free software

  • A good 404

    Steve WoodsOddities, Open Source, Tech

    Those whose fingers get into a tangle will be familiar with the HTML 404 error code page, just one of a number of HHTP status codes, of which the 400 series deals with client errors.

    A moment’s digital dyslexia this morning meant your ‘umble scribe was treated to Shropshire Council‘s 404 error page, as shown below.

    Shropshire's Council 404 page

    Umbraco is the open source content management system (CMS) used by the council to manage its website.

    Your correspondent particularly likes the final line: “This page is intentionally left ugly ;-)”.

    Computer scientist Brett Victor has an artistic 404 page, which pays homage to surrealist artist René Magritte.

    404 page of a pipe reading this is not a page

    However, my favourite 404 page of all time assumes the persona of Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adams’ Hithchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and can be seen here in all its glory.

  • Second YH4F launches

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    FSFE logoRegistration for for the second edition of “Youth Hacking 4 Freedom “, the Free Software Foundation Europe’s hacking competition for teenagers from all over Europe, has opened. The contest offers young people aged between 14 and 18 the opportunity to challenge themselves, meet like-minded people and win cash prizes of €4,096, €2048 and €1024.

    Registration is open until 31 December, after which the six-month coding phase will start, ending at the end of June 2023.

    YH4F graphic

    YH4F aims to inspire young people by giving them the chance to hack on a software project in a fair and fun way while meeting other young developers from all around Europe. The winners will receive a cash prize and a two-day trip to Brussels with other hackers for the award ceremony.

    The first edition of the competition was a huge success with broad participation and well-coded winning projects. Over a hundred people coming from 25 different countries registered and submitted 35 project at the end of a five-month coding phase. The six winning entries offered sign language transcription, a smart table robot, a personal assistant, a music tutorial, a file sharing program and a homework manager. All the programs are licensed under free software licences, thus granting everybody the right to use, understand, share and improve them.

    Ekaterina, one of the winners of the first edition of the YH4F competition, states: “Taking part in this competition was personally a big step as before it I have never ever programmed something and I did not have knowledge to do so. During the project I learned a lot more about programming concepts, how can I implement the modules and generally the programming language Python“.

    To be eligible to enter participants must be between 14 and 18 years old and live in a European country. The YH4F competition includes an introductory online event in which the FSFE team will present the competition and answer questions about it. Participants are free to use their imagination to the competition as any type of software can be coded as long as it is free software. The projects submitted can therefore be stand-alone programs written from scratch or a modification and combination of existing programs, in addition to which participants will be able to follow each other’s work and exchange ideas.

    Projects will be submitted to the expert jury at the end of June 2023.

  • Introducing Ubuntu Pro beta

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Security, Tech

    Ubuntu logoCanonical is currently offering a public beta version of Ubuntu Pro, giving Ubuntu Linux users extended maintenance and security compliance for software packages ranging from the Node.js runtime to Python 2 and Rust. Security cover will be extended for average and high common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) for thousands of applications and toolchains including Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Node.js, Puppet, Python 2, Rust and others.

    A free thirty days trial is available for businesses. Ubuntu Pro is available for data centres and workstations. A free level is being offered for small-scale personal use (up to 5 machines).

    Since the launch of Ubuntu LTS with 5 years support for the main operating system, businesses have asked the supplier to cover a larger area of the open source landscape under private commercial agreements. These benefits are now offered free of charge to anyone with a free personal subscription to Ubuntu Pro. This may also be combined with 24/7 enterprise level for the Ubuntu operating system.

    Ubuntu Pro is available for all Long Term Support (LTS) versions of Ubuntu from version 16.04 LTS upwards. The standard Ubuntu Pro subscription covers security updates for all Ubuntu packages. In addition, Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure subscription has been renamed Ubuntu Pro (Infra-only) with no change in its price or range. The Infra-Only subscription covers the base operating system and the private cloud components required for large-scale and bare metal and excludes wider cover for applications. Subscribing to Ubuntu Pro costs US $25 dollars per year excl. tax for one workstation or US $500 dollars per year for a server. On public clouds Ubuntu Pro costs some 3.5% of the average cost of the underlying processing environment.

