● 05.04.13

● Links 5/5/2013: Chromebooks Growth, Further Catchup

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• We’re so busy seeking release from Windows that we overlooked all the ways Linux had already freed us

• Linux interest, despite FUD, is on the rise. You can take a look at the numbers in Distrowatch. When I migrated to Linux in 2009, it took Ubuntu 2249 visits to be the first distro ranked. Today, the 3rd position has 189 visits more than that. Back in 2009, the last distro had 73 hits. Today, the 100th position is counted with three digits and has almost two times that number of visits.

• In a victory for the free software movement, the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura has started to switch more than 40,000 government PCs to open source.

• All the computers will be migrated this year. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source will help save €30 million per year.

• ENTERPRISE MESSAGING VENDOR Icewarp claims that it is not hard to sell Linux to firms that have been using Microsoft’s software products once they become open to change.

• Icewarp, which produces a messaging and collaboration server that rivals Microsoft’s Exchange and Sharepoint servers offers its daemons on both Windows and Linux. However the firm told The INQUIRER that in certain regions firms are very keen

• The FreeType font rendering engine has been enhanced with a new rasterizer for Compact Font Format (CFF) fonts, contributed to FreeType by Adobe and Google. The new rasterizer details were included in the latest changes file for the beta version 2.4.12 of FreeType. The new engine is said to be “vastly superior to the old CFF engine and will replace it in the next release”.

• Currently though, the new engine is disabled by default and has to be enabled at build time. The code itself is described as a “mature beta”. Google explains that CFF fonts place more of a burden for working out the display trade-offs on the rasterizer, more so than TrueType, and the new Adobe CFF engine for FreeType brings a higher quality engine to the open source font renderer, which is better able to make the appropriate trade-offs for a wider range of displays.

• Depending on how you pay for it, you’ll probably have to part with at least fifty quid for Windows 8, and double (or more) for OS X, and they come with almost no software compared to the average Linux distribution. Yet almost all Linux distributions are free as in zero-cost.

Desktop

• After a decade of looking for the “year of the Linux desktop”, many Linux columnists have given up. Some say it isn’t coming, while others claim that Linux has simply failed on the desktop.

• Plenty of specialized companies out there sell PCs with Linux, but Dell is one of the very few mainstream contenders to have done so over the years. After some spotty initial offerings, it’s taken a different approach with its latest Linux PC. Rather than try to sell Linux hardware to the masses, which the company has said typically requires support, it’s focusing instead on developers, a savvy group that tends to need less help.

• Although many people think of them as older participants in the portable computing market, the fact is that Chromebooks based on Google’s Chrome OS first went on sale in June of 2011–not long ago. In a recent post on the state of Chromebooks, I noted that prices in the $200 range for Chromebooks like the Acer system shown here are attracting users, but also noted that market share numbers are not showing these system making a big splash.

• When you get right down to it, nobody cares about Operating Systems. Nobody wants to install an Operating System, with minor exceptions including your average ‘Gear Head’ (me) who likes to get grease under his finger nails and tinker with all manner of different technologies. I am in the minority.

• So, when you walk by that Chromebook at Best Buy, realize that it’s in the brick and mortar setting because it comes pre-installed. That is a must for any operating system to become wildly popular. You can’t succeed otherwise. It doesn’t matter which GUI you like. Not pre-installed? You are losing in the bigger game played by Microsoft and Apple.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• The XFS file-system with the forthcoming Linux 3.10 kernel will have an experimental feature for CRC protection of meta-data.

• The XFS file-system pull request for the Linux 3.10 merge window was submitted on Thursday to the kernel mailing list.

Applications

• With animation soaring higher into 3D imagery, there’s something to be said for old school 2D hand-crafted images. For those who are so inclined, Pencil Animation shows a lot of promise as a drawing tool. It’s easy to use and provides lots of options. Installation, though, can be a bear — and we’re not talking Yogi. Lack of developer support is also a drawback.

• After years of waiting, there is finally a publicly available beta of the Lightworks high-end non-linear video editing software.

