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Celebrate Software Freedom Today
An anonymous reader writes "It's that time of the year again: when we all unite regardless of the (free) licenses we cherish and go out into the streets to let people know how Free Software has changed our lives. With over 425 events in 80+ countries, communities as diverse as Joomla!, FreeBSD and The OpenDisc, to name just a few, will be celebrating all over the world. Don't wait; grab your best arguments and join the wild masses of freedom lovers to the software freedom parties. Where will you be partying today?"
Why not have it on weekdays when most people don't have dates, wild parties or bar nights to check out the girls? What were they thinking?
Funny that many "open" source sites don't allow spidering or indexing of their site.
>Where will you be partying today?
My basement. Alone. Where else?
Well, today I'll be celebrating Linux's 20th birthday. I guess all you people who celebrated earlier dates for Linux's birthday must celebrate your own birthday as the day yo mama told everyone she wasn't fat, she was pregnant.
I do not mind if there was a charge for Linux, although being free is nice.
I decided to try Linux because as each iteration of Windows came about, more and more things get locked down so the user cant do things. For testing I still have a Windows install (used rarely), but by going from WinXP to Win7, even silly things like recording "What you hear" from the sound system have been locked down. It's this constant locking down of features that drove me to Linux.
Leaving aside major changes like KDE3 to KDE4, at least I am free to change the desktop the way I like, and not some way Microsoft wants you to "experience" in Windows.
One thing I will say, sometimes you can't get people to Linux no matter how many Live Distros you run showing their really old computer can be used again at a faster speed with up to date Linux compared to an ancient copy of Windows (and is too old to run up to minute Windows).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Maybe it's just me, and I'm sorry, but I imagine that the local "Software Freedom" party would be only very slightly less painful and awkward than the "CoCo Forever" party thrown last week by the local Tandy Computer User's Group.
People planning Software Freedom Day parties with Google Maps. Maybe they'll send invitations by sharing MS Word documents on Facebook too...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's almost impossible, IMHO, to understand the user-interface mindset of someone who only uses GUI apps when you've used CLI since your mid-teens. It's even harder to understand someone who doesn't think like a programmer and doesn't relate the abstractions of the UI to underlying structures, GUI or not.
Emotions! In your brain!
Actually, for getting a command prompt in Windows 7, you don't have to drill all that way down. When you click on 'Start', in the box that has 'Search programs and files', you just have to type 'cmd' and presto!!! The only time I need to call any tech support is when my internet is down, and typically, the first thing the support person tells me is to do that and invoke such a window, and then ping the gateway address.
I do agree w/ you otherwise that everything that's done in Linux & BSD on the CLI should have been doable on a GUI. In the 90s, NEXTSTEP came closest to that, and hopefully, GNUSTEP is capable of it. I would have hoped that GNUSTEP would have been the UI of choice for both BSD and Linux. But w/ the insistence on using CLI to edit /etc and other files to make things in Linux work, I'm afraid you are right!
even lower than a Java based phone OS?
I clicked the link and got "There was a problem retrieving your account information. Please contact support."
If there is ANY CLI then YOU HAVE FAILED.
Then Microsoft has likewise failed because the Windows recovery console is not graphical, and because the process for specifying arguments to a program run as a scheduled task (Start > Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks) is not graphical.
How about a "find drivers" button, both of which your competitor has had for years?
Ubuntu has one of those: System Settings > Hardware > Additional Drivers. So how does one convince device manufacturers to make working Linux drivers available to Linux distributors from day one, as opposed to Windows and Mac OS X on day one and Linux as an afterthought? The only way to get a "find drivers" button is to make a kernel that can use another operating system's drivers, and ReactOS has a chance to succeed where Linux failed because ReactOS aims for compatibility with the NT 5.x kernel used in said ten-year-old version of Windows.
Its just human nature folks, humans are visually oriented creatures that like to touch and explore.
So how does one automate a task by touching and exploring? I thought the whole point of using a computer was to automate repetitive information processing tasks.
CLIs are about as UNINTUITIVE an interface as you could possibly design
That's like saying giving someone instructions in English is about as UNINTUITIVE an interface as you could possibly design. Better to point and grunt.
open != free
Then why does each of the criteria of the Open Source Definition, as published by Open Source Initiative, echo one of the freedoms of the Free Software Definition, as published by Free Software Foundation?
