- Posts tagged floss
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MacHg
MacHg is a free open source OSX GUI for the revision control system Mercurial. This allows you in a nice graphical way to manage a collection of files, to add things to the collection, to save a snapshot of the collection, to restore the collection to an earlier state and in general to work with the files. In my humble opinion it's the best Mercurial client for OSX.
John sent me this. Even though my time on OSX is now coming to an end (eight business days until my laptop gets shipped; unspecified time on the workstation from Dell) this is a really, really cool looking project. Not just highly functional, but totally visually striking and information rich.
Free Software Needs Free Tools :: Benjamin Mako Hill
Over the last decade, free software developers have been repeatedly tempted by development tools that offer the ability to build free software more efficiently or powerfully.
The only cost, we are told, is that the tools themselves are nonfree or run as network services with code we cannot see, copy, or run ourselves. In their decisions to use these tools and services -- services such as BitKeeper, SourceForge, Google Code and GitHub -- free software developers have made "ends-justify-the-means" decisions that trade away the freedom of both their developer communities and their users. These decisions to embrace nonfree and private development tools undermine our credibility in advocating for software freedom and compromise our freedom, and that of our users, in ways that we should reject.
This is a good point, and one that I think deserves some scrutiny. The open source KForge project provides an opportunity to escape hosts like SourceForge, Google Code, GitHub and Bitbucket, but it is relatively difficult to deploy on commodity hosting. (This week I had the opportunity to talk to someone who had deployed it.) I'm guilty of storing many of my scientific projects on Google Code and Bitbucket, but one of my main projects is hosted privately on a server I pay for, using only Free Software.
One of the issues I see with scientific programming endeavors is that often the self-hosting option presents some red tape, whereas the hosted option is much simpler and easier -- particularly if the project itself is cross-institutional. This is one of the reasons I pushed for our primary simulation platform to be hosted at Google Code, rather than on a local, university-hosted server.
Revisiting Ethos | jonobacon@home
When I first heard about Free Software in 1998 I was mesmerized by it’s potential. Sure, back then the software was complex and some would argue ugly, but underneath the rough edges was a thing of beauty — the opportunity for people to come together to make new things, and anyone with the inclination and energy could take part.
Jono's description really rings home for me. When I first really started hearing about FLOSS, I was 18. I'd been using Linux and Unix for seven years (but only on dial-in BBSes and the like) but I'd never considered using it on my desktop. And then I picked up a copy of SUSE 6.1, installed it, and started looking beneath the surface. I still believe in the principles, but it's hard not to get frustrated with where computing is going. I've tried to use those principles in my research, pushing my code and my data into the open while encouraging my colleagues and collaborators to do so as well. We've been successful so far, but the Grand Experiment (as my current mentor likes to call it) is just beginning. (More on that as it occurs.) In many ways the FLOSS community and the Scientific communities are very similar, but the cross-talk is sadly limited.
To answer the prompt from Jono that I didn't quote above, I'm passionate about Free Software and Open Source software because I want my kids to have the same opportunities and the same encouragements that I did. And because I think it's really guided me, my personal and my professional interactions in many ways, and I want to make sure that spirit of collaboration, of openness, of tinkering and problem solving never dies out.
Bill Gates talks "free education" | opensource.com
One point here needs to be emphasized, though. When Bill Gates talks about online education, he says this:
"Great courses online that you can use for free."
There is a huge and vitally important difference between those words, and these words:
"Great courses online that are free."
KDE Gears Up to a Free Cloud | KDE.news
Day 2 of Camp KDE kicked off with a bang when Frank Karlitschek announced the start of a significant new KDE project. The ownCloud initiative will complement the Social Desktop and Get Hot New Stuff efforts which are already dealing with social and collaborative data. Like those, the ownCloud initiative strives to combine the rich desktop interfaces made possible by the Qt and KDE libraries with the large amount of social information and data users are putting online.
Relatedly, Ubuntu One was featured on FLOSS weekly a few weeks ago.
KDE is one of my favorite open source projects, and this is an exciting development.
Open Textbook bill | opensource.com
What could be more fascinating than watching a high school dropout explain how open textbooks, sponsored by the US Government, might be used a tool of the administration to rebuild America's credibility with the world?
The belief in the potential of the open textbook model runs deep in Washington right now, and the clearest indicator of that belief is probably Bill S. 1714: Open College Textbook Act of 2009.
Tomorrow, Apple is probably unveiling a "tablet." My suspicion is that it will target education slash textbooks, and my further suspicion is that that targeting will be largely incompatible with the aims of this article and bill.
The price of progress « swiftcoding
This outcome of the browser war has led at least a few to the conclusion that open-source is the answer, and that open-source will inevitably recreate what has been developed commercially, and either surpass that commercial product, or force it to evolve. Sadly, I don’t see this happening particularly quickly, or on a wide scale – OpenOffice is playing catch-up in its efforts to provide an out-of-the-box replacement for Microsoft Office, GIMP lags far behind Photoshop, and linux, despite widespread adoption in a few key fields (namely budget servers and embedded devices) still lags far behind Windows and Mac in many areas.
For some reason, this post makes me miss running enlightenment on a regular basis. Maybe this weekend I'll install the latest build of e17 on my Ubuntu desktop.