• Lightworks was originally supposed to be on Linux around 2011 but there were numerous delays and the project finally went into alpha last year but it was very restricted in terms of access. It’s not too open but Linux development has continued.

• That’s extra sad, because Blender has gone the way of Gimp – insane. I loaded up the latest version of Blender, and discovered – for the thousandth version now – that every single menu, button, command, keyboard shortcut, and function has been rearranged pointlessly AGAIN!!!!!, meaning I would have to sit down AGAIN!!!!! and devote solid, monastic concentration to learning AGAIN!!!!! a completely new Blender interface for a month before I could produce anything with it. This has been going on nonstop for a decade now. Forget it, I have better things to do with my time than waste it with silly games by the sour trolls of the Gimp and Blender teams. Can’t WAIT for those two projects to choke off. So sad any other projects have to go.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Here’s the thing about Surgeon Simulator 2013; I didn’t like it very much at first. Not this full version, anyway. I loved the original free release – a silly joke game, primed for Youtube Let’s Plays, in which you play as a floppy surgeon’s hand, with keys controlling each finger. You perform open heart surgery on a guy. The joke is that it doesn’t go very well, even when you succeed. It’s pretty hard to fail, because it’s more of a toy than a game. If you do fail, it doesn’t matter, because it’s the only level, so why are you playing really? To have fun, probably to make videos of it, or to hurl comically-rendered bodily organs around.

• I booted up Surgeon Simulator 2013 proper, tried the first op (the same one I’d already played) and failed within two minutes. In the free version, I could last up to ten quite comfortably. I tried again. Failed again. I couldn’t cut the stomach out. I don’t even remember the free version having a stomach stem. I hacked at the stomach stem with a bone saw. The guy died. I tried again. I drilled through his ribcage and pierced his lungs. In the free version, he’d have shrugged this off. I guess he’s gotten more fragile since then. He died, of course.

• Valve, the company behind Steam and several games on the platform, has released a beta version of their critically acclaimed, physics-based puzzler, Portal, for Linux.

• Closure, an indie game developed by the Eyebrow Interactive studio, is available on Steam for Linux with a 66% discount.

• Portal, an innovative single-player game developed and published by Valve, will soon arrive on Steam for Linux.

• Every now and then in Linux gaming, it pays off to pick up an old favorite and see how it’s come along. Last time I visited SuperTuxKart, it was a dinky thing with about four tracks, no powerups, and disgusting “burp” sound effects. Maybe it was 2004?

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Every function should have at least four good alternatives. This is where you come into play. Please help us to improve the study with your ideas for alternative metaphors. These can be quite diverse and from different contexts. So every input is appreciated.

• Once we have found sufficient metaphors for each of these functions we need to create icons to these metaphors that fit in one icon set. And at this point we need your assistance again since we are not designers but usability experts. Icons should be redesigned to not have any biases because of the color, style, etc. It does not need to have a really fancy design with 3D effects or the like. But the layout must not influence users decision which one to choose in the upcoming test.

• In the general discussion about “lightweight” desktop environments I have read a few times that one should disable Compositing in KWin. That’s done in Kubuntu’s low-fat settings package and also something Jos talked about in the context of Klyde.

• I have never seen an explanation on why Compositing should matter at all. It mostly boils down to “OpenGL is evil” and “I don’t want 3D”. So let’s leave the “educated guesses” behind us and have a proper look to the question whether Compositing matters for “lightweight”. (Remember: lightweight is a buzz-word without any meaning.)

• KDE community offers one of the the most advanced desktop environments around, Plasma Desktop. But it is not limited to the desktops, KDE has developed technologies for every class of devices, whether it’s PCs, netbooks or tablets. The community develops software packages which are cross platform and are used on different platforms – some of the most notable KDE applications include Calligra suite, DigiKam, K3b and much more.