The current version of Ubuntu's system requirements are much steeper than XP's, and not far from Win 7's.
Nearly any desktop PC manufactured in the past ten years has a 1 GHz PIII or P4 CPU or faster and at least 512 MB of RAM (or enough slots for it), which is the minimum spec for mainstream Ubuntu. Lighter-weight Ubuntu flavors are also available: Lubuntu can run on a Pentium II with 128 MB. What are the specs of the machine that failed to meet the system requirements?
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CategoryTeam2011
Top Four by country:
India 53
USA 37
Philippines 28
Mexico 27
Looks like Open Source is quite active in the Philippines and Mexico.
I love the CLI and use the terminal all day every day, but in essence, I have to agree with hairyfeet's assessment wholeheartedly.
Just instead of lashing out at the CLI, I complain that sound in Linux is clumsy and flawed, I still have trouble configuring Wifi, Bluetooth is almost impossible to be made to work decently, clipboard management STILL is an absolute pile of shit, Web browsing is noticeably slower than on Windows, Kon Colivas' patch set is refused over some silly technicality, and most window managers are installed with such abysmally lacking default configurations that I can't deny the whole Free Software case is just hopeless. This thing has always been, still is and shall ever be designed for servers. It is all downright hostile to anyone intending to run a desktop/workstation. If I really want to be honest, I have to admit: I use Linux because I am a hobbyist.
thx for you posting, brother.
see you there.
I need to feed my family. I write code for a living. How do I get paid for doing this in a world where all software is free?
Wow, calm down :)
I don't think many Linux users are concerned about becoming the number 1 desktop market. We care more about using open standards which will enable us to use Linux if we want. One way of encouraging open standards is to get people to use Linux, OpenOffice, etc - but who cares what OS other people are using, as long as things are set up so that you can communicate freely with them, sending and receiving data in a format that anyone else can understand?
Having said that, when using Ubuntu I never had any reason to use the CLI outside of doing geeky webserver/programming type things. With Mint I did need to use the CLI to turn off "tap to click" on the trackpad, so admittedly that sucks. But when I was using Windows recently I had to Google just as much to find out where the option to "disable touchpad when typing" was because the GUI controlling the Synaptics driver settings wasn't worded very well.
gconf-editor already does something similar for Gnome, it's basically it's the equivalent of regedit. You still have to type gconf-editor from a terminal to run it - but MS don't put regedit in the Start Menu either. Some settings need to be made less accessible so that people don't screw up their system doing "exploration."
I suppose someone could write a GUI that automatically parses all the most popular Unix config file types and locations and lets you change settings from that. It would be quite convenient, especially for people who don't yet know where settings files are likely to be located. If nobody's actually done that yet then I might give this a go, good idea HairyFeet :p Similar to the idea that gconf-editor and regedit aren't available from a menu, I'm not sure it would be a good idea for it to be startable from outside a CLI though.
Windows is quicker if you are given a task where you've never had to do it before" why? Because GUIs are intuitive and reward exploration, and CLIs give you a blinking cursor and a shitload of man pages, that's why!
That really depends on the task now, doesn't it? Some things you just can not do in Windows without downloading a specialised application. As a silghtly sideways example I've used many simple text editors over the years, but recently after trying emacs I love it. I can use regexps in my search and replaces, and create macros to do things that 99% of text editors simply cannot do. I get that most people don't care about this kind of feature, but there are just some things that either take a very long time, or are simply not possible when you're using a basic GUI. You have to wait until someone makes a GUI that does what you want.
which is totally what she said
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete! http://kimi.edu.vn
...this sounds so fucking gay. It reminds me of a line from Super:
She sucked more dick than my brother Victor and you saw that faggot come in here once with a cum worm on his beard. He didn't even know it was there. How you don't know someone jizzed in your face?
That's what I imagine these "parties" being like.
If you find this post offensive, don't read it! THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING! I am what I am because of how apes behave.
What is this "sound" from the computer of which you speak? One communicates with a computer via a console, and the only sound a glass TTY makes is the beep when you receive an ASCII character. Perhaps one can program the line printer to make musical sounds by printing at particular rates.
