Showing headlines posted by mbaehrlxer

The company's business model put up too many barriers, and it's hard to compete without flexibility for all It's possible you've already forgotten App.net. It was the crowdfunded startup that was going to teach Twitter a lesson and start a new machine-to-machine messaging platform at the same time. Now they plan to shut down development, shift to a best-efforts maintenance-only approach, and give up their attempt to share revenue with their developer community. They also say they will try to use open source as part of their triage.

1976 was a good year for text editors. At MIT, Richard Stallman and Guy Steele wrote the first version of Emacs. And over at Berkeley, Bill Joy wrote vi. It’s reductionist to say that these two editors were each built around one big idea, but what the hell, let’s be reductionist. Because what stands out in 2014, looking at modern editors like Sublime Text and Atom, is how Emacs’ big idea has been thoroughly learned — and how vi’s big idea hasn’t.

Red Hat, the Linux operating system company, pioneered the original open source business model. Red Hat gives away open source software for free but charges a support fee to those customers who rely on Red Hat for maintenance, support, and installation. As revenue began to roll into Red Hat, a race began among startups to develop an open source offering for each proprietary software counterpart and then wrap a Red Hat-style service offering around it. Red Hat is a fantastic company, and a pioneer in successfully commercializing open source. However, beyond Red Hat the effort has largely been a failure from a business standpoint.

Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them, so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and fuck you in every possible way.

Recently Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of what appears to be her college radio station, wrote a post on the NPR blog in which she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life. Our intention is not to embarrass or shame her. We believe young people like Emily White who are fully engaged in the music scene are the artist’s biggest allies. We also believe–for reasons we’ll get into–that she has been been badly misinformed by the Free Culture movement. We only ask the opportunity to present a countervailing viewpoint.

[what do Lxer readers think about this?]

Cards on the table, software engineers generally have a reputation for being arrogant, disagreeable, and moody. We also have a reputation for saying “no”, for debating pedantic details, and thinking we know how to do everyone’s job better than they can. In general, this reputation is deserved. That’s exactly what we do, day in, day out, as we intermix writing code with checking in on Twitter and Hacker News.

The programming community and the furry community are an interesting pair. In one way, they are polar opposites of each other, and yet both of them share what seems to be a ubiquitous aspect of humanity - a small percentage of them are completely ... insane. The difference is that the furry community is about positive feelings, and the programming community is centered around negative feelings.

Phoronix declares the death of open-source graphics, but I disagree. Now, I am not really following the projects mentioned in the article (though I pay attention when I come across the topic), but I believe that open-source graphics is far from dead and it will come back. I am certain. We just need some patience.

DRM turned a 10 minute purchase into a 2 and a half nightmare (and counting). I wanted to buy a book: I ended up in a journey which made it dead clear that in a sane world, there is absolutely no space for DRM-protected contents. The only real warning I have about this article is that it may make you feel sick.

There are two major terms connected to software you can freely use, study, share and improve: Free Software and Open Source. Based on them you can also find different combinations and translations like FOSS, Libre Software, FLOSS and so on. Reading articles about Free Software or listening to people involved in Free Software often raises the question why do they use one term or another and how they differ from each other. But no matter which term we use, we should not allow people to split our community just because of different terminology. At the end most of us work on the same set of software, improve it and foster software freedom no matter what our motivation or preferred term is. The community needs to stay together to have an impact on all levels of involvement and to improve Free Software in all aspects. Don’t let other use the strategy of “divide and conqueror” to harm our movement.

(OLPC News Editor's Note: Over the past 2 weeks we have provided you with different views on IDB's ongoing evaluation of Peru's OLPC project and the many discussions around it by Oscar Becerra and Marta Voelcker. Now when we saw this blog post by Eugenio Severín and Julián Cristiá from the IDB's education blog we immediately thought that it was a great complement to the aforementioned perspectives. Thanks to Eugenio for kindly allowing us to re-publish their post here.)

I can tell you all manner of good things about languages I avoid, and all manner of bad things about languages I enjoy. PHP is the lone exception. Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.) [found via LWN]

I was surprised by the beginning of the Economist's article "Error Message" (based on the IADB study) that says the Peruvian Una Laptop por Niño project "did not accomplish anything in particular". The IADB study clearly stated that the project "substantially increased use of computers both at school and at home", "positive effects were found in general cognitive skills" and improved "competence in operating laptops in tasks related to core applications (like a word processor) and searching for information on the computer".

Programs and services are different kinds of entities. A program is a work that you can execute; a service is an activity that you might interact with. For programs, we make a distinction between free and nonfree (proprietary). More precisely, this distinction applies to a program that you have a copy of: either you have the four freedoms for your copy or you don't. An activity (such as a service) doesn't exist in the form of copies, so it's not possible to have a copy or to make copies. As a result, the four freedoms that define free software don't make sense for services.

For quite a while I've been collecting links, tweets and other stuff to illustrate another problem that's been affecting me (and other people, surely). I thought it was finally time to write the post and bring this up because, honestly, I feel excluded too. It's the booze. You can't go anywhere, do anything or talk to anyone in the tech industry these days without a drink in your hand. If you try to fake it with a soda water you may as well give up trying to have insightful conversations after the first hour, because everyone else is wasted.

Users are asking what kind of environment we are using in Foresight, We are still using GNOME 2, openbox and xfce. Also recently LXDE has been added. (KDE 3.5 and 4 are available but need more help to keep uptodate)

In other news, several games have been added and python 2.7 support will come soon.

1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services. The Document Freedom Award is awarded annually on the occasion of Document Freedom Day - the international day for Open Standards. Last years winners include tagesschau.de, Deutschland Radio, and the German Foreign Office.

Whether we like it or not, H.264 is "the" de-facto standard on the Internet. Every time you visit Youtube, you are watching a video encoded using the H.264 standard. The video quality is great, the compression is astonishing. And so is the price. H.264 is subject to a huge number of software patents. You need to pay hefty licensing fees if you want to create H.264 files today. We, the users, are not feeling this as we are not paying a cent. However, the freedomes allowed by this format are limited, and vague at best: here is why.

Earlier this year we announced that we would be conducting a Drupal usability study that we would live stream so viewers could watch as participants worked with Drupal 7. Becky Gessler and I are excited to announce our analysis of the results that we will also present at DrupalCon Denver to the Drupal community in a “core conversation” session with Jen Lampton called “User eXperience for Open Source: How to Galvanize a Community."

"In judo, the goal is to use the momentum of the person attacking you to defend yourself, and that is exactly what copyleft does" The intent of free software is to render the code that runs the machines that run our lives transparent. In the words of Lawrence Lessig, free software is "free in the sense that the control coders build be transparent to all, and that anyone have the right to take that control, and modify it as he or she sees fit."