• I run KDE Plasma Workspaces on all my devices – Plasma Desktop on my PCs, Plasma Netbook on my, as obvious, netbooks and laptops and Plasma Active on my Nexus 7. The reason I chose Plasma over others is the features and functionality it offers which are missing from every other desktop environments.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• We just launched KDE Sutra, a KDE magazine by Muktware, to celebrate our 3rd anniversary. Aaron Seigo, the Plasma project leader, has written the introductory column for the magazine launch. Here I present to you Aaron Seigo! — Swapnil Bhartiya (editor KDE Sutra).

• KDE is a community with over fifteen years of history during which time it has consistently produced one of the premiere Free software desktops. It is one thing to make a new software project sound and look exciting; it is another to maintain interest and excitement across fifteen years. It is one thing to gather a group of developers to scratch a collective itch; it is another to evolve that into a thriving community encompassing thousands of participants and dozens of companies with a healthy and vibrant culture while managing generational turnover.

• Yet all of those efforts pale in comparison to keeping the technology itself relevant for that long. Who uses computers, how they use them, what computers look like and their capabilities shift from year to year, let alone decade to decade.

• Hi everybody, after over a year of silence, I have something new to announce: I will make a new release available of the KDE SC on Windows tomorrow. There have been several problems in the past year that spoiled new release attempts, beginning with a build server leaving together with Nokia and ending with our web server which hosts the original binary releases. But these problems have been solved and so there we are. I hope this will make it also more obvious that KDE on Windows isn’t dead yet ;-).

• Members from the Plasma team assemble a couple times each year to get some face time with each other. This is good both for team building and for making large strides forward in the technology we maintain and work on. When we get together on our own, rather than as part of a bigger event, we call the events “Tokamaks”. We held the sixth such meeting last week in Nürnberg, Germany where we were hosted by SUSE with additional support coming from KDE e.V.

• KO GmbH announces extensive support services for Krita, the award-winning graphics application. Krita is an advanced paint application with a complete set of professional paint tools that can handle extremely large images effortlessly. It is particularly well-suited for special effects work in the movie industry.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• With the first GNOME 3.10 development release due this week, the first GNOME 3.10 development snapshots (v3.9.1) of the GNOME Shell desktop and Mutter compositing window manager were checked in.

• GNOME 3.10 is tentatively set to be released on 25 September while this is the first development release due this week (GNOME 3.9.1). With just a little more than one month since the GNOME 3.8.0 release, there isn’t too much to look at for the 3.9.1 packages.

• The folk at Packt Publishing sent me an e-copy of GNOME 3 Application Development Beginners Guide a month or so ago.

• I’ve been putting off this review because I don’t think this is an very good book and it’s hard to write bad reviews.

Distributions

• One of the comments that is quite often made on Reddit and in other Linux forums is that there are a lot of distributions that are just re-spins of Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE etc.

• Diversity is great and it is good that people put the effort in to creating a distribution.

• A Turkish distro that’s been on hiatus for a couple of years, is this latest version a long awaited sequel, or a disappointing reboot?

• We pit six Raspberry Pi operating systems against one another to find out which one is the king of the tiny computer distros

• GParted, a partitioning utility for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, is now at version 0.16.1.

• A rather long time ago (around a year and a half), I wrote a post about a system I was making which was supposed to be a cloud-based OS, named CosmOS. I didn’t really develop it that much, as I had a rather vague sense of what I wanted to do with it, and I immediately had problems with implementing the most basic concepts. Most of the idea was actually quite boring, and had already been developed by others. But since I had gone through all the trouble of making a tool for creating it (relinux), I decided to try it anyways, and just radically changed the whole design. And I did. I also found that I couldn’t have used the same name, as CosmOS was already the name of at least two different OS’s, and it was also the name of a directory of linux OSs (among other unrelated usages), so I kind of got that I had to change the name.

New Releases

• The OpenWRT team has released version 12.09 (code name: Attitude Adjustment) of the Linux distribution for routers. As was the case in the beta version, Attitude Adjustment no longer supports Linux kernel 2.4. This affects older router models with just 16MB memory and slow CPUs (200MHz), such as Linksys WRT54G models. Attitude Adjustment does now run on Ramips routers and the mini-computer Raspberry Pi (bcm2708), however.

• It’s available new iso images of SparkyLinux 2.1.1 “Eris” MATE Edition.