Oh.. you're talking about a home entertainment media platform running Windows.. that's a different matter. That's not a computer any more, stop thinking of it as one. Can you record "what you hear" coming from your phonograph? Of course you can.. that's what audio cables and/or microphones are for. You even pay a small fee on your blank recording media to compensate the rights holders.
Linux sound is terrible, but Linux was NOT "designed for servers". Linus Torvalds:
Mod. Parent. UP.
Actually, on top of the above, I think it also has to do with the personality-type of the user: Aside from a slight bit of DOS when I was about 8(i.e. "a:, install" etc), I'd been windows-only and rarely used a command line until I tried Linux at about 15. Sometime in the next year I ended up switching to it, and now, five years later, I can't live without my command line handy. It's just /so/ convienient to have all that scripting power right there, and access to everything I want, instantly.
Of course, that isn't to say I don't like having a nice GUI desktop environment... but I love having shell access.
To celebrate, can we put Gnome 3 on a fiery altar and watch it burn?
Most people don't follow the Open Source Definition when calling anything 'open'. The term 'open' has always been close to the dictionary definition and is a more relative term than that of Free Software. It's often coincidental that "open source", as defined by the average person, means the OSI's definition of the Open Source Definition.
In addition, 'open' is somewhat considered to be some sort of consumer inspired movement to go beyond just source code licensing and into allowing for a business model that's closer to the "Bazaar" model at literally every aspect.
Remember, most of these open source projects are small and ran by donations and would rather have their bandwidth used for something useful. There is no obligation for Free Software/Open Source projects to let you use up massive amounts of bandwidth on their servers to be 'open', which, in this case, means little to their cause. If they wanted you to have offline documentation, they'd probably have put out download links or included documentation in the source code which your distro probably included in the package, as well.
That being said, you can still spider their site by ignoring robots.txt and changing your user-agent.
But that's what it comes down to, doesn't it? I installed Linux on my laptop, and unlike previously, it does fine detecting my network card, and I know the command for setting the IPs for the interface. But when I need either sound, I have to find which version of ALSA matches my kernel in order to get even mediocre sound. WiFi, forget it, which essentially converts my laptop into a brick. Clipboard management - I use the one under kde, which is somewhat flaky because it automatically copies something I highlight, as opposed to something I highlight and then copy - but I at least have the option of going and clicking on the words I wanted. About Gnome - whether 2 or 3 - the less said, the better. Honestly, Linux would do well to take a page out of Apple, make GNUSTEP the default user interface, which is the final interface in getting things working, and do a better job burying things under that interface. Oh, and allow things like KDE, GNOME, XFCE, et al to run, but as a switchable option, and if one exits that, one should be taken back to GNUSTEP, as opposed to the CLI. (Speaking of which, why does an OS need so many 'shells' - ash, bash, csh, ksh, and so on?)
Why is Free something that's more associated w/ Linux & GNU than BSD? Why has it evolved to the point that it's considered different from open, which ought to mean the same thing? Why is it that 'Freedom' has carried w/ it such a ball & chain that it's synonimous w/ drivers not being available for a certain platform for which the 'Free' OS is being implemented? If you want basic things, like sound, networking/wifi to work, chances are you'll run into a roadblock? All that has made 'Free' synonimous w/ 'does not work w/ basic things I need'.
I understand all the arguments about Freedom being the capability of looking at, and changing the source code if something doesn't work, but guess what - most people don't have friends who can write a proper device driver for them, the way they might have someone help them w/ mail-merge or pivot tables. So having proprietary software for major essentials, such as drivers, is okay! Also, the civil wars in the Free Software movement about which licenses are really free vs which ones aren't, and are better avoided, do no favors to the Free Software movement. Right now, Free Software, having the market share it has, is a follower, and needs to support what it can, be it drivers, popular software and popular hardware. Once all that is there and people develop free alternatives that are also feature competitive (w/ Office, for example, or Photoshop, or Movie Maker), then it would make sense to become more rigid and demand that software be made open in certain situations. But until then, doing what a lot of Free Software advocates do is shooting oneself in the foot.
Richard Stallman had a printer,
whose code he could not see.
So he began to tinker,
And set the software free.
