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Archive for March, 2008

Linus’s Law

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

There are two versions of this, both referring to Linus Torvalds:The first was written by hacker and open source leader Eric S. Raymond in his essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. It states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. More formally: “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will [...]

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What is “open source”?

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

This website attempts to define just that. Open source does not only mean that the source code is available for a developer community. To be considered truly open source, software has to fulfill the following licensing, sharing, and legal conditions:
1. Free Redistribution
2. Source Code
3. Derived Works
4. Integrity of The Author’s Source Code
5. No Discrimination [...]

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Open Source Definition

Monday, March 24th, 2008

The licenses attached to open source software are pretty complex. The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program’s being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program’s license, all parties to whom the program is [...]

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Words that made computing history

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles [...]

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Open source program for file compression

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Here’s another award-winning program that was developed and is being improved through a community effort: 7-ZIP. It supports a large number of file compression formats, such as ZIP, RAR, CAB, GZIP, and TAR. It also has its own format called 7Z, which promises to be 30%-50% better than ZIP. Read about 7Z here.
There [...]

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Contributing to open source projects

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Not just technical expertise and programming knowhow is needed in the development of open source software. Your skills in the following aspects may be of great help:

Creation of user manuals - if you’re adept in technical writing, you can contribute by writing and proofreading user documentation.
Translation - software doesn’t just come in English. If you [...]

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An open source Office

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

If you don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars for Microsoft Word, Excel, and the other software bundled with Microsoft Office, I can point you towards a good alternative that doesn’t involve piracy.
Try Open Office, a bundle of open source software that has everything you need: a word processing program, spreadsheets, presentation software à [...]

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Open Source Blogging Platforms

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

Did you know that even the software that this blog runs on is open source? Yup, Wordpress is developed by the user community. Other popular blogging platforms that are open source are Movable Type and Livejournal.
The advantage of this arrangement is that it puts power into the hands of the people who are most [...]

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