Since free software and other free culture products are formed by an organic, incrementalist process, they tend to be highly organic in their design as well. Free software is not so much built as it i ...
Just as there are "classic" cars that never seem to go out of style, there are some classic pieces of software that remain useful long after most of their contemporaries. One of those programs is Xfig ...
In the dawn of modern computing, there was only text. And the text was good. You can do a lot with text: write equations or sonnets, describe intricate computer subsystems or a fine spring day. But pe ...
A constant pattern in the corporate environment is the gathering of resources, but with the free exchange of information inherent in commons-based projects, the pattern of choice is the _dispersal_ of ...
The seventh iteration of the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 7x) was held the weekend of February 20th 2009 in Los Angeles. SCALE is an annual conference that has several tracks and has special ...
FOSDEM - a geek trip to Brussels. Going abroad to experience different cultures. Or at least, a chance to eat chips, suffer rain, and watch American TV in a different country.
Including Dia in this series is just a bit of a stretch, because it is not a conventional "vector graphic editor". Instead, Dia operates at a somewhat higher level of abstraction. But since that abstr ...
I am a great fan of the Gutenberg project, a noteworthy and honorable effort to digitize copyright-free texts. This project has released into the public domain over 20,000 classic books. This article ...
This post is in response to Dario Borghino's story, "Why Open Source is not Free Software". Go read that first... I have a couple problems with this post. First of all, there is much less difference b ...
If you have ever read any of the articles I have written on Free Software Magazine you might just have noticed that my opinion of politicians is lower than a limbo dancer's pole. A brief brush with po ...
Choosing to release a piece of software under the terms of a free software license is an important step through which many programmers and writers first approach the free software community. However, ...
Let me issue a disclaimer right off. Before I ever typed my first GNU/Linux command in a terminal the Free Software Foundation was fighting the good fight for free software and all the issues surround ...
In the near future, the semantic web data will be precisely tagged and thus a whole lot easier to find. This will further spur the trend of the web and global society becoming tight networks that are ...
Politicians in general are not terribly tech-savvy, let alone conscious of the most important intellectual freedom issues, but President Barack Obama does have a reputation of being more aware than mo ...
This time, Microsoft may have outdone themselves with a proposed patent of such breathtaking hubris that it makes their previous FUD pale by comparison. If it comes off it will either be a licence to ...
I was window shopping in a high street electronics store a few days ago. I was delighted to see a shelf display full of netbooks from vendors like Samsung, Acer, Dell, Advent and Asus (of course), to ...
So here we are, entering another year -- and no doubt at some point during this year, more than one person will declare it the "year of the Linux desktop". Of course it won't happen and those who cons ...
The latest vector graphics package for GNU/Linux is a Linux port of a proprietary Windows application called "Xara Xtreme", which is in the process of being converted to a GPL license. There are a num ...
One of the more challenging application areas for free software development is computer graphics. However, there are a number of excellent and popular tools for handling them. I use graphics a lot in ...
> They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety (Benjamin Franklin) All manner of campaigns have been tried to persuade Windows users t ...