Since when was sound considered essential for servers?
Half are trolls, most are useless, and few are above +3. Slashdot's demographics seem to have rotted out completely.
It's OpenStreet Map!!
It was bought with someone else's money donated for Research purposes.
Besides that, what kind of printer are we talking about: plotter, dot matrix, typewriter, pixel map, extruder, hydraulic press, coin, punch-card, or what?
Many arts of printing have have destroyed, either by government or lack of articulation. RMS doesn't need anything more than a typewriter.
Oh fuck off, hairyfeet.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
I'll elaborate: despite your vendetta against the command line, do you use sign language instead of talking to people? The command line is far more natural and powerful than the GUI- it's like speech. Hell, even MS is implementing better command lines, does that mean microsoft is in decline? Or rather, is that the reason that microsoft is in decline? Not even, powershell is one of the most useful- or perhaps, the only useful administration tool they've introduced in years.
Ignoring your disgusting double standards and logical fallacies, your argument, or rather, conviction, is wrong as well. You hardly have to use the command line on linux if you don't want to, anyway, what- do you think this is still '95? One should never have to open the terminal in ubuntu, or mint for instance, to fix anything- it just makes it easier. What's more intuitive, "open up this program, browse to this menu, you sould see this, browse to this sub menu, click this button..." or "type this into bash and you're done"? Even if you maintain a CLI-free usage, you can still fix any problems that crop up in a... roundabout way. Your argument is both poor and totally irrelevent.
And, I know you're not likely to understand this as the biggest Microshill on slashdot, we don't want to castrate our OS for market share. Believe it or not, I, and many others, could not care less about being the most popular OS in the world- in fact, that'd take the fun out. I just want a solid OS kernel that powers distributions that I can run on stuff dating back to the 486, without issue- with good hardware support. What's the point of using linux if we've made it as unstable, crashy, bloated and locked down as windows, in a quest to emulate the biggest triumph of marketing over technology the world has yet known? Market share is irrelevant. What is relevant is making the best damn OS out there.
As for your bashing of OS market shares, even maintaining 1% is growth, as the number of computers in the world is much higher than it has ever been- however, the actual linux market share is 2%, most of that gained even in the past 3 years. Not to mention that little success that was linux on the phone, which you consistently refuse to acknowledge in your postings.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
If you're trying to resurrect an old machine, consider Puppy. I liked it for the month or so I used it on an old laptop that had run Windows 98, until I found that its window manager's Alt+drag binding (if I remember correctly) interfered with a binding used by my favorite paint program, at which point I switched to Ubuntu.
Well, see.. I, for one, don't care. It works for me, and I'm just as glad not to have to provide support for the idiocy I see in a number of the unwashed Windows-using masses. /I/ want to use, and if they happen to require some CLI to use, well, so be it.
I will put my coding time into making tools
If you, or anyone else wants to make a noob-friendly version, I'm not stopping you. You can take from the massive amounts of applications, desktops and other things, choose whatever you want, patch it, and distribute it(Just so long as you keep it open source). /want/ to be doing the same things as the unwashed masses?
I suppose the problem is simply that there's only a few companies willing to do it(for desktops) -- like Canonical -- and most don't have the funds to do it.
So we wait. And make it better for us. And endure comments such as yours which make us believe more in our position because, really, do we
The web page http://www.theopendisc.com/programs/productivity/ still mentions "PDF Creator" which is now bundled with MalAware in the included the "PDF Forge Toolbar".
The page still mentions OpenOffice.org as the office suite but they said they change it to LibreOffice. I hope that they removed PDF Creator too. I will not bother downloading an ISO with malaware let alone sharing/giving it to anyone.
You are a fucking mindless idiot. You and everyone who modded you up. I want Linux to be a lot, lot more popular, so:
- more software companies will make versions of their software for it (like TextMaker);
- my bank will make their extra security module available for Linux so I can do online banking like normal people;
- my smartphone manufacturer will make its support applications available on Linux, so I can backup and restore at least my contact data, not type all my 100+ contacts manually when I buy a new phone because some basement-dwelling dipshit thinks that using an unpopular OS is l33t and kewl;
- hardware manufacturers will have more interest in offering drivers for Linux.
Do a favor to the world: die.