• On the beginning of April, the MATE team published new version of MATE environment 1.6. SparkyLinux 2.1 MATE Edition features MATE 1.4. It can be a little difficult to make clear upgrade of MATE, so I decided to make new iso images, which provide full system updates.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Fedo..uh, I mean, Mageia chairman, Anne Nicholas, today announced the final release date for Mageia 3 – again. Nicholas said they didn’t want to say they’d release when ready for fear they’d sound a lot like Debian. Yet Mageia 3′s release schedule is starting to look a whole lot like Fedora 18′s.

Gentoo Family

• As ever, you are welcome to choose between Calculate Linux Desktop featuring either KDE (CLD), GNOME (CLDG) or XFCE (CLDX), Calculate Directory Server (CDS) for server solutions, Calculate Media Center (CMC) should you need any and, last but not least, scratch versions for those preferring minimal installations: Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS) and Calculate Scratch Server (CSS).

Slackware Family

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat’s Gluster open-source community has been all about its namesake, the GlusterFS, but now it’s expanding to cover other open-source, software-defined storage technologies.

Fedora

• It’s been about three months since the release of Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow,” but this week afforded the first glimpse at the next version of the popular Linux distribution.

• Is heartwarming to see people writing Free software and is understandable newbie developers will create less than perfect applications, still there are some apps which should never be written, and in this category I include the “scripts” supposed to install and do “everything” on your distro, from installing Flash and codecs to… $DEITY knows what.

Debian Family

• Twenty cities around the globe, ranging from Bangalore in India to New York in the USA, will be hosting parties this weekend. More are expected to announce they are joining in as the week progresses.

• The next release of Debian GNU/Linux, 7.0 or “Wheezy”, is less than a week away now — so I decided to take one last look at a pre-release build.

• My intention was to see how it looks and works in general, how it gets on with installation on various systems of mine, and whether and how it is working with GPT partitioning, UEFI BIOS, and Secure Boot.

• For this test, I downloaded the netinst image of the daily build on Saturday, 27 April. There are a lot of ISO images to choose from when downloading Debian; I generally take the net installer image because it is the smallest download and it gives me the most flexibility when installing.

Derivatives

• In my neck of the woods the Internet doesn’t get any faster, and my six year old dual-core AMD computer still holds up nicely. I don’t like Gnome 3 and I don’t care about Ubuntu’s run everywhere there is lots of memory vision. Linux is all about choice, and I do have plenty of them.

• In this article I’ll take a look at Debian. Debian is one of the oldest distributions still in active development. It is a popular distribution for personal use among software developers, it is also the most popular Linux web server platform. Debian has a great community and the amount of software packaged far exceeds any other Linux disto out there.

• The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made its first Wheezy based release today. This is the release announcement:

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Sometimes people ask me why they should use Ubuntu Server. It’s an understandable question, after all, Ubuntu gets a bunch of attention on the desktop (and more recently mobile), but people tend to forget that Ubuntu is an excellent server distribution, quietly humming along helping to run some of the world’s coolest companies at scale.

• It’s that time again for a new Ubuntu – should you be raring to go with it, or is it a case of more of the same?

• Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail was released a few days ago. It comes with many pre-installed applications for several purposes. However, these applications won’t be enough for some users to be able to effectively use Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail. So, here’s a list of recommended applications for Ubuntu 13.04.

• The Ubuntu Team originally approved some final modifications for the 13.04 release. After getting us all excited about the massive number of new Smart Scopes, the original approval was then retracted. Either way, I felt the need to inform everyone about the upcoming changes. Though unfortunately we must wait for 6 months for the Ubuntu 13.10 release.

• Or maybe it should read the other way around, unremarkably remarkable. Which one is it? Well, I don’t know, take a look and judge for yourself. Now, the mandatory two paragraphs of introduction. For me, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal was a fairly big flop. And it was nothing short of a disaster on my high-endish machine, where the Nvidia graphics stack was bonkered.

• Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) is now out, but it has been release without an important update for Unity, which didn’t made the cut before the launch day.

