Feb 03
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 …
Save as PDFJan 18
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 …
Save as PDFJan 10
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 …
Save as PDFJan 08
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 …
Save as PDFJan 07
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 …
Save as PDFJan 05
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 …
Save as PDFNov 19
Yesterday I began my morning with a meeting involving members of various departments who are dealing with a major change to our IT systems. We are replacing a system from Vendor A with another from Vendor B, and just about everything changes. As a result, we have a lot of meetings. But I didn’t bring this …
Save as PDFNov 13
Nov 13
Or Why Tim Cook may be the world’s unluckiest man Please understand that I don’t wish anything bad to Tim Cook. I’ve never met the man. But I am observing something about the market dynamics in the smartphone and tablet market that I have not yet seen anyone else talk about. Eric Raymond in his …
Save as PDFMar 11
I was thinking today about something I have thought about before, but a new connection happened in my mind. It all started with Wikipedia. I use Wikipedia a lot, in fact I use it enough that I recently felt compelled to make a small donation, as I usually do for open projects I rely on …
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