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Mention Jimmy Wales and you automatically think Wikipedia; however, that is not his only love child. The Wikia search engine is his latest offspring — or least it was when it was launched in January 2008. Wikia has been devised as a free software and open source alternative to Google and others search engines. In an article in June I speculated about how the internet might change the way we think.; I mentioned in passing the Wikia search engine. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine

We interviewed Matthew Bloch, one of the founders of British hosting company, Bytemark. He talks about his company, and their commitment to free software. You be the judge! Read the full interview at Freesoftware Magazine.

Some time ago I was required to adapt a bespoke website application (which I had originally written) so it not only supported multiple languages but also multiple character sets. The website, MakingContact.org, is a on-line community for families with disabled children run by the charity Contact a Family. It required “support” for four languages in addition the English it was currently in: Somali, Arabic, Farsi and Simplified Chinese. Yes, I know the latter is not actually a language but for these purposes the cap fitted. I decided to do it using Smarty, the PHP-based templating engine. Whilst it was possible that a CMS or similar could do the job now, at the time I could find none which supported multiple character sets in the way I required. I’ve been meaning to write the process down for some time so here’s how I did it. Read Ryan's story of how he did it at Freesoftware Magazine.

A recent attack piece against Richard Stallman was written by Linus Torvalds on the eve of Obama’s election. Black and white by Linus Torvalds Linus begins with this: So I’m pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 and use it as the license for all my projects that I care about. How unfortunate to write negatively of Stallman in the very first sentence. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

A recent article caught my eye and turned it a nice shade of red. It discussed the hardly new idea that the future of software usage must involve a mixture of free and proprietary products something the writer refers to as “mixed source”. The piece was entitled “Mixed source - the best of both worlds” which may give you a clue as to where I disagree with it. The article was an opinion piece by Steve Harris, senior director for open source products at Novell in issue 78 of Linux User & Developer magazine. Sadly it’s not yet available on-line and I don’t honestly know if it will be. If it is I’ll post a comment with a link here so you can read it for yourself.Freesoftware Magazine

GNU/Linux has come a long way since XXMS, the Winamp wannabe. The number of free media players has bloomed: Amarok, Banshee, Rhythmbox, Kaffeine, Kplayer and JuK. They have enough features to cater for every need a dedicated music lover could wish for. So Songbird, which is not even at version 1.0, would have its work cut out to rival those media players especially the ability to play video as well as music. But Songbird has one unique feature. It has a built-in browser, Mozilla, which allows it to extract maximum mileage from your music collection. Web integration leverages your music and allows you to do some really great stuff. This article will look at the features of Songbird that make it an essential addition to any installation. Read the complete article at Freesoftware Magazine.

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was “Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for”. His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of strippers in Perth. Yes, I would classify the link quite work-safe. After talking about it for a while, I decided that it would be a good idea to write a short case study about how I created the site. So, here we go. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

A few weeks ago I discussed the main features of the Chrome browser and Google’s motives; at that point I was like the poor child, nose pressed against the window pane, looking inside at the sumptuous feast at the master’s table. I, like all GNU/Linux users, hadn’t been invited. Same as ever. Crossweavers decided to gate crash the party and bring their own drink too. In short, in just eleven days from the launch of Chrome they built a version running under Wine, and although their products are proprietary and they usually reciprocate by giving code back to free software like Wine, this time they gave it away for free. Thus did Chrome become Chromium and I had a chance to download and install it. Reader, I benchtested it. Read the full review at Freesoftware Magazine.

For the past 26 weeks I’ve been producing the Bizarre Cathedral strips for Free Software Magazine. Every one of them is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commerical-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) licence. Recently I’ve received a few pieces of mail saying this is a “non-free” licence and questioning my use of it here. Some of them are quite polite, others have demanded I change the licence immediately (presumably “or else”). I’m not going to change the license, and here’s why. Read Ryan Cartwright's reasons for his non-free licence at Freesoftware Magazine.

The pace of software development — regardless of the licence — is pretty fast these days. The state of your systems need constant monitoring. New features, bug-fixes and (most important) security updates need to be properly managed. Here, in no particular order, are five ways that choosing a free operating system will make system maintenance a lot easier and simpler. In short they are ways that — when it comes to system updates — GNU/Linux beats Windows. Discover Ryan Cartwright's reasons why GNU/Linux beats seven bells out of Windows when it comes to updating by reading the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Not long ago I watched a free software developer totally lose his cool with a user who (admittedly very frustratingly) posted a “bug report” in Spanish on an English-language project that amounted to “it doesn’t work”. He posted a very sarcastic reply in a couple of random languages (one of them through a machine translator). It was an understandable reaction, and in a way, kind of funny if you could understand all of the languages involved, but it wasn’t exactly good public relations. It was a sure sign of burnout. He had forgotten one important point: you are not obligated to help just because you wrote the thing. Read Terry Hancock's advice to hard-pressed software developers on how to cope at Freesoftware Magazine.