• The biggest feature of Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) should have been the Smart Scopes, a collection of scopes for Unity (like the existing Music, Video, and so on). The developers have decided that this feature is not ready, and Ubuntu 13.04 has been skipped.

• What’s more important: Ubuntu’s success in cloud computing or on mobile devices? The answer is both, according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth. During a quick conversation with The VAR Guy at the recent OpenStack Summit, Shuttleworth said Ubuntu — a popular Linux distribution for PCs — must succeed both in the cloud and mobile worlds because they are the two biggest IT waves empowering customers today. Plus, he added, the world wants a Google Android alternative.

• Carla hails from Italy and enjoys being the guinea pig for new ideas and kickstarting new projects and efforts on the team. She’s been a wonderful contributor to our ubuntu autopilot tests project, happily helping lead the charge towards automating our favorite desktop applications.

• Now that we know the codename of the next major release of the Ubuntu operating system, and that the development cycle will start tomorrow, May 2, we are happy to announce that the release schedule has also been published, as a draft, on the Ubuntu Wiki.

• Ubuntu 13.04: The Linux desktop for everyone (gallery)

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• “I think we can all appreciate what products like the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi can do for today’s youth,” said blogger Robin Lim. “Understanding how something works is important. These single board computers can even be the basis for some really creative school and commercial grade projects, which go beyond plugging them to a keyboard and monitor.”

• A US engineer is trying to sell the idea of an open source drone detection system built out of shedloads of Raspberry Pi kits.

• The Drone Shield, which is designed by John Franklin, will cost around $60 to $70 to set up. It will combine a, a signal processor, a microphone, and analysis software to scan for specific audio signatures and compare them against what known drones sound like.

• When the Raspberry Pi first came out, the board-only design got a lot of people desiring a case to go with it. Since then, a few companies and Kickstarters have popped up to supply cases to those that want them. With many different designs on the market, it’s hard to know what to go for, and mainly comes down to how you plan to use the case. SB Components have created a simple case that is suitable for many uses, at a price that reflects the Raspberry Pi itself.

• A new open source XBMC Media Centre player has been unveiled this week in the form of the new The Little Black Box, which has been designed to specifically run XBMC.

• USA Technologies (USAT) announced a cashless payment device equipped with near field communications (NFC), a magnetic card reader, and support for a variety of contactless payment standards, including Mifare. The ePort G10 runs embedded Linux on an ARM9 processor, and offers an LCD screen plus serial, USB, and Ethernet connectivity.

Phones

• Note, as the market is expected to be very near exactly 1 Billion new smartphones sold this year, you can take those numbers and convert multiply the percentages by 10 to get the number sold. So for China, 27% means 270 million smartphones this year as the Chinese market size, and for North America 13% means 130 million smartphones sold etc. Yes, China alone this year will see approximately twice as many new smartphones sold as in all of North America. And Asia accounts for almost exactly half of all new smartphones sold this year, led by China, but including the rich parts of Asia like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong etc, and then the Emerging World parts of the ‘Rest of Asia’ ie India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines etc etc etc. Half of all smartphones sold this year will go to Asia.

• [...]

• (This are based on 2012 numbers, expecting the ratio to be very similar this year, with the exception of if there is a major economic collapse that suddenly kills sales).

Android

• Barnes & Noble seeks to revitalize its Android-powered Nook tablet line over arch-rival Amazon’s Kindle tablets by adding Google Play and full Android app support.

• Ready to start programming for Google Glass? The tools are out there. While only a handful of Google Glasses are out, Google quietly released its Android-based core kernel code.

Free Software/Open Source

• We’ve built a full market risk analytics platform for capital markets—with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, such as a declarative calculation engine, a flashy HTML5 GUI, and a comprehensive analytics library—and we’ve released it under the Apache 2.0 License. And, our key customers and users at the moment are some of the world’s most secretive technologists: hedge fund managers. To an outsider, this may look like a curious combination.

• Last week North Bridge Venture Partners and Black Duck Software released the 7th Annual Future of Open Source survey. Previous years’ surveys have generated interest industry-wide, with implications that cross industries and ecosystems.

