You might have gathered from my article about hosting free software events, I work and am interested in the UK Voluntary/Community Sector (VCS)[1]. I also am a user and advocate of free software and I ...
The best thing for a programming language is to be powerful and popular at the same time. Perl was like that some time ago, but over the years it has slowly lost its appeal, even while retaining and i ...
On 2 Nov 2007, the Free Software Foundation Europe held an event in London, UK called "Free Software as a Social Innovation" to which I was fortunate to be invited. Run jointly with M6-IT CIC and desc ...
More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know _how free_ Firefox real ...
After an interesting free software licensing event in Helsinki, I got thinking about licence complexity. At the conference, people had two types of questions (a) Why didn't GPLv3 additionally solve X ...
**Frequently Asked Question:** Do software patents exist in the EU? **Answer:** The problem is that software patents exist in some ways in the EU. The power of patent governance is split between a leg ...
Imagine you need to create an Ajax application, and you’re scratching your head in frustration since you don’t understand `prototype.js`, you think using ASP.NET Ajax feels like building a car with sc ...
An article on Slashdot recently is the latest in a series of items I’ve seen over the past several years, all on the same theme. Each one has identified the thing which will finally allow Linux to bui ...
I'm working on _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, by Jared Diamond. Good book so far, although I've ground almost to a halt halfway through. (I'd probably make better progress if it showed up as blog-sized chu ...
So I, along with everyone else today, got forwarded this link which shows that Wikipedia has begun its journey from an edit-focused hive of activity, to read-only archive, as people stop editing the s ...
The University of Pavia, in Italy, recently awarded Richard Stallman with an honorary degree. Stallman gave a short speech, his “lectio doctoralis”, on the ethical imperative to use free software, foc ...
Again in the case of Intellivision, much like so many other of its “partners” (including Sendo), Microsoft demonstrates that their business model is based primarily on fraudulent and deceptive busines ...
Fast, small, lightweight—and still a full-featured GNU/Linux: _Puppy Linux_ combines a complete set of applications with great flexibility, yet it requires minimal hardware. This article introduces th ...
Programming free software is tons of fun. But every so often, it’s nice to get a change from the daily grind and have some fun. That’s where Bygfoot comes in. Bygfoot is a Windows or GNU/Linux (or Mac ...
Sakai is an online Collaboration Learning Environment, CLE for short. Indiana University has proactively deployed it for 100,000 students, and over 120 other Universities are involved with their own l ...
With the lay public now moving their businesses and lives online, everything they do has an electronic component. But, being lay people, they’re using the most antiquated, bug-ridden, security-deficie ...
This article describes the work in progress of applying Ubuntu Linux sensibly within an underfunded school, and as part of a wider well thought out and alternative educational structure. I shall empha ...
This entire OOXML campaign stinks! This is being forced on _everyone_ simply because _one_ corporation has manufactured a back-door strategy, to maintain a software monopoly. Around the world, we deci ...
I recently read a doctorate’s thesis on file system robustness by Vijayan Prabhakaran from the University of Wisconsin. It’s very interesting, and may explain in part the recent ruckus on the LKML aro ...
Two things piqued my interest recently. One was the [iPlayer protests at the BBC]( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/14/bbc_iplayer_protests/), the other was the [Wiki tracker]( http://www.wired.co ...