will change their minds as they gain familiarity, that Unity will gain traction as a universal interface, scalable across all devices, and that it will be as attractive to a certain class of user as Apple claims to be. Only time will tell whether Oneiric Ocelot, and the advent of Unity as the only choice for the Ubuntu desktop, marked the moment when Ubuntu began to scale the heights of universal acceptability, or fell back to earth with a bump.

The Linux Foundation's Executive Director Jim Zemlin sat down with The H's Editor-in-Chief at LinuxCon Europe to talk about the embedded initiative, the purpose of the Foundation, Linux desktop leadership and what applications he'd like to see on Linux.

Projects do not thrive when there are ambivalences and ambiguities around the ownership of the code that makes up the project, as can be seen from the fallout among the various projects that Oracle inherited through its purchase of Sun Microsystems.

The problem is not restricted to ownership of the code per se, but manifests itself in a lack of transparency around the future direction and licensing of the code. Devices such as dual licensing, copyright assignment and Community Licence Agreements (CLAs) can have unintended consequences; they can strip away the clarity of a project's purpose and act as a disincentive to the sense of community that is the lifeblood of an open source project.

LibreOffice was a dive into the unknown, and an opportunity to prove what the community already knew: that a chance to swim free could only bring positive results

Gentoo is not like other Linux distributions. The Gentoo swims faster than other penguins, and dives deeper. Where more fashionable distributions worry about fast installation and ease of use, Gentoo worries about efficient compilation and degrees of customization. Gentoo is not about ease of use or making installation easier for the new user. Computers are what you do with them, and most users have little or no knowledge of how their systems are put together, and care even less. Gentoo is for the users who want to reach under the hood, get their hands dirty, and learn.

The story of the free software desktop is littered with what-ifs and might-have-beens. The desktop has been 'good enough' for years, and can boast some considerable success stories, but has yet to make a significant breakthrough. On the face of it, the free software desktop should be an easy choice. The average GNU/Linux desktop costs little, looks good and performs well, and offers a real opportunity to break the upgrade cycle. Cost, security, scalability and versatility are persuasive arguments for the free desktop, but other factors have worked against the uptake of Linux at the corporate level. Inertia among users is usually given as the reason and users are made to take the blame, but perhaps there are simpler explanations. The desktop has been left in the hands of the Linux companies, and the Linux companies are many and small. Many have come with grand ambitions and some with high ideals, but few have stayed the course.

The splits and controversies around LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have highlighted a number of issues concerning the licensing and corporate governance of open source projects and communities