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Registration Opens For Software Freedom Day 2011
An anonymous reader writes "For those of you who think technology and more importantly software should be open and shareable, the annual celebration of Software Freedom Day has opened its registration and you have about 10 days to get a free team pack to help you with your own event organization. SFD represents about 500 teams worldwide organizing events to discuss about the importance, benefits and usage of Free and Open Source Software on the same day: September 17th this year! It's also an opportunity to preach to your local community and gives them ideas and reasons about why they should care and use FOSS."
and their open source software.... haven't we learned by now that closed source is much better?
What is that terrible mascot on the front page? It's looks like some of the later Sonic the Hedgehog characters all gang-banged a penguin.
I am a huge fan of open source and Free Software but beyond some higher profile projects (Kernel, KDE, Python...) it is hard to rally people to work for free. For every open source success there are ten projects that just die from inertia / lack of interest.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
and I don't know why. Is it the matching lyrical syllables to the Weird Al song title?
Nice. Will they be handing out copies of Photoshop, Maya, or Lightwave by chance?
To launch a successful event of any kind can take months of planning and orgaization. You really need to be thinking at least a year in advance.
You need to stay ahead of the game.
Your campus event on the 17th comes too late.
School isn't out quite yet, but Microsoft already has an ace up its sleeve when it comes to this fall 's back-to-school shopping season. The company announced that anyone buying a Windows 7 PC worth $699 or more will automatically get an Xbox 360 Arcade system for free, no rebates involved. That's right --- completely free.
All you need to do is buy a new computer and provide your .edu e-mail address. If you're shopping at a brick and mortar Microsoft Store or Best Buy, just flash your student ID, and you'll walk out with your new computer and an XBox 360. The promo will run between May 22nd and September 3rd in the United States, and Canadian and French shoppers will get in on the fun later in the summer.
Microsoft back-to-school deal gives away XBox 360s free with new PCs [May 19]
freedom freedom freedom, oy!
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
FOSS is a great initiative and one of the best things is that proprietary software doesn't have to die for FOSS to succeed, it can all come down to who has the better product but to have the better product you need more than just great engineers, you need great designers and marketers, you also need to avoid this FOSS stereotype.
Free software is nice, it also changes too frequently, has many defects, each distro tuning things differently, a rag tag fleet of options and configs in funny places. It is rough around the edges, but somewhat customizable if you have the coding skills and time to work for free. It is a kluge to be recognized for what it is, a toolbox of shoddy but working rugged tools that were home crafted by academics and software devs to correct some issue or to improve a design flaw or add some awkward new ability to the tools you have now, by use of esoteric conditional band aids and command line hacks.
Here are a few things I have to give as examples by the way of anecdotal observation. I know its alot but please mod me up, I have taken time to write something controversial, interesting and informative - and I have terrible karma. :-)
LDAP is fully capable of being a customizable platform to manage accounts computers and the organizational tree of resources. it replaces NIS as the tool of choice for authentication in a production Linux environment. For those who had to roll with this drastic change, it is not trivial to convert a NIS environment to ldap, but isn't too bad for an expert in both with the right method to do it. That takes experience though. However, ldap implementations, howtos and structure all vary widely depending on who set it up, on what distro, and which version of ldap and its schema. It has a awful command line syntax to do essential tasks such as adding a user or adding a group or searching for a account or anything else. I think that major omission to the opendap project. Heres the default way:
$ ldapmodify -r -D 'cn=foo,dc=bar,dc=com' -W /tmp/user.ldif
ldapdelete
Used to delete entries
$ ldapdelete -D 'cn=foo,dc=bar,dc=com' -W 'cn=user,dc=bar,dc=com'
ldapsearch
Used to search ldap servers
$ ldapsearch -L -D 'cn=foo,dc=bar,dc=com' 'objectclass=posixAccount'd
This is a deterrent to people thinking of adopting ldap.
To ease the pain, you can acquire ldapscripts (Google it) that is a humble project that makes setting up accounts etc less painful than using ldap add syntax. Oh yeah, you need to customize that too.
Then you can add a user like:
ldapadduser foo foogroup
(enter name)
(enter password)
Now if you ever had to use ldap doesnt that seem like it should be a part of the openldap package?
Then there is ldapvi which you should get because you need to be able to view the "database" and correct things, again this is tedious and user unfriendly using ldap tools that come with openldap. Oh you can set up and alias in bash, that allows you to log into your ldap using ldapvi to edit it without having to do some annoying cmd line options and the admin user DN - so more customizations need to be made to make things usable. Once you get past all the time it takes to standardize your ldap's organizational hierarchy and what the best way to classify things would be.
Do you want auto-mounter, did you happen to notice it is hokey to set up in ldap compared to NIS? Should you have an email attribute for each user to appease web applications and mailer scripts to derive the email address for a user account? Were you insane enough to want to add the samba schema there for authentication from a samba server? It will need to rehash all your passwords (samba doesn't have the ability to auth against an ldap server without it.. needs samAccount crap, passwords rehashed.
So add an additional attribute or two per user to add the the pile of little minutia that you need to add to the mix... to inter operate properly across disparate software implementations that need to authenticate to ldap in their own special and hokey ways. Does that work with ldapadduser? Will I need to customize it to facilitate samba stuff being created?
Did you know that svn server nee
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tl;dr
Sorry, you lose.