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Proprietary Attacks on Software Freedom

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Microsoft
OSS
  • Microsoft Pentagon Win Changes Cloud Game But Will Face Protests

    In the past year, Azure has racked up some large deals from Kroger Co. to AT&T Inc., but a customer as big, demanding and secretive as the Pentagon will go a long way toward cementing Azure’s reputation as a serious contender.

    Amazon, which won a lucrative cloud contract with the Central Intelligence Agency in 2013, was seen to have the upper hand in the competition. But politics entered the picture. Trump has long been at odds with Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos. The world’s richest man also owns the Washington Post, which Trump claims has treated him unfairly in its coverage.

  • I'm not Boeing anywhere near that: Coder whizz heads off jumbo-sized maintenance snafu

    We're back again with Who, Me?, The Register's Monday morning crowdsourced tale of reader misdeeds and close calls.

    Today's confession from "Pete" will tighten the sphincters of those who flew on Boeing's finest back when 1990 rolled around.

    Pete was something of a multimedia whizz at a time when Windows 3.0 was a thing, sound cards were unusual and CD-ROMs even more so. He was fresh off an award-winning stint coding up the multimedia add-on for a well-known UK publication.

    It was early days for the technology, and Pete had cleverly coded things so audio would play from the mixed-mode CD if users lacked a sound card, but the indexing software leaked memory like a sieve under Windows 3.0. The vendor ended up having to send their lead programmer over to Blighty to sort out the issues but Pete persevered "and my CD-ROM launched successfully on Mac and Windows".

  • Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

    Users who download and attempt to run LibreOffice on the new macOS Catalina are presented with two options – "Move to bin" or "Cancel".

    In the face of being told that the developer cannot be verified, savvy users will know that there must be more options – and there are. If you cancel the dialog, you can head to Security and Privacy in Preferences, where there is an option alongside the blocked application to "Open anyway". Then you get another warning message, but this time with an option to take your chances and Open. The good news is that you only need to do this once, but it is a considerable annoyance.

    Apple reminded developers earlier this month that apps must be notarized to run on Catalina. "In June, we announced that all Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store must be notarized by Apple in order to run by default on macOS Catalina. Make sure to test all versions of your software on the macOS Catalina GM seed and submit it to Apple to be notarized."

    [...]

    LibreOffice is not the only open-source project to suffer at the hands of Catalina. The GIMP image-editing application also has problems, giving permission errors when trying to access files in locations such as Desktop and Documents. What should happen is that macOS prompts you for permission, but this dialog is not being triggered. A workaround is to run GIMP from the Terminal, visiting any required folders from the command line before launching the application. The thread referenced above has more details.

  • Ethical Open Source: Is The World Ready? [Ed: Can we please stop feeding known trolls who are trying to destroy Software Freedom with so-called 'ethical' licences?]

    Most users of OSS have been content to rely upon OSS licenses (many less restrictive than the GPL), that are approved and maintained for the ‘good of the community’ by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), a California-based public benefit company that sees itself as the steward of the cause. OSI is the creator (and proponent) of the Open Source Definition, a detailed document that sets out the central tenants of certain OSS philosophy —including requirements of free distribution, distribution of source code, integrity of the author’s source code, code not specific to a product, license to be technology-neutral, etc. —governing which OSS licenses can be labeled with the open-source certification mark, the OSI “seal of approval.”

    However, the open source status quo is increasingly being challenged by a number of developers who are unsatisfied with the current state of ethics in open source. These individuals advocate a more activist approach to ethics by creating new OSS licenses that contain deliberate moral clauses that most certainly contravene the current Open Source Definition. Three such licenses will be briefly discussed, followed by analysis as to likely next steps.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.