I am Drigg’s founder and developer. Drigg and Pligg are pieces of software that will allow you to create Digg-like sites. People sometimes ask me if they should pick Drigg or Pligg. When it happens, I am not sure what I should answer. This article will hopefully solve the dilemma for most of them. Please note that I am bound to be biased here. I am an ex-Pligg users, who happened to have the both the need and the skills to create an equivalent product. I would have never forked Pligg had I liked Pligg in the first place. So… well, feel free to tell me what I got wrong with facts — I will correct this post accordingly.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. A little obvious but I couldn’t let this one pass.

( See here if you missed the entertainment as it happened. )

You get the best free software news at FSDaily… because YOU decide what’s important. Here are the top 10 FSDaily stories from the last week as voted by the members. Don’t like ‘em? Think something’s missing? Want to know more? Head to FSDaily and get voting!

Everyone knows about the infamous internet wars. Ranging from operating systems to text editors to code indentation style, these wars have wreaked havoc on the web for years. The topics range from serious topics like religion to serious geek topics like operating systems to just plain stupid topics like code indentation style. So today, I’m going to go through a list of some of the most famous topics and remind you of a few of the more, er, “famous” battles.

Figure 1: By Dave Fischer(http://www.cca.org/dave/), licensed under the CC-BY

When I came across the oddly named SliTaz I really didn’t know what to expect. Yet another predictable fork of some better known distro which would blaze briefly in the free software firmament, burn out and fall to Earth, spent? Boy, was I ever wrong. If you want to know why Switzerland may be about to become better known for more than chocolate and Cuckoo clocks, read on and be prepared to be impressed and delighted by a live distro of exceptional speed and size.

The Open Source Convention, or OSCON as it’s more readily known, is an annual confluence of all things open source that has taken place since 1998. From its origins as an informal get together of Perl aficionados, OSCON is now regarded as the place to go for all things open source.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of OSCON, and I was fortunate enough to be a part of that history.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

When the story about Microsoft shelling out $100,000 to Apache for ASF sponsorship broke across my radar it rather tickled my funny bone and my curiosity. When ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski declared that “Microsoft’s sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft “gets it” regarding the ASF” I had a fit of the giggles—and then, like many others, I started to ponder on the reasons why and what it actually meant.

I’m not paranoid, but…

I am largely immune to conspiracy theories.

Inkscape is one of the most popular free software vector drawing applications. With minimal effort you can achieve some excellent results. However, for the inexperienced it can be a bit hard to find out how to get those results. In this tutorial I’ll look at creating a simple ribbon effect which will hopefully introduce some of the key Inkscape features along the way.

Some websites need to handle data securely and assure the end-user they are a) secure and b) who they say they are. The traditional way to achieve these is via Secure Socket Layer. Firefox 3 changed what happens when a self-signed SSL certificate is encountered. It’s a change which has caused some concern and much discussion.

Should we only trust certificates signed by third parties? Are there cases where using a self-signed certificate is valid? Should users be informed or warned and how strong should the language of that notification be? Is it possible a simple solution is already available but has been overlooked in all the flan-flinging? I think so.

You get the best free software news at FSDaily… because YOU decide what’s important. Here are the top 10 FSDaily stories from the last week as voted by the members. Don’t like ‘em? Think something’s missing? Want to know more? Head to FSDaily and get voting!

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

In a recent article, Ryan Cartwright argued that free software isn’t playing the “same game” as proprietary software is. He’s right—but that begs the question: what game is GNU/Linux playing?

Thirty years of proprietary software thinking have conditioned us to think that marketshare is a critical measure of success, and so we’ve convinced ourselves that we have to “win” against Windows in order to “succeed”. But this is simply not true. GNU/Linux can be a very great success even if it never achieves more than 1% of the installations in the world. The reason is the difference between “power” and “freedom”.

It’s not always true that the neatest, most advanced technology ends up winning most of the market share. There are other reasons which get in the way. Sometimes, the less advanced solutions end up winning — and evolve in order to become more solid and established. An example of this is Javascript/AJAX, which has conquered most of the web-based client programming — despite the fact that there were competing technologies which could (and maybe should) have easily won, purely based on technical merits. How did that happen?

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral

The EeePC started as a niche product aimed at children. It was a huge hit, which surprised everybody — even Asus. Microsoft noticed it, and started putting pressure on Asus . While reading around, I came across this interview with Benson Lin, which proces once more that Microsoft is tying up Asus and effectively killing the GNU/Linux version of the EeePC.

Steve Ballmer has recently sent a memo to every Microsoft employee. Ballmer’s memo leaked really quickly (I wonder if he expected it). After swallowing the corporate-madness part (but that’s allowed: he’s a “mad” corporate leader after all), one particular passage really grabbed my attention. Taking about Internet applications being popular, he wrote: “But we also need to make sure developers have the .NET skills to write unique Windows applications using Windows Presentation Foundation”. Which begs the question: does anybody still develop Microsoft Windows applications? Really?

Some people seem to challenge the idea that most (if not all) free software projects need a benevolent dictator—that is, somebody who has the last say on every decision. They are quick to point out Linus Torvalds’ past “mistakes” (see the speech marks): using BitKeeper to manage the kernel, not allowing “pluggable” schedulers in Linux, etc. As a software developer, I feel that a dictator is absolutely necessary in every free software project. Here is why.

Respect earned by the BDFL

When most people install a free software mail transport agent (MTA) they plumb for Postfix, Exim, qmail or Sendmail. Whilst these are all fine, they can be a little over the top for some smaller systems or systems where all you need is some kind of local MTA functionality. In these cases many people will install their favourite MTA anyway — but there are more lightweight alternatives. Here I look at one of them: Smail.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral