Free software won the source code battle, but it is quietly losing the workflow battle. We can inspect code, fork code, patch code, and redistribute code. Great. And yet, for a huge part of our ecosys ...
AI is everywhere. It is in search, in email, in support systems, in code editors, in photo tools, in your phone and, yes, right here in this very article. We can still pretend we are “evaluating” AI f ...
Free Software Magazine is alive right now because we had AI at hand when we needed it. We moved from an old proprietary publishing system to Jekyll in less than a day -- yes, less than a day! If we ha ...
Last night I saw a message from a friend of mine in Facebook: she is trying to organise a baby sitting community where people who trust each other will exchange "tokens" when they babysit each other's ...
I have recently restarted Free Software Magazine, after working full time on a free software project. One of my articles ended up on Slashdot. In the past, this meant hours of frantic work: on one han ...
One upon a time, movies were released in different countries at different times. This could be done because there was no easy way to copy and store away a movie. If you lived in Italy, you could wait ...
I have been watching the evolution of the Ubuntu Software Center for quite a while now. I had doubts about its interface and its speed, but I liked the fact that it offered an easy, down-to-earth inte ...
About 6 years ago, I wrote an article about why I felt that installing software in GNU/Linux was broken. It pains me to say that the situation is, sadly, exactly the same:GNU/Linux never made it to pe ...
There is a belief that democracies respect the rights of their citizens. Well, they don't. There is a great deal of cant written about that but even the democratic modern state has become so big, so i ...
I don't think many people have realised that we are on the verge of a technological revolution. The computing world is changing, and this is the first time GNU/Linux is catching the revolution as it _ ...
When I wrote an article for FSM a few years ago about 3D printing it was a big topic in the open-source community but it had not yet gone fully mainstream. If there was one thing _guaranteed_ to make ...
Google has recently announced that they will take Google Reader offline. "I won't miss it. Never used the damn thing. Didn't trust the idea of a big company like Google's interests being so aligned wi ...
Over the years, the marketing and advertising strategies employed by businesses—both small and large alike—have changed dramatically. What once used to be traditional advertising on a black-and-white ...
In this article, I will talk about an exciting chain of events which brought several universities together: instead of buying different Learning Management Systems, they teamed up and started working ...
Bruce Willis has been trending on Twitter this week. Nothing to do with his dubious acting abilities. No, a story began to circulate that he wanted to bequeath his iTunes music collection (spread over ...
I just checked, and my State government's website here in Australia has 43 pages with the message that Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed if I want to view the page's downloadable PDFs.
You've probably heard of this intriguing new crowd-funding service called Kickstarter, right? (If not, how are you getting this website from that cave of yours?). A lot of people are using it to fund ...
The last week has been terrific for "Lunatics". We've cleared the licenses on almost all of the music -- and certainly the most important pieces. However, for a moment, I want to focus on the little p ...
In March 14, 1999 Ethan Galstad released the first version of Nagios. Then, nearly exactly 10 years later (May 2009), Icinga (a fork of Nagios) was born. What happened there? Why a fork? In this artic ...
News about the lawsuit between Oracle (which owns Java) and Google (which uses aspects of Java in Android) are resonating far and loud at the moment. At this point in the article, I should summarise t ...