  • Amazon Workspaces offers Ubuntu virtual desktops

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    The AWS blog writes that the company loves to give its customers choices: the choice of infrastructure to deploy their workloads, store their most important data, or the operating systems for their virtual desktops.

    To this end it has started offering Ubuntu virtual desktops, based partly on the premise that “Ubuntu is the most widely used operating system among professional developers (66 percent Ubuntu, 61 percent Windows, and 57 percent macOS)”.

    AWS Ubuntu virtual desktop

    To date your correspondent has seen both Ubuntu’s Unity desktop – as shown above – and the lightweight Xfce desktop as an alternative.

    It has been a quip of open source enthusiasts that next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop (instead of the Beast of Redmond’s ubiquitous operating system.

    AWS is now demonstrating that 2022 is the year of the Linux desktop on someone else’s computer. 😀

  • EU open source repository now online

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

    EU flagThe EU Commission has launched the code.europa.eu open source repository with over 100 projects to promote open software development, heise reports.

    The EU Commission has started operations of its open source development platform code.europa.eu without much ado. The Director General for Informatics, Veronica Gaffey, announced the launch of the open source repository two weeks ago at an Open Forum Europe conference two weeks ago. The platform should facilitate “the collective development, exchange and reuse of solutions for European public services”.

    In Gaffey’s words: “We created a central code repository, one which I can now announce publicly. You will find our software development platform at code.europa.eu. So, code.europa.eu facilitates the open development of software projects from the Commission as well as the other European Union institutions. We start today with just over 100 projects and 150 developers, but the OSPO is busily onboarding others.”. The focus is on projects by the Commission and other EU institutions, but also “in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere in the EU”.

    In December last year we got rid of an outdated, complicated, bureaucratic legal process that stopped us sharing open source. Now Commission projects that wish to share their software with others are free to do so,” Gaffey explained.

    The European Public License (EUPL) 1.2 should be used as the main licence for new source code on the platform, according to EU open source news site Joinup. The EUPL has been adapted to European law and is compatible with version 2 of the more well-known GNU General Public License (GPL). Code added to existing projects will use the same license as previously, such as the Dynamic Discovery Client, which uses the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

  • Audacity 3.2 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

    When it comes to open source audio editing software, Audacity is the software package your ‘umble scribe has been using and recommending to others for over a decade and a half.

    The latest minor point release for the software – to version 3.2 – nevertheless brings some major new features, including real-time effects. Furthermore, the package will now run natively on Apple’s Silicon Macs, according to German IT news website heise, whose headline rates it as ‘Genuine competition for commercial audio software‘.

    Audacity was first released in 22 years ago and since then it has made major strides towards becoming a fully-fledged end-to-end production tool for everyone who works with audio, from multi-track recording and editing to podcast production, i.e. a complete digital audio workstation (DAW).

    The new version press release states that the Audacity team has been working hard to empower audio creators with the following highlights of this release: real time editing capabilities, VST3 plugin support and sharing, the latter via Audacity’s new audio.com sister service.

    For a full list of changes in Audacity 3.2, read the release notes.

    Audacity is available for download for Linux, Mac and Windows and your correspondent is awaiting the new version’s arrival in the Debian GNU/Linux software repositories.

  • LibreOffice 7.4 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The release was announced today of LibreOffice 7.4 Community, the latest version of the free and open source office suite. It is available immediately for download for Linux, MacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors) and Windows.

    LibreOffice 7.4 banner

    The new release comes packed with many new features and improvements.

    GENERAL
    • Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files
    • Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library
    • Search field for the Extension Manager
    • Performance and compatibility improvements
    Writer (Word processor)
    • Better change tracking in the footnote area
    • Edited lists show original numbers in change tracking
    • New typographic settings for hyphenation
    Calc (spreadsheets)
    • Support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets
    • Extra functions in drop-down AutoSum widget
    • New menu item to search for sheet names
    Impress (Presentations)
    • New support for document themes

    The new features are summarised in the following video.

