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Friday, April 01, 2005
Open Source Friday - Mozilla Remains Bounty-ful
For a decent history of free and open source software, read this. If you're not interested, don't. Easy, eh?Bounties
Dammit. If only I had real computer expertise, I could've turned all my time browsing into cold, hard cash. A researcher in Germany won $2,500 in bounties from the Mozilla Foundation for identifying security issues.Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman is both one of open source software's best promoters and worst enemies. It's like voting for Dennis Kucinich in the primaries: even if he's the best match for your political views, he's got no chance to win and no willingness to compromise. He's an idealist, which is why he can get away with this hair:
In this interview, he makes a number of interesting points. Plus, he insists on calling Linux, "GNU/Linux", which has is as accurate as it is cumbersome to say. Stallman is best known, though, for never being satisfied:
OFB: Since its purchase by Novell, the entity that was formerly known as Ximian seems to have become even more Free Software friendly and, Novell as a whole, has started to free up a lot of their code. Are you satisfied with the steps they are taking?
RMS: I can't be entirely happy with Novell as long as it distributes non-free software, and in particular, I can't entirely approve of SuSe as long as it distributes non-free software. However, Novell's changes go in the right direction. The Ximian and SuSe programs that were non-free are free now.
Software!
- PySol (rhymes with Lysol, I guess), is a collection of about 200 solitaire games. It requires Python, which all 3WNers already have so that they can play Derekota.
- Playing poker? The Poker hand evaluator might be your friend. It generates a score based on your starting hand. Looks like it's a compile-at-home package and "tar -jxf", "./configure", "make" is really, really hard.
- On the other hand, if you the only thing you "draw" is a kitty asleep on a couch, Sodipodi is probably a better choice for you. Sodipodi is a vector-based drawing program, similar to Illustrator. You can download packages for Linux and Windows. Might also run in Mac OS X.
- Remember the last time Anthony Edwards tried to be sexy on camera? Sure! We all do. The famous volleyball scene in Top Gun. Poor Goose lacked the guns to compete against Val and Tom and went on to be cuckolded with extreme prejudice on ER. Anyway, nerds everywhere can now play volleyball from the comfort of their computers. GPL Arcade Volleyball runs on Linux, Windows, Max OS X, and -- wait for it! -- BeOS.
- Used to be that computers were primarily business machines. Today, of course, they are primarily intermediate storage devices: they hold your music before you download it to your iPod. I've used CDex on my Windows machines for years. It's an easy to use program for extracting music files from CD to .ogg files. Even .mp3, if you want. That's all it does, though -- there's no visualizations, or themes, or playback, or organization.
Magazines
For those of you who want to read about free and open source software more than one day a week, you can subscribe to Free Software Magazine. For $4.95 an issue, I suppose they must have some nudity. Barely legal penguins next door, at the very least. If you would rather read about Linux from a new user's perspective, try TUX magazine. It's the "first and only magazine for the new Linux user. Before Oprah convinced me that I could be a billionare by pinching pennies I subscribed to Linux Journal. It's a good magazine for everyone who wants to upgrade their motherboards, but really shouldn't.
