Archive for category Free Software
Celebrating Apple’s Rules?
Posted by Jason in Free Software, Propriatery Technology on April 12, 2010
Every once in a while I get rational correspondence taking me to task on something I’ve said. I sincerely appreciate hearing criticism, because I loathe the “echo chamber” effect and welcome the challenge of strengthening my arguments. So I was quite happy to receive an email that contained the following: [W]hen I read your new note, it almost [...]
KDE 4.4 Positive Spin
Posted by Jason in Free Software on April 9, 2010
I just ran across KDE 4.4 Positive Spin over on Brain Dump – my first time seeing this blog. The author, Andy Crouch, makes a good point: It’s interesting to see that even now, 2 years down the line people are still bringing up the KDE 4.0 release. Perhaps it’s me but I don’t (either [...]
Matt Asay On IBM Patents
Posted by Jason in Free Software, Patent System on April 8, 2010
Wow. I don’t often agree with the Canonical COO, Matt Asay, on many things and even when I do in general, I often find myself in disagreement with details. In Mr. Asay’s recent piece “IBM patent claims show open source has arrived“, that’s not a problem – because I disagree with everything, filled as it is with inaccuracies [...]
Firefox in Ubuntu to be powered by Google after all
Posted by Jason in Free Software on April 8, 2010
Old News Ubuntu was going to rely on Microsoft as the default search engine for 10.04. Let’s review the rationale: Why? I am pursuing this change because Canonical has negotiated a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and this revenue will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and [...]
Review: KeePassX
Posted by Jason in Free Software, Reviews on April 7, 2010
Keeping track of passwords sucks. We may be moving – ever so slowly – towards some sort of acceptable centralized identity authentication scheme, but in the here and now I bet you have to manage a lot of passwords. I know I do, and I hate it. Every site has some slightly different set of rules for [...]
Emacs and the GPL
Posted by Jason in Free Software on April 6, 2010
The H has quite the interesting story up, “Emacs & the birth of the GPL“, tracing how Emacs developed, and how that in turn led to the development of the GPL. Seeing the Future I quite enjoyed seeing how RMS tempered prophetic statements with unfortunate real-world experience. Consider this insight from RMS into why it would [...]
Songbird drops Linux support
Posted by Jason in Free Software on April 3, 2010
Sad news: Songbird will no longer support Linux. I gave Songbird two tries, and saw improvement and thought it had potential. It never reached a point where it could challenge Rhythmbox, but I was interested in where it was going. I did think if it reached it goals it would be a serious contender. Now [...]
Recent Comments