PostsFree Software Archive
Ubuntu’s Lost Identity
Ubuntu boot splash screen — old (left) and new
Ubuntu has a new logo and identity brand, and I really don’t like. Why through away the legendary friendly circle icon and replace it with a badly kerned wordmark?
The Magic of Software (Licensing)
Henry Birdseye: “Is it getting to the point where the software is going to cost as much as the machine?”
Unknown: “I think it will get to that, yes.”
Birdseye: “So, if something like that can cost so much. Why not just make your copy?”
Bill Gates: “If you don’t get a legitimate copy, you won’t be… came aware of the improvements, and… overall the impact that type of ripoff is going to have is that people won’t write quality packages.”
Unknown: “It takes time to write software. We haven’t found any way to really reduce that time. It takes time to define the problem. It takes time to write the software.”
Henry Birdseye: “But increasingly, as you begin to (medal?) with the prepackaged things and get a little experience, you just can’t resist the temptation to do some of your own programming. And people are gonna be doing that.”
Bill Gates: “There’s a lot of people who are forcasting that there’ll be software stores just like there are record stores today and that there’ll be thousands and thousands of those, and I think I have to agree with that.”
And yet, 86-DOS — the operating system which Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen pitched and later licensed to IBM — was actually written by Tim Paterson and called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). Read more »
The Pricey GPL Thought Experiment
Let’s create the most expensive GPL licensed WordPress plugin and call it the Pricey GPL. It is offered as a free download from WordPress.org and by default it displays a random paragraph from the most downloaded book at Project Gutenberg in the WordPress dashboard. Of course, there is a widget available, too.
However, to enjoy the real value of the Pricey GPL, you have to purchase a monthly subscription to the PriceyGPL.com service (an API key) which displays a random paragraph from one of the GPL licenses. Read more »
Basic Math of GPL
Khoi Vinh together with Allan Cole have released (a rather noisy) grid based WordPress theme called Basic Math.
They say it’s GPL, while the price tag reads: “Single-site License (Limited time only) $45″, which clearly violates one of the main freedoms protected by GPL — the freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
Update: Basic Math is now fully GPL.
WhiteHouse.gov Runs Drupal
White House opens Web site programming to public. Another proof that Free Software matters. (via WordPress Tavern Forum)
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Member of the Free Software Fundation
I am now a member of the Free Software Foundation. Here is the talk by Richard Stallman that inspired me to finally become one.
Freedom means not having a master — Richard Stallman
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Palm WebOS and GPL
Here is the source code of Palm’s WebOS — built on top of Linux kernel with more than 1000 patches (via h-online.com).
Does anyone know if it’s the complete OS with windowing & UI parts developed by Palm?
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Proprietary vs. Liberal vs. GNU GPL
This is a response to an article written by Daniel Jalkut, titled Getting Pretty Lonely.
I think there is one critical point that we all should agree on — developers like to be compensated for their work, even those of Open Source and Free Software.
Some assume that GNU GPL makes it almost impossible or at least very hard to earn fair compensation for time invested in developing the software, while “Liberal” licences allow the freedom to determine (and guarantee) the compensation through controlling the distribution.
The reason for this is the current implementation of the competition-driven capitalism which has made the concepts of donation and freedom to compensate completely bizarre in the context of how businesses work these days. Read more »
Free Software, GPL and WordPress
If you want to know what the spirit of GPL and Free Software is, listen to what Stephen Fry and Richard Stallman have to say. These ideas are so simple and amazing at the same time that no rule or license can fully define them. You have to sense them.
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The Future of Media is Linux
All e-book readers to be released in 2009 will have Linux as their operating system. Can it really be that Microsoft and Apple have already missed it? Could they have not realized that all traditional media as we know it today will be on these devices in just a few years time? Is Linux really becoming the industry standard? Read more »
Is Linux the New Black, the New Red?
Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Fedora, Gentoo, Knoppix, Mandriva, openSUSE, …
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License
GNU GPL