Events

• Whew. That drive from Felton-to-Bellingham-and-back gets longer and longer. But it goes without saying, of course that it’s well worth it. The 14th annual Linux Fest Northwest was a success and while they take a break before getting ready for next year’s event — April 26-27, 2014, at Bellingham Technical College — I’m going to make my reservation at the Hampton Inn right now so I don’t forget.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• The basic idea behind prefetching is to speed things up for the user. An algorithm is involved that guesses which resources are likely to be accessed by the user in the recent future.Think of Facebook’s login page for instance. The most reasonable assumption is that the user will enter the username and password, and then click on the login link. If you prefetch some of the information you may speed things up for the user in the progress if a prefetched resource is indeed accessed.

• Samples of FinSpy, part of the FinFisher surveillance software suite sold by Gamma International UK Ltd to government organizations, have been found disguised as Mozilla’s Firefox browser, according to a report published Tuesday.

• The report, written by academic research group Citizen Lab, documents the spread of offensive computer network intrusion capabilites — hacking tools — marketed by Western companies.

• The former Opera Software designer accused of leaking trade secrets to Mozilla denied the charges yesterday, but confirmed that the lawsuit takes aim at a search revamp he worked on while a consultant for the maker of Firefox.

• Spanish online phone seller and Telefonica partner Geeksphone announced the availability of the first two developer phones running Mozilla’s Linux-based Firefox OS distribution. The $194 Peak smartphone offers a dual-core, 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and a 4.3-inch IPS display, with 8- and 2-megapixel cameras, while the $119 Keon has a 1GHz Snapdragon S1, a 3.5-inch HVGA display, and a 3-megapixel camera.

SaaS/Big Data

• Swapnil: MySQL became the default database of a majority of projects and companies around the globe, what made MySQL so popular – what characteristics did it have? Was it it’s open source nature, technological superiority or marketing by Sun? Monty: MySQL was widely popular long before MySQL was bought by Sun. (This was one of the main reasons why Sun wanted to buy MySQL).

• The open source OpenStack cloud platform is being built by a diverse and large group of vendors and developers. Among those vendors is Linux leader Red Hat, a company that is no stranger to being part of a multi-stakeholder open source effort, like the GNOME Linux desktop, for example.

• Helping to lead Red Hat’s OpenStack efforts is Senior Principal Software Engineer, Mark McLoughlin. McLoughlin isn’t just a leader at Red Hat, he was also the leading contributor by code commits to the recent OpenStack Grizzly release. In an exclusive video interview with Datamation (see below), McLoughlin explains how his years of experience in the GNOME desktop community prepared him and Red Hat to help OpenStack to succeed.

Databases

• Godfather of open source databases facilitates a merger to quicken development, growth.

• When Oracle bought Sun, one of its reasons was to gain control of MySQL, the most popular open-source database management system (DBMS). It didn’t work. Some of MySQL’s founders and top programmers had already left to create the MySQL fork, MariaDB, while others started SkySQL, a MySQL and MariaDB support company. Now, the old core MySQL developers have rejoined forces.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Between January 15th & April 27th 3,002 bugs were reported – I’m serious, no lie, over 3,000 bugs reported! Thanks (partly sarcastic?) to our fantastic users for reporting problems when you find them. This period covers 103 days (so about 29 bugs per day reported). Just maintaining our unconfirmed count would have been a tremendous success…..but, WE DID BETTER!

Education

• Thanks to alumni and faculty of West Virginia University’s Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, students with an interest in software development will now be able to fund their education through an Open Source Scholarship.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• Business intelligence could be one of the most essential but little-known secrets that drives executive decisions in the marketplace.

BSD

• The FreeBSD Foundation was so successful in raising funds last year that it has been able to considerably expand its activities.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.4.13, another bug fix release in a series of stable of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software. With this release series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3, MySQL or PostgreSQL. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX.

• I have been developing free software for a long time, originally as an independent freeware author in Windows (oh the stories I could tell you there) and more recently in Linux. Why do it? And what are the values and principles that are most functional when working for free? I thought I would take some time out to share the strategies I have developed over the years that make this work.

