Monthly Archives: May 2010

The Next 10 Years of Software Freedom: Your thoughts?

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Heading to Indiana today to speak at OSS 2010. Topic of my talk? The Next 10 Years of Software Freedom — Impact of Web Applications, Mobile Computing, and Cloud Computing. If you were giving this talk, what would you want to say to the audience?

Like Richard Stallman, I’m concerned about the impact of Web applications and cloud computing (though RMS doesn’t like the term) on user freedom. Unlike RMS, I don’t believe that we can “fix the market” and convince people that they shouldn’t be using Web applications and cloud computing. If the concept of software freedom cannot be adapted to every type of computing, it’s of limited use.

This goes hand in hand with mobile devices and smart appliances replacing personal computers for much of people’s computing. The good news there is that Linux stands to play a very large part on mobile devices. But how does the community ensure that software freedom plays a major role throughout the entire toolchain?

Your thoughts please — what would you want to say?

Is Thunderbird Too Little, Too Late?

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A few weeks ago, the Mozilla Messaging folks released the second beta for Thunderbird 3.1. The list of features amount to some nice improvements, but nothing revolutionary. One has to wonder if Thunderbird will ever be relevant to a wide audience, or if the Mozilla Messaging team should be focusing on doing more than incremental improvements to an old-school mailer.

I don’t mean to harsh on Thunderbird unduly, or disparage the good work being done by the Thunderbird developers. Criticizing Thunderbird feels a bit like kicking a puppy with a boot made out of kitten skins. It seems harsh to say, but Thunderbird appears to be floundering as a project and certainly isn’t grabbing market share the way Firefox has. That’s a shame, because the philosophy behind Mozilla Messaging is very user-centric.

Read the full story on Linux Magazine’s site… »

AbiWord: The Underappreciated Word Processor

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Network effects being what they are, OpenOffice.org tends to suck all the oxygen out of the room when talking about open source productivity applications. But OpenOffice.org isn’t the only game in town for open source word processing. One of the best, if underexposed, open word processors is AbiWord.

AbiWord has been around for ages, but without the weight of a company like Sun behind it, the little word processor has gotten less attention than it deserves. Let’s try to remedy that a bit.

Read the rest on LinuxPlanet… »

The Spring 2010 Linux Distro Scorecard (Part 1)

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Which Linux distro should I use? It’s one of the most common questions for new and aspiring Linux users. There’s so many to choose from, how can you pick the right one? Let’s see if we can help clear it up a little and help you choose between all the other major distros.

In order to give each distro its fair share of space, we’re breaking this into a two-part series. Today, we’ll review Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint and Mandriva. Tomorrow, we’ll cover openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu as well as reveal our final “scorecard,” which should provide you with a quick reference sheet for comparing Linux distros.

Read the first part on Linux.com… »

Good docs, bad docs, missing docs?

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Looking for opinions, which shouldn’t be too hard to find on the Web… Which FLOSS project have the best, and worst (or absent) documentation? What projects would you love to see better documented?

Following that: What do you think makes good documentation? Plenty of project have a wiki full of stuff that resembles documentation, but doesn’t seem to help very much. Would be curious to know what people think the hallmarks of good documentation are.

I’m using documentation very loosely — mostly thinking about end user docs and material for admins, but would also be interested in hearing thoughts about developer docs. Comments are thataway, light ‘em up!

WebM Poised to Bring Open Video to the Masses

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Google I/O brought a lot of interesting developments, but one of the most interesting for Linux users might be the announcement of WebM. Finally, Linux will be a first-class platform for media.

WebM isn’t the first effort to bring open video to the Web, but it has a number of things going for it that other solutions do not. Namely, it has the weight and backing of one of the largest companies on the Web (that’d be Google), and buy-in from most of the major browser projects and vendors.

Read the full story on Linux Magazine’s site… »