FOSS - Page number 5

Like many, I was surprised-but-not-really when Pamela Jones announced that she would be retiring original content on the legal analysis site that grew to fame within and without the open source community as it rose to do battle with the incredibly audacious claims by The SCO Group that Linux was directly derived from UNIX. » Read more

Creative Commons posted two pieces to their blog today regarding their licenses, and in particular, CC0, the Creative Commons public domain notice.

Plaintext versions of Creative Commons licenses

The Creative Commons licenses are now available in plaintext form: » Read more

Adam Drew makes open source music. He writes, records, and produces all his own sounds using Linux and all FOSS tools. Read more in his post from last week. » Read more

Three Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) students recently gained recognition for a Humanitarian Free and Open Source (HFOSS) proof-of-concept project, Open Video Chat (OVC).  OVC put a functional video chat program written designed for deaf students on to the OLPC XO 1.5 computer. This is the story of how it got started and where it can go from here. » Read more

When people think "free and open source software," a lot of different programs come to mind. One may think of Mozilla's popular Firefox browser, which is for many the first free software package they've used. The Linux kernel, which powers everything from phones to the world's fastest supercomputers, may spring to mind. GNU/Linux operating systems such as Fedora, Debian, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux may feature prominently in one's thoughts, or these days, so may Android. However, one class of applications will not immediately come to mind when most folks consider free and open source software—music production software. » Read more

I have been asked to turn "Open for Business" into a monthly column, focusing on applying the open source way to business. Let the reader beware that I am not a millionaire. I don’t own multiple houses or drive a new car, but for the past eight years I have made a living running a business focused exclusively on open source software (and that’s without needing outside investment). The suggestions offered in this column fall in line with our business plan of "spend less than you earn." I hope others will find them useful.
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I presented at POSSCON this week on introducing and using open source software in your school or classroom. Now I’d like to take a few minutes to hit some of the high points and give you a look at how you can bring open source to your school with a minimal of effort.

First . . . why? Why would you want to use FOSS (free and open source software) in education? Let’s take a look at what we use computers for in a typical classroom.
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If you could open source one thing, that wasn't software or technology, what would it be?

Tell us why.

The third annual Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) Symposium took place today, once again convening as a pre-conference activity for the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education Conference (SIGCSE). The theme for this year's symposium was the impact of humanitarian FOSS in the local community. » Read more

When you procure proprietary software, you buy a right-to-use license and then a support agreement. But when you buy open source, you already have the right-to-use from the OSI-approved free license, so you should compare the subscription cost with just the cost of a proprietary support agreement. Right?

Wrong! The open source subscription includes all the same elements as the combination of both purchases. In most cases, if you are receiving equivalent value, you should expect to pay similar prices. » Read more