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Free Software Magazine

Free Software Magazine: articles on free software

Basics of mapping with KML

May 21, 2012

Two of the most useful free (as in beer) software applications from Google are Google Earth, which runs on your computer, and Google Maps, which runs as a Web service. You can use both Google Earth and Google Maps to plot your own points, lines or shapes on an interactive map. You can also annotate these things with informative details. Unfortunately, the user interfaces provided by Google for doing this kind of DIY mapping are... well, clunky. They're slow, especially if you have a lot of items to add to a map.

Opinions

How and How NOT to Re-License your Work for Free Culture

May 7, 2012

The last week has been terrific for "Lunatics". We've cleared the licenses on almost all of the music -- and certainly the most important pieces. However, for a moment, I want to focus on the little problem with the one minute of music we probably won't get to use, and the right and wrong way to relicense your art if you are ever in that situation.

End users

Basics of mapping with KML

May 21, 2012

Two of the most useful free (as in beer) software applications from Google are Google Earth, which runs on your computer, and Google Maps, which runs as a Web service. You can use both Google Earth and Google Maps to plot your own points, lines or shapes on an interactive map. You can also annotate these things with informative details. Unfortunately, the user interfaces provided by Google for doing this kind of DIY mapping are... well, clunky. They're slow, especially if you have a lot of items to add to a map.

Hacking

File Thingie: A No-Nonsense Web-Based File Manager

May 17, 2012

File Thingie is not the sleekest or feature-richest web-based file manager out there, but it's a perfect fit for those who need a no-frills solution that is easy to deploy and use. This is not to say that File Thingie skimps on features. All the essential functionality is there, including the ability to upload multiple files in one go, support for users and groups, file access control based on black and white lists, and more.

Games

MegaGlest: a fantastic, free software strategy 3D game

February 4, 2012

When the Glest team started "Glest" as a college project a few years ago, they probably didn't expect their game to go such a long way. While "Glest" stopped being developed a couple of years ago in 2009, it was forked in two different projects: GAE (Glest Advanced Engine) and MegaGlest (the game I am reviewing in this article). So, how is it? The answer is simple: this game is incredible, polished, enjoyable, addictive, smart, and plain simply fantastic.

Interviews

Interview with Igor Sysoev, author of Apache's competitor NGINX

January 5, 2012

NGINX is the new start rising in the landscape of web servers. Well, it's hardly "new" -- it will soon turn 10. However, it's definitely rocking the web server world, with Netcraft showing a huge increase in usage in the last few months.

I was fortunate enough to catch up with NGINX's author, Igor Sysoev, who agreed on answering a few questions for us. So, here is a glimpse on their business model, their new 2.0 version, and more.

Humour

The Bizarre Cathedral - 100

October 13, 2011

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Reviews

Book Review: Introducing Character Animation with Blender, 2nd Edition by Tony Mullen

February 17, 2012

This is the Blender 2.5 update to Mullen's very successful book on character animation. Since Blender 2.5 introduced a fairly dramatic change in interface design, this is a very useful update. This is a thick and extremely dense book that covers character animation from start to finish.

Announcements

Lib-Ray Video Project Now on Kickstarter -- Let's Make it Happen!

May 4, 2012

Today is the Free Software Foundation's "Day Against DRM" and it seems like an auspicious time to launch a Kickstarter campaign to support the completion of the Lib-Ray standard for publishing high-definition videos on fixed media. I've been posting my progress on the prototypes here in Free Software Magazine, and it's clear to me that this is now just a matter of being able to dedicate the time and resources to finish the job.

Most forwarded

Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.

TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.

Most emailed

Free Open Document label templates

If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.

Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!

So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?

More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.

When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.

Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?

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