Free Republic

Has anyone used or is anyone out Free Republica using Open Office Suite? What has your experience been like? When did it switch from free to member fee based?

This story was posted on FR back in 2007, but it's fitting to repeat now, since "Jibby" is in many of your prayers at this time. I'd like to share the story below about an O.S.S. World War Two veteran of the Halyard Mission rescue operation returning to Serbia 60 years later to pay tribute to the Serbian and American veterans who played out one of the great, heroic stories of World War Two that has remained largely hidden all these years. ____________________________________ The above is the back of signed photo given to OSS Radioman Arthur Jibilian by General Mihailovich...

WASHINGTON — Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world. They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt.

One was a historian and assistant to John Kennedy, another was the chef who first introduced French cuisine to American households, and a third was the father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police. In their every day lives they had nothing in common but Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Julia Childs and Miles Copeland shared a secret life - serving in an international spy ring at a time when Hitler was threatening the world. Their work and that of thousands of other members of the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA, will be revealed today...

WASHINGTON - Famed chef Julia Child shared a secret with Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and Chicago White Sox catcher Moe Berg at a time when the Nazis threatened the world. They served in an international spy ring managed by the Office of Strategic Services, an early version of the CIA created in World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt. The full secret comes out Thursday, all of the names and previously classified files identifying nearly 24,000 spies who formed the first centralized intelligence effort by the United States. The National Archives, which this week released a list of the...

The Fall of Microsoft Office By Anders Bylund (TMF Zahrim) May 27, 2008 On the same day that the state of New York published a report supporting open formats for electronic documents, mighty Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) said that it would support the open-source ODF format in Office 2007. Redmond's own Open Office XML specification may be heading for the great Recycle Bin in the sky, never to come back. What happened? The twin developments are noteworthy to astute investors for multiple rasons. While several European countries, the EU itself, and the state of Massachusetts have distanced themselves from proprietary document...

When I think about what works really well in open source development and technology, the following things stand out: Modular architectures, Programming language agnostic, Feedback-driven development, Built-for-purpose systems, Sysadmins who write code, and Standards-based communication.

The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era.

The inaugural version of OpenDisc has hit the streets! Featuring major updates for FileZilla and OpenOffice, and new versions of Blender, ClamWin, Firefox, Pidgin and WinSCP. Also by popular demand the Tux Paint stamps package makes a return to the disc. As per usual printable disc covers and labels are included, but if you’d like to view them online simply visit the cover art section. Most importantly there are five new programs on OpenDisc 07.10, three of which were added due user suggestion; Dia, GnuCash and the ever-popular VLC are now featured, as is the streamlined Sumatra PDF and TrueCrypt.

Linux users from around the world are filling out the Linux Foundation's desktop survey. But what John Cherry, the foundation's director of global Linux workgroups, wants to know is, "Where are the responses from the North America?"

The part that I find interesting is the “Grandma’s linux is called Mac OS X� bit. Not because it’s likely to be controversial but because I’ve come to the same conclusion over the past few months too. I have the belief that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all OS. For the most part Windows continues to dominate, although it’s hard to say how much of that is due to the fact that it fits most of the people most of the time and how much of it is down to people assuming that Windows is something that comes with...

Fearing the restrictions it places on their work, the majority of open source software developers do not plan to publish code in the next year under a controversial new license authored by the main governing body for open source and free software, according to a survey released Wednesday. In addition, more than 40% of those surveyed said they won't ever publish their work under Version 3 of the General Public License, which was released earlier this year by the Free Software Foundation. "GPLv3 is controversial because it imposes restrictions on what you can do with programs," said John Andrews, CEO...

In what may be the first action of its kind in the U.S., a lawsuit has been filed to enforce an open-source license. In what may be the first action of its kind in the U.S., the Software Freedom Law Center has filed a lawsuit to enforce an open-source license. The SFLC filed the suit on Wednesday in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Monsoon Multimedia Inc., on behalf of the developers of BusyBox, Erik Andersen and Rob Landley. The suit charges Monsoon with using BusyBox under the GNU General Public License version...

Stallman: The fact that Torvalds says "open source" instead of "free software" shows where he is coming from. I wrote the GNU GPL to defend freedom for all users of all versions of a program. I developed version 3 to do that job better and protect against new threats. Torvalds says he rejects this goal; that's probably why he doesn't appreciate GPL version 3. I respect his right to express his views, even though I think they are foolish. However, if you don't want to lose your freedom, you had better not follow him.

AMD will continue producing a closed-source proprietary driver; however, they are opening the source-code to a critical library with accompanying GPU specifications for X.Org developers. To get the ball rolling, AMD is also funding the development of a new open-source R500/600 driver.

