Kevin O'Brien
Author's posts
Mar 25
Ohio LinuxFest Calls for Women
Please Redistribute I had two things happen to me this week that got me thinking. The first was the unforced error by Sqoot that by now has reached everyone on the Internet (but if you missed it for some reason, see Joe Brockmeier’s article at http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/03/how-casual-sexism-put-sqoot-in.php ). The other was an inquiry I got from …
Mar 04
Supporting Free Software – Getting Involved
I started this particular series of posts on January 5th, and now I am going to finish it on March 4th, so it has been just 2 months. In that time we have explored some of the ways everyone can support Free Software, such a by filing bugs, writing documentation, and by providing financial support. …
Mar 03
Why I Am An Optimist
This is going to be a little bit different from what I usually post here, but it’s my blog. If you don’t like it, just click away. It is easy to list many things going wrong these days, and I think most of us tend to look at the negative side. Regardless of political or …
Feb 03
Supporting Free Software – The “M” Word
And by that I mean Money. As I mentioned previously, when we talk about Free Software, the emphasis ought to be on freedom, not on price. The fact that so much Free Software is also free of purchase is great. It offers people who cannot afford expensive proprietary software a chance to use comparable software …
Jan 18
Supporting Free Software – Documentation
In my day job I am a Project Manager, and one of the things I constantly try to get is good documentation. I hope I have even produced a little of it myself. But there is no topic on which I get more resistance than on creating good documentation. No one ever has time to …
Jan 10
Supporting Free Software – Bug Hunting
In a previous post I mentioned that Free Software should more properly be considered “Community-Supported” software, and I said I would come back to discuss just what that means. There are lots of ways for someone to support Free Software, but one of the most important is by submitting bugs to the developers. Remember that …
Jan 08
The openSUSE adventure: Installing Packages
Well, I learned some more today in trying to install the software I use all of the time. As a long-time Kubuntu user I was used to how they set up their repositories, I know all of the command-line tricks for using apt, and none of that is any use to me now.:) But I …
Jan 08
Calling All 2011 Ohio LinuxFest Attendees!
We would really like to gather a teeny little bit of information about what you liked. I promise this can’t take more than a couple of minutes : And to make it worth your while, we will select one respondent at random to get a free Professional pass to the 2012 event, which gets you: …
Jan 07
OpenSuse 12.1
Well, I just installed OpenSuse 12.1 on one of my computers. Another one of my New Year’s resolutions was to try some other distros. I picked OpenSuse because it is a KDE distro, and I definitely prefer KDE. I am hoping to find that RPM is better than it used to be. So far, YAST …
Jan 05
Freedom is Never Free
The words we use to describe what we do can matter a lot in how we in the FOSS community think about what we do. Once upon a time there was Free Software, as defined by Richard Stallman in the famous Four Freedoms: The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). The …