Yeah, I know, I shouldn't be feeding the trolls.
- - -
Thing is, I don't *need* numbers. Why in the heck should I care whether 5;000 people use it or 500,000,000? So long as it does what I want, I see no reason to use something else. And until I see stuff like Teamspeak *dropping* support instead of adding it... I have no need to worry.
Also, please realize that I am not "the linux community". I have never provided code to an existing product, or properly compiled my own kernel. I'm just a guy. I have no real say in much of anything, Linux OR Windows. Yet you seem to believe that I could change something if I wanted to. *sigh*
Oh, and BTW, I *have* windows 7 on my laptop. I also have Debian LXDE. I find Debian starts quicker, stops quicker, runs apps quicker. W7 is shinier, yes... but it's also way slow(even with Aero disabled). And my laptop's no slouch - 4GB of ram, 2.4GHZ C2D, ATI mid-range graphics chip(it'll run TF2 at 50fps, 1920x1080, mid settings, no AA). And yet, when Linux runs what I need far faster, why would I want to run Windows?
*sigh*.
Celebrate the ironic memory of /. not having a gruesome banner add at page top.
Yay! Softwar Freedom Day. Go FOSS! not sure how I'm going to celebrate though
Wow, PMS much?
Basically, I don't care much about linux being popular as an operating system, I just want people to use open standards so that OS support will never be a problem again, no matter what I'm on. And this, I think, has already begun. It was hell 5, 10 years ago, when people stopped, inexplicably, making native linux applications in large measure., and little-to-no cross-platform compatibility existed inherently.
The reason why I don't think I would like linux becoming popular is well, android. From a free and open source project a few years ago, android has made an about face, and is filled with proprietary standards, software, drivers, and oh so much more. About the only thing open about it is the core source code, it's tivoization, it's a mess. It's nearly as bad as windows. As I said to hairyfeet, what is the point of using linux if, in a quest to dominate the desktop, we've rendered our OS as windows?
But I really do understand your point- I just don't agree with it as stated above.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Better to draw, point and explain. Like, an icon
So when a user tries to automate a complex task, how does the user combine such icons into a larger whole?
with tooltip when moused over
Or we can go in the other direction, where Linux in the form of Android has been arguably more successful: What's the counterpart gesture to a mouseover on handheld devices that rely on touch input?
Where did RobbieThe1st say Linux was ready for the masses? You're frothing at the mouth for all the wrong reasons here. My take? I use Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD -heck- even IRIX still. I'm not the slightest bit interested in "the masses" or what they need or want. I value the freedom to build and manage my own computer the way I see fit. This has nothing to do with feeling 'leet' or any other juvenile excuse for misplaced feelings of superiority. Windows has no place on my systems but that's not because I think Microsoft is somehow inherently evil. It's just that on Windows I feel like I'm forced to use my computer with one hand tied behind my back. That's nothing more than simple personal preference built on -most likely- sub-optimal habits learned in a past when GUI's weren't even available, and you're welcome to have a different opinion. Funny that you should mention and disqualify Haiku, though. If there's any OS that would fit your preference for being usable without a CLI it'd be BeOS and its free Haiku sibling. Sure, it still has a CLI if you want it (much like Windows and every other OS under the sun except MacOS Classic), but it's not needed. When it comes to "the masses" I'm always surprised by the ease with which 1% of computer users is dismissed as 'next to nothing'. Have you ever stopped to think about how many individuals you're talking about when you say 1% of all computer users in the world? That'd be enough people to fill a small to mid-sized country with and it's certainly enough -as decades of steady development, growth and improvement have proven- to sustain free software as a viable choice in computing. You should also understand that the ecosystem that forms around free software is not (nor was it ever intended to be) a single entity with a clear direction or even any kind of unifying goal. Sure, some commercial entities have emerged and made money using free software. They are welcome to do so and their contributions are very much welcomed, but making money or conquering percentages of market share is not the purpose. The only unifying aspect to the free software community is the combination of freedom and software, nothing else. Anyone who attempts to use free software as a stick to beat some other interest, is pushing an agenda of their own and is not representative of the loosely-knit group of people who love their freedom in computing. You're just as welcome as any other to simply take it or leave it, no questions asked. The rest is up to you.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.