Fonts, don’t come easy to me

If there’s one aspect of Linux that has more Wild West in it than a typical Charles Bronson movie, it’s fonts. Linux fonts. This is something that we all take for granted, in fact so much granted, it’s almost Cary Granted, see what I did there, and yet, the reality isn’t all Rosie O’Donnell.

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Give me Support or Give me Death

I guess I’m insecure like that, but I often find myself trying to rationalise my affinity for Free Software. How I do this is by arguing in my head with imaginary detractors. As I understand it, putting your ideas into words and then bombarding them with “Yes, buts” and “What ifs” is the base of…

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Age of Makers

The late 70s and early 80s were arguably the golden age of computer nerdiness. This was an age of innovation and invention: the first mouse-driven interface, the first GUI, and even the first touchscreen are all products of that era. In those early days, you programmed your own drivers, wrote your own applications, and hacked…

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Spanish lawmakers to kill CC licensing and turn the country into a “digital backwater”

A new restrictive copyright legislation, ready to be passed into law in Spain, may very well hinder the interchange of ideas and render all Creative Commons and other copyleft licenses useless. Known as the “Google Tax”, the law establishes that news aggregation sites (such as Google News, Menéame, Reddit, Digg, and others) should pay a…

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Crowdfunding and Saturation

Over at Linux Magazine, Bruce Byfield has published an interesting article on Open Source and crowdfunding. Go ahead and read it. It is a brief, insightful and well-reasoned article. He mentions the saturation effect as a potential stumbling block that may slow or even eventually kill this financing model for Open Source projects. But metaphors…

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