I want no monuments

Following Florian Haas post on FSFE, I want to replay here my own comment.

I think the nineties saw a poor marketing of free as in freedom. Therefore the term “open source” was necessary to spread the word. And I agree it was an incorrect word.
Latest years saw a pretty good popularity of free software and a wide spread of open source. And open source is still important for the spread to keep on.
More and more users understand it is not just open source and it is quite impossible to find someone from the technical who doesn’t know what Linux is.
It is a task of the old users, those who NOW use free software, to help young users understand the different meanings of the words in the FOSS acronym.
And to invite new users by talking to them about freedom (and national finance): maybe the time is more ripe now.

Ottima iniziativa dell’Hacklab di Caserta!

Una lettera aperta ai nostri ministri affinchè adottino il software libero ANCHE per ridurre la spesa in software e sistemi che ogni anno affligge le casse statali, qualcosa di simile a 900 milioni di euro!

Se almeno quei soldi finissero nelle mani degli italiani, invece che finire in america o in qualche altro paese extraeuropeo…

Firmate la petizione!: la lettera verrà stampata e inviata il 20 luglio!

http://81100.eu.org/petizione/

As you may know, the ODF Alliance, global group of business companies that promote the free open document format (ODF), some months ago requested the ISO to make the ODF an ISO standard.

Yesterday, ISO accepted and ODF is now an ISO standard.

In the meanwhile, OpenOffice.org just launched the campaing Get Legal, aimed to convince current MSOffice users to switch to a legal and free copy of OOo, instead of burning another CD to get MSOffice 2007

Surely you read a lot about new Sun’s marketing show.
Let’s go to the source of the news. Sun.com shows a big banner stating “Free and Open Source Software: Sun announces […blah…blah…] software with Solaris at no cost“.

Let’s forget for a moment that “free” that at the beginning could mean FOSS but in the end means “gratis” and therefore confuses who must still understand the difference.

I see the following scenarios:

• Think of you as a business company: whatever you think about free(dom) software, probably its cost is not a problem.
  Usually that money is part of the project budget.
  So you won’t be interested.
• Now think of you as a student who knows nothing about free(dom) software. You are probably used in using cracks and keygens to enable your illegal software copies. And you are proud of that.
  So you won’t be interested.
• Now think of you as a fellow. That software could be gratis, but it’s not free(dom). You already have similar softwares and they are free.
  So you won’t be interested.

So, now: where is Sun going? Who could be interested?
Let me say: I really think of Sun as one of the biggest friend of free(dom) software between large business companies.
But they are talking about money, not about features, nor about reliability, nor about interoperability, nor about extendability…

I really fear they hope to gain fame and respect from an inexistent community that uses its software just because it’s gratis, without even asking if it is free or not.
I really fear their huge investment will just be forgotten in a couple of months.
I really fear we’ll lose a friend and I hope I’m mistaken.

I know I’m always late, but better late than never!

I think you and your friends will appreciate this short movie from Lafkon. I suggest you to download from the torrent.

Luky enough, we italians got it dubbed :)

no1984.org team makes it available here.

Hope you like it.

I’ve just read on OSNews that, while the city of Munich is switching to free software, Extremadura (Spain) supported the development and lately adopted their own GNU/Linux distribution, known as gnuLinEx.

Then, a few minutes later, I even read the french tax office has switched[0] to OpenOffice

I definitely can go bed with a smile on my face!

[0] article in italian

Probabilmente molti di voi sapranno già di cosa sto per parlavi ma forse non tutti hanno avuto tempo e modo di leggere questo bel libro, edito da Eleuthera e scaricabile gratuitamente dal server Ippolita.

Come è facilmente intuibile, il punto del libro è fare la differenza: non si tratta di prese di posizione, si tratta di un’analisi delle sostanziali differenze fra le due visioni e di ciò che ne consegue nella pratica. Un’analisi oggettiva, tanto da risultare evidente la scrittura a 8 mani.

Ve ne consiglio la lettura: io l’ho letto in treno come pdf ma andrò ad acquistarlo per aggiungerlo alla biblioteca e supportare gli autori.

I’ve just finished playing with gimp and created a small button
Hope you like it :)

ps: sorry fot the gif format, but i got trouble with gimp saving png
–gif imaged removed–

update
ok, i created an xcf version of the box (sorry for the delay but i’m not used to graphics at all)
Here is the XCF version, while the png version follows

The story told in the posts below has finally reached its end: the Ajax.NET project became free software, as it was promised.
The code was given to a business company, SediSys, that has opened a site, BorgWorX, for maintaining it.
I still have some doubts about a point (2.1 and 2.2) of the license, but it seems GPL compatible.
I’m very happy about that!

Have fun

In my previous post, I was telling you a story about a, so called, “bad guy” who ran into troubles when the community around his “open source” project recognised it as a fake.

I’ve notified that odd behaviour to the SourceForge team. They’ve found that some “unwanted” posts from the project forum have been deleted. Well, actually you cannot delete forum posts from sourceforge, you can only hide them. This makes them available to the sourceforge team, if you forward them an inquiry, as I have done.

They’ve agreed and now the “bad guy” (actually, his work) has been deleted. That guy still has time to make the source code available, and, therefore, to have back his project. I hope he will.

This time the words “open source” have been used as an advertisement strategy.

In my own experience, I understand I have to think about using “open source” or “free software” as the way to describe something to my colleagues. “Open source” is sometimes mistaken as “gratis”, but when I talk about “free as in freedom”, I know what I’m saying and when the others do not, they ask me and I can explain them. I’m not a guru at all, but we can talk about it.

Have fun