Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category.
September 3, 2009, 3:21 pm
I’ve found that three of my favorite books are available for free for download and re-distribution, so I’m just spreading the word and providing some mirrors
Richard Stallman’s book: Free Software Free Society
Download the PDF file here: http://tuxtraining.com/files/rms-essays.pdf
Source: http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/
Lawrence Lessig’s book: Free Culture
Download the PDF file here: http://tuxtraining.com/files/freeculture.pdf
Source: http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
Eric Raymond’s : The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Download the postscript file here: http://tuxtraining.com/files/cathedral-bazaar.ps
Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/
July 4, 2009, 2:45 pm
The Unix philosophy is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to developing software based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system.
Continue reading ‘Unix philosophy’ »
May 27, 2009, 1:52 pm
by Richard Stallman
Something strange and dangerous is happening in copyright law. Under the U.S. Constitution, copyright exists to benefit users — those who read books, listen to music, watch movies, or run software — not for the sake of publishers or authors. Yet even as people tend increasingly to reject and disobey the copyright restrictions imposed on them “for their own benefit,” the U.S. government is adding more restrictions, and trying to frighten the public into obedience with harsh new penalties.
How did copyright policies come to be diametrically opposed to their stated purpose? And how can we bring them back into alignment with that purpose? To understand, we should start by looking at the root of United States copyright law: the U.S. Constitution.
Continue reading ‘Misinterpreting Copyright’ »
May 27, 2009, 1:51 pm
by Richard M. Stallman
It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks — three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws — into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not arise by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.
Continue reading ‘Did You Say “Intellectual Property”? It’s a Seductive Mirage’ »
May 27, 2009, 1:42 pm
by John Sullivan FSF Operations Manager
We don’t make (much) music here at the Free Software Foundation, so it’s natural for people to wonder why the FSF has been standing up for individuals targeted by lawsuits launched by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most recently, we filed an amicus curiae brief in the case of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, et al. v. Joel Tenenbaum showing the RIAA’s theory of statutory damage awards to be unconstitutional.
Continue reading ‘The War on Sharing: Why the FSF cares about the RIAA lawsuits’ »
April 19, 2009, 2:35 pm
About twenty years ago Jobs and Wozniak, the founders of Apple, came up with the very strange idea of selling information processing machines for use in the home. The business took off, and its founders made a lot of money and received the credit they deserved for being daring visionaries. But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems. This was much weirder than the idea of Jobs and Wozniak. A computer at least had some sort of physical reality to it. It came in a box, you could open it up and plug it in and watch lights blink. An operating system had no tangible incarnation at all. It arrived on a disk, of course, but the disk was, in effect, nothing more than the box that the OS came in. The product itself was a very long string of ones and zeroes that, when properly installed and coddled, gave you the ability to manipulate other very long strings of ones and zeroes. Even those few who actually understood what a computer operating system was were apt to think of it as a fantastically arcane engineering prodigy, like a breeder reactor or a U-2 spy plane, and not something that could ever be (in the parlance of high-tech) “productized.”
Continue reading ‘Neal Stephenson: In the Beginning was the Command Line’ »
April 18, 2009, 4:11 pm
Commands enable you to do all sorts of powerful things on your computer. We’ll demonstrate this by looking at an everyday task that might be familiar to you.
Continue reading ‘Put Yourself In Command – with the command line’ »
April 18, 2009, 3:35 am
One of the things about getting older is that you learn to ignore things until you have to do something about them. It’s a learned efficiency, I suppose, rationing your increasingly precious time out to the unceasing demands upon it. I finally realized I have to do some serious thinking about cloud computing.
“Hang on a minute, don’t you work at Google ?” I hear you say. Well, yes, but in my defense many of the people who work at Google don’t have anything to do with cloud computing. Some of us have to keep the conference rooms clean, write Open Source/Free Software, things of that nature.
Continue reading ‘Jeremy Allison: The GPLs Cloudy Future’ »
April 18, 2009, 3:15 am
How many Linux users are there really?
It’s a darn good question, and there isn’t a darn good answer.
In one way, we’re all Linux users now.
Continue reading ‘How Many Linux Users Are There (Really)?’ »
April 17, 2009, 10:45 pm
There’s been a lot of debate by security practitioners about the impact of open source approaches on security. One of the key issues is that open source exposes the source code to examination by everyone, both the attackers and defenders, and reasonable people disagree about the ultimate impact of this situation. (Note – you can get the latest version of this essay by going to the main website for this book, http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs.
Continue reading ‘Is Open Source Good for Security?’ »
