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Free Software Magazine

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the clean-living-in-china dept.

EmilEifrem writes: "Why hasn't everyone submitted this story one million times? Anyway, the Free Software Magazine (FSM), issue 01 is out there. There's a column by RMS, an article about making a living with free software, a C advocacy article and even an "enterprise" section, amongst other things. Seems like a promising first issue. s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/g."

5 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. sourceforge article by asv108 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I thought the most interesting article was this piece dealing with the recent changes over at Sourceforge. It probably deserves it's own submission even though we have discussed this before.

  2. They Need Better Writers by Kerg · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From C Advocacy Article:

    So Java became a language in search of home and found in the web browser. But it's never been more than a cult language outside this market.

    ;-)

    Mr. Steve Oualline seems to be well in touch with reality and the industry direction, heh.

    Advocate all you want but come on... surely you can do better than that.

  3. Re:objective C by Pengo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I never realized how important the GnuStep movement could be until I took the time (one afternoon) to learn Objective C. It really is everything -I- could want from a language, with the only exception of NSStrings feel a bit clutsy to use after using python and java for so long.

    If apple continues to break ground in market-share, and attracts more and more commercial development maybe we will start to see OSX ported GnuStep applications.

    Cheers

  4. Re:GNU and W3C Standards by Maul · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Agreed. When I've always used the W3C logo for a page conforming to the W3C standards, I have always linked the logo to a URL that will validate my HTML.

    Obviously, it looks bad if a page displays the logo and does not validate. I'm not blaming everyone involved with the magazine, but they should really get on the case of the web page designer(s) to either
    get the HTML to validate, or to remove the logo.

    It is a pet peeve of mine when people use the logos without validating.

    --

    "You spoony bard!" -Tellah

  5. Re:C Advocacy by moncyb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    However, there are also languages (basically all except C, and by inheritance C++) where there was more progress in the last decades than finding funny new ways to get root by exploiting new classes of bugs (first buffer overflows, then format string errors...)

    Ummm...those problems come from mistakes made by the programmer. Like writing printf(mystring) instead of printf("%s", mystring), using the outdated gets instead of fgets, or incorrectly specifying the amount of space a buffer has--such as coding read(fd, buffer, 256) when your buffer has only 200 byes of space.

    Those types of mistakes could just as easily be made in other languages...for example doing something like popen("sort " . $HTTP_GET_VARS['filename']."r") would be a big security mistake in PHP.

    What is it that there are so many C advocates? I just don't get it...

    Maybe all of the people you are referring to aren't advocates, but people who see the need for a language like C. There are many cases where a low level language is needed, and C is much easier to program and much more portable than assembly. Not to mention there are some cases where using C is a more elegant or easier solution.

    There is a reason C has been around for a while--it gives the maximum control for the least amount of coding. There are a few things assembly has over C (just try to figure out if that last addtion operation just overflowed). PHP is far better for web programming. I hear Perl is great for text processing. I have also heard Python is easier to program. However, C still has its uses.