Interviews
UK's Mr Open Source speaks out on BBC, OSC and 'free markets'. Prior to founding the open source consultancy, support and training company Sirius in 1998, he was the technical director of an IT Management training company. He is best known today as President of the Open Source Consortium (OSC) - and scourge of the BBC. For more about both, insight into where enterprise open source stands today, and what remains to be done.
In September this year, the Macedonian government announced one of the most ambitious educational technology projects ever proposed: to provide 180,000 of its school-age children with computer access.
At 36 years old, William Hurley has been involved in IT for more than half his life, starting after a car accident that left him badly injured. While recovering, he began hacking X-objects for MacroMind and later Macromedia Director in the open-source multimedia community, then went to work at Apple Inc. and IBM, where he was a master inventor and senior manager of targeted Internet applications.
"Java is a popular programming language used both on the desktop and the net. Until recently users who wanted to use just free software have had to struggle with partial support for Java, but now that Sun have begun freeing their Java implementation the way has opened for free software developers to create an entirely free implementation. This free Java, IcedTea, was shipped by default with Fedora 8, and so we talked to ThomasFitzsimmons, the lead developer behind this feature."
Groklaw is the blog that has made a difference. Created as a personal project by Pamela Jones, better known as PJ, in 2003, its stated purpose was to increase understanding of the law as it is applied to Linux and free software.
Interview with Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group on the BBC, iPlayer and DRM.
"Linux really wouldn't have gone anywhere interesting at all if it hadn't been released as an open source product. I also think that the change to the GPLv2 from my original 'no money' license was important, because the commercial interests were actually very important from the beginning. The commercial distributions were what drove a lot of the nice installers and pushed people to improve usability," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds.
As part of our KDE and Distributions series KDE Dot News spoke to representatives from Alt Linux. Russia recently announced plans to include GNU/Linux in every school in the country, and ALT Linux hopes to be the chosen distribution. Below CEO Alexey Smirnov and Andrey Cherepanov answer our questions about their relationship with KDE.
Sean Daly's telephone interview with Mark Taylor, President of the UK Open Source Consortium.
Amidst hisses and applause, political activist Richard Stallman — standing barefoot behind a podium, sporting a wild beard and playing with his long, shaggy hair — discussed what he terms the “conspiracy” of companies against the consumer Wednesday night.
"Many computer users tend to equate Microsoft with evil, but that is a mistake. Yes, Microsoft develops non-free software, and yes, that is evil, but Microsoft is only one company among many that do this, and it is wrong no matter who does it," said Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement, author of the GNU GPL and initial developer of the GNU OS, which is the basis of today's GNU/Linux system.
"It has been over four months since Dell started shipping computers preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux to home consumers in the United States. Lets take a moment to look at the progress that has been made so far. John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team in Austin was kind enough to let me interview him by e-mail. Besides commenting on the current state of affairs with Ubuntu on Dell machines, he also offers some insight in how the Linux team at Dell works and opens a small window into the future of Linux at Dell."
Over the past few releases, Fedora has gained a reputation amongst the various distributions for having some of the best artwork out there. This time around, responsibility has been handed over entirely to the community Art Team, and they've done themselves proud.
Read on to find an interview with Mairin Duffy. Fedora Art team lead and previews of some of the key elements belonging to the infinity theme.
LXer interviews one of the lead developers of the Xfce desktop environment.
Are you ready to fight for freedom or are you too lazy to resist? That is the challenge Richard Stallman throws down to the open source community in this major interview from our sister title Computerworld Brazil. He also spells out his views on Microsoft, Linus Torvalds and much more.