I don’t like KDE4. I don’t like the Dolphin file manager either. There, I said it. I’m not trying to start a flame war. Really. But those dislikes are proportional to my concern about the future of Konqueror. For my money, it is just about one of the best things before and since sliced bread. I loved it enough to write about here at length and in depth. As a file manager it is packed to the gunnels with power features and as a browser it’s not half bad either. The integration of both in this universal document viewer is the killer feature but it is getting rather left behind behind in the Web 2.0 goldrush. I worry that it might wither on the vine. Then, I discovered Krusader. It’s a massively powerful and feature-packed twin panel file manager and if Dolphin isn’t cutting the mustard Krusader might just be what you’ve been looking for. Gary Richmond tours the killer features of Krusasder and you can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Regular readers of this column will know that I’m a fan of education and positive experience as an advocacy tool in place of shouting from rooftops. Winning the mindset of an average computer user — particularly home users — is never going to be a quick process but a recent experience showed me we still have some old and familiar hills to climb. How do we combat legacy reputations of GNU/Linux that are no longer valid? Ryan Cartwright explores how to combat the legacy reputations in GNU/Linux by way of a telling tale about Debian, Windows and his friend's printer. Read the whole article at Freesoftware Magazine.

These days there’s a lot of buzz about “Web 2.0” and making websites more interactive, but what’s really going on is a reconnection to the community nature of the internet. Collaboration, cooperation, and the information commons are all ideas that pre-dated the world wide web in the form of older internet technologies. In today’s distributed computing environment, though, these technologies have really flourished. Here’s a guide to eight that you should consider making use of in building a community around an information commons project of any kind, from multimedia, to hardware, to software. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

The temptation to compare the FreeRunner and the Apple iPhone can be overwhelming. They both run a Unix-like operating system; they both have GPS, wi-fi, and accelerometers; they are both cell phones. In spite of their similarities, their differences are even more striking. Anthony Taylor takes a look at the features of FreeRunner and discovers that it is not the iPhone, but a handheld computer with GPS and cellphone capabilities and runs on free software. You can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

In a recent article on free software and the Large Hadron Collider I mentioned that here in the United Kingdom The Guardian, a national British newspaper, had founded a campaign called “free our data”. They objected to the fact that the Ordnance Survey (and others), funded by the British taxpayer, was charging business and individuals for its cartographic data thus effectively making people pay for it twice. Their campaign is great but until such times as it succeeds an alternative is needed. A free software alternative. Enter OpenStreetMaps. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

An increasing number of computer users are turning to online applications instead of ones on their desktop. It started with webmail and has moved to productivity/office tools. With the emergence of online applications that have no desktop equivalent, and mobile devices that are browsers in your pocket, things are looking up. But what about free software? If the software we are using is not run on the computer on our desk/lap/hand what does the licence matter? For some time now I’ve been reading predictions where the browser will be the computer. Does this future have space for free software? Ryan Cartwright raises a very timely question about the significance of software licences in an era of online applications. You can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

In the proprietary production world, what matters about a copyright is who owns it. In the free production world, however, who owns a copyright is relatively unimportant. What matters is what license it is offered under. There is a very simple rule of thumb about the best license to use: use a “free, copyleft license”. As usual, Terry Hancock forensically analayses issues of copyleft, the GPL and licences generally and you can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

So far, all of the browsers that I reviewed for this book have been Gnome-based browsers. Epiphany is a Gnome-sponsored project, and Firefox is rapidly moving towards Gnomeization (though at the time of this writing, a Qt port of Firefox is under heavy development). What’s a good KDE user to do? Simple: use the conqueror of the browser market, Konqueror. Andrew Min is your guide to the all singing, all dancing, resident KDE browser Konqueror. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

The launch of Google’s Chrome has created a frenzy of online activity (just Google it and it will return in excess of fifty one million results), including mine. and already the world and his wife has been busy publicising tips, tricks and hacks. There is absolutely no doubt that Google is very serious about its new baby. They hired no less than four Firefox developers—Ben Goodger, Pam Greene, Darin Fisher and Brian Ryner. Enough said. It wasn’t dreamed up on the spur of the moment as another speculative product of the Summer of Code. Can the same be said of Knol? What is it, how does it work and more importantly, does it conform with the principles of free software and is it a serious challenger to Wikipedia? Find out why Gary Richmond thinks Google's knol is a stinker and not the remotest threat to Wikipedia by reading the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.