• This week the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman (RMS) gave two presentations at the Technical University of Denmark. The events were organized by KLID.

• On Wednesday the topic was Copyright vs. Community. Discussing the history of copyright, how it is being extended and (mis)used, and how Richard Stallman proposes to reform copyright.

Project Releases

• After one whole year of hard work, toil, tears and sweat from all our awesome contributors the latest release of the Open Build Service(OBS) is ready for you. Version 2.4 adds support for yet another package format, secure boot signing and appstream app stores. It also brings a constraint system to better match build hardware to build jobs and includes a lot of speed improvements. OBS 2.4 is the latest, greatest and rock solid release that is already used by our reference server since January. We strongly recommended to update to this version.

Public Services/Government

• Using open source software solutions helps public administrations to regain their power as customers, says Tariq Rashid of the IT Reform group at the UK Cabinet. It helps them to move from expensive unique IT to the commodity competing end of the market.

• “Over the last ten years, Open Source has become unremarkable. I think that’s a great achievement. We no longer argue about whether it’s secure or not, or whether it’s safe to use. We focus now on how best to use Open Source to get the best value for every tax dollar,” said Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector Group.

Leftovers

• 75% of the 8600 respondents share news via email, compared to 55% who share stories via Facebook or Twitter.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• I in no way doubt that next year will be a celebration of the city’s stouthearted fortitude. I have no doubt that people will arrive in droves to witness “the spirit of freedom prevail.” But I do think we need to separate the bravery of those who will gather in 2014, and what the security imperatives will undoubtedly be. We need to critically examine what’s proposed and, if necessary, raise our voices in protest.

• [...]

• building movements now against the militarization of the police force.

• The point is that shifting spending from the military to other types of government spending would be more broadly beneficial to the economy. It’s hard to imagine many people on the left who wouldn’t support this. So why is it portrayed as a “quandary”?

• But McCormick was just small beer. He was the unauthorised con. The authorised con involved more money by a factor of twenty million; it was a multi trillion dollar con involving entirely fake and planted evidence as a justification for a war in which millions were killed or maimed, the infrastructure of a modern country bombed back to the Middle Ages, and vast personal fortunes made in the arms, mercenary, military support, banking and oil industries.

Cablegate

• Prenda Law’s litigation campaign against people allegedly sharing obscure pornographic films on BitTorrent hasn’t been going well. A growing number of judges has taken notice of accusations that Prenda stole the identity of a Minnesota man named Alan Cooper and named him CEO of the litigious shell company AF Holdings. Prenda’s lawyers have invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering potentially incriminating questions about how Cooper’s signature wound up on AF Holdings legal documents.

Finance

• Oh, are we getting ripped off. And now we’ve got the data to prove it. From 2009 to 2011, the richest 8 million families (the top 7%) on average saw their wealth rise from $1.7 million to $2.5 million each. Meanwhile the rest of us — the bottom 93% (that’s 111 million families) — suffered on average a decline of $6,000 each.

• The two New York-based banks will pay $247 million to almost 224,000 borrowers, the Fed said today in a statement. The checks — meant to compensate borrowers who may have been mistreated in foreclosures during 2009 and 2010 that relied on improper documentation or faulty procedures — range from $300 to $125,000, depending on the how much harm may have been done.

• Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) sued its former vice president of emerging markets, Agostina Pechi, claiming she stole the bank’s trade secrets in a bid to win clients for her new employer, Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• interesting piece (4/21/13) about the libertarian-right Koch brothers’ interest in buying the Tribune Company. Why would profit-seeking businessmen want to buy money-losing newspapers? Chozick reports that “the papers could serve as a broader platform for the Kochs’ laissez-faire ideas.”

• The Week magazine turned the Caucasian Tsarnaev brothers into non-whites.

• It is worth asking questions about how different communities or societies react to violence. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States bombed and occupied Afghanistan, based on the argument that the government of that country had tolerated the presence of Al-Qaeda and thus must bear the retribution. As a result, many thousands of people who had nothing to do with terrorism were killed.