    LibreOffice 7.4 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office: such users should check regularly for new LibreOffice releases since the development progress is so fast, that each new version offers dramatic improvements compared with its predecessor.

    LibreOffice provides the highest level of compatibility within the office suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, to filters for a large number of legacy document formats, thus returning ownership and control to users.

    LibreOffice for Business

    For business deployments, TDF strongly recommends approaching the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from its partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs; see the dedicated business page for details.

  • Happy 25th birthday, GNOME

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Tech

    GNOME's 25th anniversary banner

    Yesterday the GNOME Foundation announced the happy news that the project had reached the venerable age of 25 years old, with special thanks to its founders, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero, plus its contributors and supporters over the last quarter of a century.

    As is fairly common within the technology world, the GNOME name is an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment.

    In its lifetime,GNOME has the default desktop environment of many major Linux distributions, including Debian, Endless OS, Fedora Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Ubuntu and Tails; it is also fulfils the same role for Solaris, a Unix operating system.

    GNOME42 desktop environment

    What began as a two-person project has certainly grown and flourished over the years, attracting support from not only volunteers but major players in the free and open source world such as Red Hat. Furthermore, there’s a new, special commemorative website to visit too: https://happybirthdaygnome.org/.

    Many happy returns!

  • Fedora Project wants to ban CC0 licence for software

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The CC0 Creative Commons licence exempts work form copyright claims, but does not exclude patent claims; and this presents a problem for free and open source software, as German IT news site heise reports.

    Fedora logoThe Fedora Project would like to remove the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence from the list of permitted software licences, as Richard Fontata from the Fedora Legal Documentation Team wrote in a post to the Fedora mailing list. The reason for the change is that the Fedora Project has agreed that software under a licence which does not exclude patent claims cannot be regarded as free and open source software (FOSS).

    Public Domain logoThe Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0) licence is the most liberal Creative Commons licence. It places works in the public domain, with the copyright holder waiving all copyright and related rights worldwide insofar as this is legally possible. However, the patent or trade mark rights of any party are specifically not affected by CC0, so it is thus possible to place works subject to patent rights under CC0.

    Patents against open source

    In the 2000s various companies, including Microsoft, have attempted to asset patent claims against Linux and open source software. The Open Invention Network (OIN), whose members mutually waive all patent claims against one another, came into existence as a response to these moves.

    Furthermore, in the open source world, there is the risk that companies could release code which is protected by that company’s own patents. If other developers use this code, they are unwittingly exposed to the risk of patent lawsuits. There is therefore widespread agreement in the FOSS world that open source licences must explicitly exclude the possibility of patent claims by the author*.

    In its permitted licences list the Fedora Project distinguishes between licences for software, content, documentation and fonts. CC0, which was previously listed as a permitted licence for software and content, will in future only be allowed for content. According to Fontana, it still has to be clarified whether any program packages will be affected by this change.

    *= for intellectual property purposes software is regarded as a work of literature.

  • Good riddance, Internet Explorer

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech

    Internet Explorer logoTwo days ago (and not before time. Ed.) Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer (IE) 11, the final version release of its web browser first introduced in 1994.

    Over the years, Microsoft has been steering Windows users away from IE and towards Edge, its newer browser which is based upon the free and open source Chromium browser.

    However, for those that still use sites and or pages that exploit the standards-ignoring qualities of IE, Edge does have an IE compatibility mode.

    IE’s inability to adhere to standards had in the past created lots of extra work for web developers who had to code work-arounds for IE just to get their pages to work in what was then the world’s most popular browser. It was the world’s largest browser mainly due to Microsoft bundling IE with its Windows operating system and integrating it deeply into the structure of the OS. This led to lots of angry comments in the code of webpages and style sheets, frequently employing intemperate language.

    Media – and social media – reactions to and reports of the news have been mixed. Business Matters on the BBC World Service got all misty-eyed and nostalgic earlier in the week. However, my favourite response to date is from the Twitter user known as beConjuror, drawing attention to the ‘not responding‘ feature of many of Microsoft’s fine products.

    Tweet reads Internet Explorer is NOT responding
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