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In the past year I have written a couple blog post about monetary contributions to Open Source projects. There are lots of great projects out there that have taken many unpaid hours to create. The question I had was how to contribute to them monetarily. Today I ran across what I think is a great idea, Fairware.

Since 2008 I have enjoyed reading "Betty Blonde" a comic strip invented by talented young lady. The strip above is an example of her work. Her Father wrote a program to simplify the publishing of "Betty Blonde" to the web. After a couple of years the entrance into collage placed "Betty Blonde" on the back burner. Recently the decision was made to bring "Betty Blonde" back, along with this decision comes a rewrite of BleAx. BleAx is a great tool for anyone wanting to publish their comics to a website. In the coming days BleAx will be released as an open source program for Windows and Linux. The developer is currently looking for beta testers. The Windows beta installer should be finished this weekend and the Linux version will follow soon after. Leave a comment on his post if you are interested.

While following some links that I had received from a conversation on Diaspora* Alpha, I ran across the Smart Book, a great product from Always Innovating. While they offer them for sale, they do not yet have a shipping date. Reading their press release, it does not look like they plan to sell them in mass quantities. Imaging having a hand held Internet device, a tablet, a netbook, and screen that can be plugged into another computer, all in one device. Along with all of those features it runs multiple operating systems all at the same time. On top of everything else it is Open Hardware and Open Software. The complete package is listed at $549. I would love to get my hands on one.

Recently, I setup a bootable Linux USB key, to act as a portable OS. On the laptop I'm using as my test machine, boot to USB is unavailable in the BIOS. I was happy to find "Plop Boot Manager," it is a great program that allows me to boot my test machine (an old Dell laptop) from my Linux USB key. The following is from the Plop web site:

The reason I would like to see this happen is to simplify monetary support for the continued development of the free and open source programs and operating systems many of us use and enjoy. We also want to understand that there are costs involved in the development of these projects; time spent working on them and hosting would be two of the major costs. I understand there might be a number of difficulties arise from the consolidation of all the projects available. How to fairly share the contributions with each project.

It is now possible to run Phoenix from Linux host by using Virtual Box 4.0. During the last year, I've tried several times to run this sim in an Xp virtual box on my Ubuntu system. The closest I was able to get prior to this week, was the splash screen and a crash. For this reason, I'd been dual booting my machine with Ubuntu and Windows, but due to the extra effort required to reboot and start Windows, the amount of Sim flying I do has tapered off. That is all changing now!!