• Or on to the invasion of Iraq, which was sold as part of a “Global War on Terror” following the 9/11 attacks as well, even though there was never a connection between Iraq and the terrorist attacks. So why did the United States invade Iraq? Tom Friedman explained it to Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003.

• To Friedman, there was a “terrorist bubble” in that part of the world, and “we needed to go over there and take out a very big stick…and there was only one way to do it.”

• The West Fertilizer Co. explosion last week in West, Texas, took the lives of at least 14 and left scores injured and homeless. But the story was largely obscured by blanket coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. More than that, says legendary EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman, a guest on this week’s CounterSpin, what coverage there was often obscured the real story. Here’s a transcript of Kaufman’s appearance:

Censorship

• Where money talks, the politicians and the mainstream media do not.

Privacy

• Joint letter sent to BT, Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk by ORG, Privacy International and Big Brother Watch, asking ISPs to stand up for their customers.

• Three privacy groups have written to ISPs to demand that they stand up for their customers and warn them about the Snoopers’ Charter.

• “The Company” is a term that insiders have long used to refer to the CIA…

• A recent, practical example: The Boston bombers

• This story recently came up that Russian intelligence warned the FBI about the Boston bombers. And yet, if you read the text, there’s disagreeing comments from government employees at all levels: “Yes they did.” “No they didn’t.” “I saw that but I thought it was that other guy’s job.” Even more mind–blowing, is the headline Boston Bombing Suspect’s Name Was in US Terrorism Databases!

• What if CISPA had been in place? It probably wouldn’t have helped much. Another stack of papers would have gotten shuffled around without getting read. Maybe it would have put the right dot on the right map. If it had, doubtless three other things that demanded attention would have been ignored instead.

• Call it “Penguin Pete’s Law of Surveillance”: It doesn’t matter how much data you collect. What matters is having the eyeballs to read that data.

Civil Rights

• U.S. Naval medics are forcing tubes down the noses of detainees at Guantánamo Bay in order to feed them against their will. The U.N. has said this violates international law. When does “suicide prevention” become torture?

• Apparently the Embassy commissioned these essays from Bahrainians to mark the occasion. Extraordinarily, they have published two essays from pro-despotism propagandists. If they had published two balancing essays from the majority community, I would have viewed the inclusion of the fascist views as wrongheaded but defensible. As it is, this is an appalling disgrace to the foreign office.

• Here are some genuine press stories the Embassy might have noted, but didn’t:

• Bahrain doctors jailed for treating injured protesters

• Teenager Killed in Bahrain on Protest Anniversary

• Bahrain Protest Crushed By Security Forces

DRM

• The World Wide Web consortium is considering a proposal to specify standards for HTML extensions to implement Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The proposal is supported by Netflix, Microsoft, Google and the BBC.

• Today a coalition of twenty-seven organizations released a joint letter to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web’s standards-setting body, condemning Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME is a proposal to incorporate support for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) — the systems used by media and technology companies to restrict watching, sharing, recording, and transforming digital works — into HTML, the core language of the Web.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Novartis has been in the news lately for the lawsuit filed against it by the US government for kickbacks it allegedly gave to doctors for prescribing certain drugs. As we noted about that case, it should be no surprise that this sort of activity happens, given that the incentive structure we’ve created with patents is so extreme. Here’s one example of at least some principled doctors striking back against Novatis. Over 120 cancer researchers and doctors have published a paper calling out Novartis specifically for its pricing on the cancer drug Gleevec (marketed as Glivec outside the US). The doctors point out that it can cost over $100,000 per year for Gleevec currently. And, Novartis has been continually jacking up the price. There had been concern when the drug was first introduced a decade ago, that it was priced way too high at $30,000, leading the company’s then CEO, Daniel Vasella, to acknowledge the complaints, but to argue that it was “a fair price.” Well, now the company is pricing the drug at more than three times what it thought was a fair price, and it should be no surprise that people think this is outrageous profiteering by abusing a government granted monopoly to charge way more than any fair market price would allow.

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