Hello readers, and welcome once again to Free Software Magazine's fortnightly newsletter, keeping you up to date with all things free software... AND the top 10 FSDaily announcements for this week! Enjoy!

General announcements

Top ten Free Software Daily stories this week

1. OpenOffice.org goes to LGPLv3 --You may recall that a team from Sun devoted a great deal of time to the process of drafting the GPLv3. Our engagement was not just the monitoring exercise that I suspect it was for many of the corporate participants. Read more...

2. Bazaar is now a GNU project --"I'm happy to announce that Bazaar is now officially a GNU project. This decision was taken after consultation with some of the core Bazaar developers, Canonical management, and Richard Stallman, leader of the GNU project..." Read more...

3. The U.S. voted no on Microsoft Office standard at ISO --In all the talk (and there’s been plenty of talk) concerning the ISO meetings on Office OpenXML (OOXML) one point stands out. The U.S. voted no. Read more...

4. From Evil to Good: List of Formerly Closed-source Software --Increasing number of software applications are going the free/open-source way these days. Looks like more and more software companies and developers have seen the barriers of closed-source programs and have now fully realized the significance of freedom. Read more...

5. Free Software Supporter --"Today we released our first issue of the Free Software Supporter, a subscription based monthly newsletter that highlights the work of the foundation as well as provides updates from the GNU project. You can sign-up to our low-traffic mailing list to receive it each month..." Read more...

6. Petition calls for Open Standards in the European Parliament --"At a time when the EU Commission investigates the anti-competitive behaviour of a market-dominant player, the European Parliament (EP) still imposes that same specific software choice on both the European Union's citizens and its own MEPs. OpenForum Europe, The European Software Market Association, and the Free Software Foundation Europe today launched a petition to call on the EP to use Open Standards so that all citizens can participate in the democratic process. [...] The signatories are encouraging citizens and other stakeholder groups to publicly support the objectives of the petition by signing up on www.openparliament.eu ... Read more...

7. Open-source 3D printer built with Linux, can even replicate its own parts --This is an amazing device: The RepRap (short for "Replicating Rapid-prototyper"), an open-source printer developed at the University of Bath. It was built using Linux, and all of the project's software and hardware components fall under the GNU General Public License. It's cheap to use, and can even replicate most of its own parts. Most of this article is an interview with the technical lead, plus there are links on the first page to videos and sample parts and objects made with the RepRap. Read more...

8. Open source: the key to sustainable savings in public sector IT --The UK's budget is looming and the public sector is charged with increasing spending on front line services by 4% while budgets go up 2%. Free and open source software is a way of saving millions of pounds in licensing fees and delivering often better products, this article argues. Read more...

9. GNOME Foundation and Mozilla Foundation join forces --The GNOME Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation announced today that they will increase their collaboration to improve developer support and user experience of desktop applications on GNU/Linux and other free software systems. Read more...

10. Microsoft May Have Bribed India for OOXML Pressure --Back in August we warned that Microsoft had just made a very suspicious donation at a very strategic time. It only days before the September vote on OOXML. The article which was cited at the time has vanished, but you can find a copy here... Read more...

Thanks to peacemaker, can.axis, ilamont, E5Rebel, Jimbob, and komrad for these stories!

Latest content

Configure Exim with anti-spam --By Ryan Cartwright. Spam's off! Make it so with Exim and SpamAssassin. Read more...

FOSDEM: A Personal Account (with all personal details withheld) --By Steven Goodwin. FOSDEM - a geek trip to Brussels. Going abroad to experience different cultures. Or at least, a chance to eat chips, suffer rain, and watch American TV in a different country. Read more...

10 billion flies and no Kubuntu --By Laurie Langham. Since last November, I’ve been missing from these pages because I’ve been spending the Australian summer out in the Back of Beyond. Read more...

How to love Free Software in 3 steps: configure, make, make install --By Mitch Meyran. I recently re-read the article how to hate free software in 3 easy steps by Steven Goodwin. I’m no programmer, but then I’ve also installed a few distributions myself. And frankly, I have trouble relating to that post. Read more...

A £99 GNU/Linux laptop: is it just too cheap? --By Ryan Cartwright. On 28 February 2008, Elonex launched the Elonex ONE—the first sub-£100 laptop in the UK. Clearly competing against the much in-demand Asus EeePC [2], Elonex say they are aiming at the school-student market. The thing is, I just can’t stop asking: isn’t £99 too cheap for a laptop? Read more...

Impossible thing #3: Free art and the Creative Commons culture --By Terry Hancock. A new conventional wisdom began to spring up around free software, led in part by theorists like Eric Raymond, who were interested in the economics of free software production. Much of this thought centered around service-based and other ancillary sales for supporting free software. Read more...

Review of FreeBSD 7 --By Yousef Ourabi. At look at the future including finstall, the new graphical installer. Read more...

gedit plugins: What they are and how to use them --By Andrew Min. In my last article, I talked about using the powerful gedit text editor. But no program is perfect, mainly because too many features imply too much bloat. That’s where gedit’s plugins come into play. In this article, I’m will explain how to install and use some of my favorite gedit plugins. Read more...

Learning XHTML: Monty Python Style --By Andrew Min. The quickstart guide to learning standards-compliant XHTML. Read more...

Running GNU Mailman at home --By David A. Harding. Putting the most powerful mailing list manager on your desktop. Read more...

Making open hardware possible --By Alicia Asín Pérez. Explaining the basics of Open Hardware. Read more...

Promoting the Public Domain with Creative Commons' CC0 Initiative --By Terry Hancock. It used to be that you could safely assume a work was public domain unless there was a highly visible warning printed on it, containing both the copyright owner and the date of copyright (at least in the USA). Read more...

Trick and tips: a summary --This is a collection of tips&tricks written by Andrew Min and Gary Richmond, published in Free Software Magazine’s blog. Read more...

Sound filtering... with the Gimp! --By Gianluca Pignalberi. Make Gimp work as an ideal digital sound filter. Read more...

Reminders

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