Google Web Fonts prove free fonts are flourishing

May 27, 2011 GMT

Historically, fonts have been a weak point in free software. There were probably two reasons: first, programmers were mostly indifferent to fonts, and, second, font designers were concerned about how their work might be used. However, in the last five years, the problem has been largely corrected, as a look at the Google Web Fonts page shows.This change seems to have been brought about largely because of the SIL Font License. The license, which is recognized by the Free Software Foundation as being free, has become the most common one for releasing fonts because it addresses all the concerns of font designers, including the question of embedding fonts in documents, the right of derivative...

Mono founder launches new startup in a hurry

May 17, 2011 GMT

To outsiders, the recent layoffs at what used to be Novell appeared to be a major blow to Mono, the free software implementation of .NET, with many of its developers among those who lost their positions. Yesterday, however, Mono's founder Miguel de Icaza revealed in his blog that the layoffs only accelerated plans to spin off of Mono into an independent company. Called Xamarin, the new company had been long in the planning, but delayed by the attempt, first by Elliott Associates, and then Attachmate to acquire Novell. "At least for a year, it was clear that Mono really deserved to be its own company," de Icaza says. "The challenge with Novell," de Icaza explains,...

GNOME Outreach Program for Women Reincarnates

May 13, 2011 GMT

"It's not rocket science," says Marina Zhurakhinskaya, the organizer of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, talking about efforts to get more women involved in free software. "You just need to say that women are welcome in your project, because that in itself sends a signal. Also, you want specific people they can get in touch with to do their first patch and to ask questions." It's a simple formula, but the first indications are that it is a reliable enough foundation to make the recently revived Program a success.The GNOME Outreach Program began in 2006, when Hanna Wallach and Chris Ball noticed that none of 181 of the applications to work with GNOME in Google's...

PR basics for free software projects

May 05, 2011 GMT

A handful of free software projects, such as the Apache Software Foundation, market themselves as professionally as any corporation. However, the marketing of most projects could be greatly improved with a few common-sense practices.Why bother? Several reasons spring to mind, even if your project isn't commercial. To start with, marketing is a way to give credit, and receiving credit remains a strong motivation for many project contributors, even when they are paid for their efforts. Just as importantly, the more easily people can find your project, the more likely they are to use it. In addition, publicity can attract donors and volunteers (and show me the project that has too many of...

A Primer on Unity

Apr 28, 2011 GMT

The first time that you log in to Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04), expect a surprise. In many cases, the familiar GNOME interface is gone, replaced by Unity, a new interface that evolved out of Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Unity is designed to be easy to use, but you should spend a few minutes exploring before you settle down to working in it. As you familiarize yourself with Unity, its strangeness might seem less if you keep reminding yourself that Unity is a GNOME shell -- an interface that runs on top of GNOME. Although Unity is radically different from any version of GNOME that you have ever seen, most, if not all the usual GNOME applications are still available, as well as features unique to...

Free software and redundancy as a marketing benefit

Apr 24, 2011 GMT

Outsiders often criticize free software because it offers too much choice. Choice confuses people, they say, and free software would be more efficient if everyone concentrated on improving the best application in each category instead of developing alternatives. To me, this argument has always seemed conditioned by monopoly, but recently I found reason to believe that it couldn't be more wrong.The insight came when I was trying to set up a local Apache installation so I could develop a Joomla! website, using MySQL as a database. I am not proficient in MySQL, and, in a moment's carelessness, I wrecked the database KDE uses for personal information management. Suddenly, KMail no longer...

Eulogy for Groklaw

Apr 11, 2011 GMT

When I got up this morning, the news was all over Facebook and the free software news sites: Groklaw, the site that was influential in the SCO legal cases, will stop publication on May 16. It's news that I hear with decidedly mixed feelings.Pamela Jones, the site's owner and chief writer, announced the decision in a post on April 9. "The reason is this: the crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over, and Linux won," Jones writes, although the last acts in the long drama are still being dragged out. "I kept going all these years because when SCO attacked in the media and in the courtrooms, there was nobody to do what we did. Only the community could have answered SCO,...