Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, is famously fond of distinguishing between “free as in freedom” and “free as in beer.” Free software, he is pointing out, is a matter of philosophy and politics, not price, and the implication is that “free as in freedom” is by far the superior of…
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Purism, the company that has delivered free laptops, is now hoping to do the same for phones. As I write, the fundraising campaign is just over halfway to its goal, with 27 days to go. You might imagine that, with Purism’s past record, its efforts would be applauded, but instead, dozens of self-appointed pundits are…
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The Collabora flavour of LibreOffice aimed at the public sector, officially rebranded GovOffice, will allow agencies to deploy the free office suite, leading to savings on Microsoft Office license fees and Collabora’s own licenses.
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Jonathan Riddell, the main developer of Kubuntu (and of large chunks of Ubuntu) has scaled up his personal war on Canonical’s licensing of Intellectual Property: He now demands hugs from anyone who uses his.
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This “story” surfaces every several months and, for some reason I always fail to fathom, everybody starts parroting it. It goes thus: Munich is sick and tired of how inadequate Linux is for everyday use and is ready to ditch years of work and millions of euros to return to Windows.
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The Document Foundation released version 5.0 of the LibreOffice suite last week. Usually a whole jump in an application’s version comes with significant changes and new features. Does LibreOffice 5.0 deserve its new version number? And, more importantly, is it worth upgrading to?
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It’s sink or swim time for Battle for Wesnoth. The fantasy turn-based tactical game has been so long in every distro’s repository that we have nearly taken it for granted. But the Wesnoth team now needs your help.
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Fresh off the presses: LibreOffice reveals the project that will go head to head with Microsoft’s 365 online suite: LibreOffice Online (LOOL).
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The system tray has remained mostly the same for decades, a few icons sitting on a panel displaying some information about the system and providing a shortcut to some features. In Plasma 5 the system tray has been reimagined to some extent. The widgets that sit on it have been redesigned and improved vastly. If…
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The new version of Netrunner is here. For some users, the most important part of this release will be its LTS nature. Since Frontier is based on Kubuntu 14.04 it will receive updates for the next 5 years. For others, like myself, the most important part is the new features and improvements over the last…
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One of the most original distributions out there is Elementary OS. The first version was hyped quite a lot, it wasn’t perceived by many as yet another distribution, they were in a mission to create a new desktop environment built on top of many of GNOME 3’s technologies. Elementary OS is perceived more along the…
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Is proprietary software ethical? This is a hard question to tackle, one that I may attempt to answer in the future, for the time being I will content myself with trying to answer the much weaker question of what kind of software the government should use, i.e. Is the use of proprietary software by the…
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