Three MythTV Linux distros compared By Nathan Willis on August 28, 2007 (9:00:00 AM) Print Comments My Series 1 TiVo is getting old, so I am planning an escape route based on MythTV, a free software system that turns an old computer into a personal video recorder. This week I tested three MythTV-specific Linux distributions: KnoppMyth, MythDora, and MythBuntu. I found MythDora the best overall fit for my needs -- but there are important distinctions between the three that may lead you to a different decision. My curiosity toward MythTV-specific distros was touched off by MythBuntu's latest release earlier this...

... Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee was confidential assistant to Gen. Donovan from 1942-46. ... The sad truth, however, is that Lee was just one of many identified Soviet agents in the OSS. Others, as we now know from numerous impeccable sources, included Maurice Halperin, Carl Marzani, Franz Neumann, Helen Tenney, Julius and Bella Joseph and Lee’s Oxford classmate, Donald Niven Wheeler.

Microsoft is spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt among open source users, Linus Torvalds said in an interview published last week. The software giant is falling short with its technology and, because it cannot win against open source on price, it is trying to encourage inertia in the IT industry, the creator of the Linux operating system said. Microsoft has been at the centre of considerable controversy over the last 12 months, mainly ;arising from its statements on open source and its technology partnerships with a range of Linux distributors.Microsoft has claimed that open source software violates 235 of its patents,...

Kevin Rose founded Digg in late 2004. It was the beginning of something phenomenal... to be precise, the Digg phenomenon. Digg was all about the tight-knit community of techies who wanted to get in there, share relevant tech news, vote for it, and talk about it. And what a fabulous idea it was. So fabulous, in fact, that according to an article about Digg, Kevin and co literally had potential investors beating down the doors, offering fantastic quantities of money to them because of their potential. They accepted a couple of million in late 2005 and the rest, as they...

Excerpt - Big UNIX news this morning. Apple has bought out CUPS, the common UNIX printing system. The name may not sound familiar, but it's part of every Mac OS X installation. CUPS implements a cross-platform printing system based on the Internet Printing Protocol and is, according to its web page, the defacto standard printing system for Linux. Until now, CUPS has been distributed by Easy Software Products under the GNU general public license. Although the purchase was announced today, it seems the actual deal went down this past February. In addition to acquiring the CUPS source code ownership, Apple...

Red Hat Inc., a provider of open source platforms, said Tuesday it has taken steps to expand its footprint in the telecommunications market. Those steps include the acquisition of Mobicents technology and new membership to the SCOPE alliance. Mobicents adds a service logic execution environment (SLEE) to Red Hat's technology portfolio and complements J2EE to enable convergence of voice, video and data in next-generation applications, Red Hat said. Mobicents is certified for JSLEE 1.0 compliance. Red Hat said it intends to develop a communications platform that integrates Mobicents with Red Hat middleware offerings. The company said more information about subscription...

Novell, Xandros and Linspire have signed well publicized agreements with Microsoft. Rumors on the Web have hinted that we might be next on the list. So we would like to clarify our position. At Mandriva, we believe working in heterogeneous environments is essential to our customers. So, interoperability between the Windows and Linux world is important and must be dealt with, and anything that helps this interoperability is a good thing. We also believe the best way to deal with interoperability is open standards, such as ODF which we support strongly and we are ready to cooperate with everyone on...

The past 21 days have been some of the most intense hacking days that I have ever had and the same goes for my team that worked 12 to 16 hours per day every single day --including weekends-- to implement Silverlight for Linux in record time. We call this effort Moonlight. Needless to say, we believe that Silverlight is a fantastic development platform, and its .NET-based version is incredibly interesting and as Linux/Unix users we wanted to both get access to content produced with it and to use Linux as our developer platform for Silverlight-powered web sites. Am now on...

There's a very interesting paper published by Goldman Sachs and posted by Hewlett Packard, Fear the Penguin [PDF]. You will recall that both companies sent representatives to join Steve Ballmer and Ron Hovsepian on the stage and to speak about how wonderful it all was on the day Microsoft and Novell announced their deal. According to the paper, Linux is going to take over the corporate data center. Here's the first paragraph: Linux-on-Intel appears likely to emerge as the dominant platform in corporate data centers. This paradigm shift should have significant implications for a broad range of enterprise IT vendors....

-- Red Hat Linux has received a new level of security certification, one that should make the software more appealing to some government agencies. Last week IBM Corp. was able to achieve EAL4 Augmented with ALC_FLR.3 certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, putting it on a par with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Trusted Solaris operating system, said Dan Frye, vice president of open systems with IBM.

