Recently a blog post entitled "Why Desktop Linux is its own worst enemy has come across my feed-radar a few times. It's yet another in the long line of "Linux ain't ready yet" jeremiads and it doesn't ...
First Asus , then Dell, then MSI , Elonex, the Cloud and all their clones. Now Acer has entered the fray and it is all, at least initially, good news. It looks like they've all found a bit of Dutch co ...
Most of the general complaints I've ever seen aimed at the Autotools are ultimately associated with Automake, in the final analysis. The reason for this is simple: Automake provides the highest level ...
In a recent interview with the British Sunday Observer, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, claimed that "it's the next billion [internet users] who will change the way we think". Such a big claim dese ...
The fight against the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard is continuing in many countries. In the UK the UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) unsuccessfully, sought a judicial review of the Bri ...
Businesses are not philanthropists. They are not, intentionally, educators or evangelists for ideologies. However, from time to time their business models just happen to coincide with their more ideal ...
Getting an external hard drive for my laptop seemed like such a good idea when I first thought about it. Seagate have got a dinky little 750 GB affair, called the Freeagent Pro, with lights that go up ...
I have recently read an eye-opening email from Ian Lynch about what happened in the UK with BECTA. I have received his permission to republish here his thoughts. I think his email speaks volumes about ...
There are about 1000 million PCs on the planet, most running that other OS. For the folks running free software, the future is now. They can run on almost anything. They can shift hardware/software pl ...
Quite a long time ago (maybe in 2000), people started talking about the _Slashdot effect_. Being _Slashdotted_ meant (and still means) that a truckload of computers online suddenly decide to access yo ...
I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw a item entitled "Maybe we should charge for Linux" in an established GNU/Linux site like Linux Today, and from the managing editor no less! Well I just couldn ...
Early in May Becta, the UK government agency charged with helping schools in their use of ICT, released a tender to support 'open source' adoption in UK schools. Several organisations decided to tende ...
You have a computer (a laptop or a desktop). Since it's a machine you use often and don't tinker with much, it probably runs Ubuntu Linux. Or, maybe, another distribution (like Mandriva 2008). If it d ...
Tony Mobily's recent FSM post A future without Microsoft and the resulting comments have caused me to consider the way we use numbers to argue for free software in the marketplace. I'm not convinced t ...
Several governments and councils reported multi-year migration plans to GNU/Linux. Free software activists praised each one of them in their blogs and commentaries. However, a few months or years on, ...
It's June 2008, and it's not a good time to be a Microsoft shareholder or employee. The computing industry is changing very, very quickly, creating new opportunities and killing once-prosperous market ...
I was at another meeting of the Editorial board of the Skibbereen Eagle yesterday. Hopefully you read the outcome of the last one. Some clever clogs suggested that it might be a spiffing wheeze to wri ...
Is it possible to develop full GNU/Linux desktops that run on the web and can therefore be accessed from anywhere? We already have a flavour of this with web-based services such as Google's Gmail, Goo ...
DOSBox is a freely available, cross-platform PC emulator. Rather than attempting to be the technology leader as a business-orientated virtualization environment like VMware or Qemu, DOSBox instead off ...
You've read the GPL's preamble, you can name the Four Freedoms, and you do your best to keep proprietary bits off our computers. But what's the future of free software in the era of Flickr, Google App ...