Free software gives everyone the freedom to run, study, change and redistribute software. It is these freedoms, not the price, that is important about free software. Free software advocates make the distinction between free, as in speech, as opposed to free, as in beer. Though many people would gladly accept a free beer, it is not one of the fundamental principles of democracy. In 1985, Richard Stallman, a computer programmer, released "The GNU Manifesto," in which he proclaimed a golden rule: One must share computer programs. Software vendors required him to agree to license agreements that forbade sharing programs with...

Memorial Day weekend has throughout our history been a time of reflection, remembering our honored service people who have given the ultimate sacrifice for our country and our freedom. In locales around the country, protesters and anti-military organizations that have 364 other days of the year, are not happy with that and also want to use Memorial Day and myriad celebrations across the country to push their "peace" at any price agenda. Instead of "honoring" our service members, active and veterans, by thanks and remembrance, they choose an "in your face" approach of political activism and leafleting. That, sadly was...

My AAR for Operation Simply Shred, Columbia, MO May 26, 2007I left my home at around 6:15 pm on Friday night to stay at the home of FReeper friends, Dogrobber and bluesagewoman in Columbia, MO.  After lots of stop and go rush hour type traffic of the folks headed to the Lake of the Ozarks for the Memorial Day weekend, I made it to their home at around 8:45 or so.  Rita showed me around their lovely home, and we sat up yapping until around 11, and then crashed.The next morning we got up and got ourselves ready to head...

Report: Microsoft says open source violates 235 patents By Stephen Shankland Story last modified Mon May 14 06:16:01 PDT 2007 Microsoft claims that free and open-source software violates 235 of its patents, according to a magazine report published Sunday. In an interview with Fortune, Microsoft top lawyer Brad Smith alleges that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents, while its user interface and other design elements infringe on a further 65. OpenOffice.org is accused of infringing 45, along with 83 more in other free and open-source programs, according to Fortune. It is not entirely clear how Microsoft might proceed in...

AMD will soon deliver open graphics drivers, said Henri Richard just a few minutes ago, and the audience at the opening keynote of the Red Hat Summit broke into applause and cheers. Richard, AMD’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, promised: “I’m here to commit to you that it’s going to get done.” He also promised that AMD is “going to be very proactive in changing way we interface with the Linux community.”

Oliver Jones provides an even-handed summary: "I've been a stalwart Solaris x86 user for many years now - I refuse to run Linux on my hardware, when Solaris makes the penguin look decidedly second-rate." For reliability, he says: "I truly can't fault the Sun option: I consider that if Solaris is good enough for the banks, it's good enough for me." But, he also says: "To be honest, Solaris isn't without issues - the number one I see at the moment is the user experience (especially with regard to hardware support). Sun really needs to plough some more development resources...

THE FREE SOFTWARE Foundation has declared a jihad on Microsoft and Novell's licensing deal and has declared that it will wreck it using the latest draft of the GPv3. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Association told Reuters that Open Saucers need to make sure that such deals "don't make a mockery of the goals of free software".

FIRMS WOULD LOVE to have you dump your computer every year, and your accesories, and your MP3 player, and your DVD, and your entire movie collection, and replace it with new ones. The software world is getting closer. I think that "Planned Obsolescence" is sadly here to stay; but there's hope, only one: open source. Microsoft has lately perfected the planned obsolescence game with its decision to make flagship products like Internet Explorer 7 not available for previous OS versions like Windows 2000. Cutting updates and no longer releasing patches for insecure products is not enough.

That Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, prefers the current version of the General Public License, GPLv2, over the version in development, GPLv3, is no secret. But in a lengthy E-mail response to questions from InformationWeek, he offers a full explanation of what he thinks is superior about GPLv2. Torvalds says he regrets that the authors of GPLv3 have decided to take aim at political opponents. He has little patience for statements about the "evil and immoral" nature of proprietary code or the "TiVo-ization" of Linux (a reference to set-top box producer TiVo producing a device that runs...

Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 Linux distribution has reached another big milestone, racking up two million installed users barely two months after tallying 1 million installed users. With the new threshold crossing, it is unclear whether Fedora 6 is the No. 1 Linux distribution in use today, but internetnews.com has learned that preliminary discussions are underway that could see Novell's OpenSUSE Linux distribution partner with Red Hat's Fedora to drive open statistics about Linux use.

San Francisco (dpa) - A week before the launch of Microsoft's new Vista operating system, its open-source competitor Linux received a giant boost Monday as prominent high-tech companies announced they were forming a consortium to promote the free challenger. The Linux Foundation, formed from two separate support groups, will have the backing of companies like IBM, HP, Intel, Oracle and Novell who aim to boost the free programme by providing promotion, standardisation and legal protection, according to James Zemlin, executive director of the foundation. "It's really a two-horse race now, with computing dominated by two operating-system platforms, Linux and Windows,"...

Around 25% of enterprises will be running mission-critical business application on Linux platforms by 2009. The prediction comes from analyst Saugatuck Technology, as a result of joint research with BusinessWeek Research Services. The researchers questioned over 130 firms and also found that 45% of enterprises will... Article Continues Below ... be using Linux to run critical applications by 2011. At the end of this year, 18% will be relying on Linux for critical applications. The analyst said Linux and other open source software take-up had now reached critical mass in the market place. It said recent open source announcements by...

I spent December seventh, eighth, and ninth in Seattle as Microsoft's guest. Microsoft flew me there from Florida at its expense, put me up in a nice hotel...They didn't quite play the old Beatles song "Love Me Do" in the background, but it was the event's unstated theme. [snip] In any case, there were five participants. And our first formal event, the morning after the introductory supper, was a tour of the Microsoft Home of the Future -- under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). The young gent from the Inquirer wouldn't sign the NDA, so he didn't take the tour. Since...

Give people 12 months warning (time to work out what they're going to do, talk with the legal dept, etc) then make the kernel load only GPL-tagged modules. I think I'd favour that. It would aid those people who are trying to obtain device specs, and who are persuading organisations to GPL their drivers.

She had many codenames - Diane, Camille, Marie, Philomene - but to the Gestapo she was simply the Limping Lady because of her wooden leg. Gestapo chief Hermann Göring put out Wanted posters offering a reward for the capture of the woman he viewed as the most dangerous spy in war-torn France. But Virginia Hall ignored the Nazi secret police, and, working for Winston Churchill's SOE, the Special Operations Executive, forerunner of MI6, she slipped back and forth between London and France, wreaking havoc behind enemy lines. When he set up the SOE, Churchill said he wanted it "to set...

Shirly Ray Trumps, 84, a retired Army colonel who led commando operations behind German lines in support of the Normandy invasion, died of lymphocytic leukemia Nov. 15 at his home in Annandale. Born along the Bayou Teche in Breaux Bridge, La., in the heart of Louisiana's French-speaking Cajun parishes, he joined the Army in 1940 as a member of the Louisiana National Guard and was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry in 1942. On a weekend pass to Washington in 1943, he heard that the Army was searching for French-speaking volunteers to train for special missions. He applied for and...

BALTIMORE - In 1942, the Gestapo circulated posters offering a reward for the capture of "the woman with a limp. She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies and we must find and destroy her." The dangerous woman was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore native working in France for British intelligence, and the limp was the result of an artificial leg. Her left leg had been amputated below the knee about a decade earlier after she stumbled and blasted her foot with a shotgun while hunting in Turkey. The injury derailed Hall's dream of becoming a Foreign Service officer because...

People may be passionate about their favorite sports team, but if you really want to get them fired up, ask what Web browser they use. There's the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" crowd who tend to stick with the browser that's included with their operating system -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer on Windows and Apple's Safari on the Mac. There are the "I've just gotta be me" folks who prefer lesser-known browsers, such as Opera from Opera Software. And there are the "live free or die" open-source true believers who champion Mozilla's Firefox above its commercial counterparts. Then there...

The chief information officer of Massachusetts' Information Technology Division (ITD) resigned earlier this week, citing a lack of funding for the state's IT programs. Louis Gutierrez had been a champion of open standards and was a strong supporter of the state's plan to implement the OpenDocument format (ODF) and his resignation could slow the ODF rollout, which is scheduled to go live in January. Gutierrez had been sounding the alarm over the lack of funding since August when the state's legislature failed to approve a bond issue that would provide financing for various IT programs including the move to ODF.

Capping a monthlong investigation, Oakland police arrested the estranged husband of a missing Oakland woman Tuesday on suspicion of murder. Police said they have evidence to suggest that Nina Reiser, 31, who went missing Sept. 3, is dead. Her body has not been found. "All avenues led us to Mr. Reiser being responsible for the death and disappearance of Ms. Nina Reiser," said homicide Lt. Ersie Joyner.

When Bill Clinton made his speech to the Labour Party conference, he bamboozled a few by finishing with the word "Ubuntu".

In a surprise move, Linspire is now offering its CNR ("Click 'N Run") software service at no charge to its Linspire and Freespire Linux distribution customers. In addition, the company will soon be open-sourcing the CNR Client. CNR, previously a fee-based service offered at annual subscription rates of $20 for basic and $50 for premium ("Gold") access to new programs, had been the San Diego-based company main source of income. Now, however, according to CEO Kevin Carmony, Linspire is doing well enough from selling its higher-end products and services that it can afford to offer its basic CNR service free...

On August 4th, we found out that Lenovo Group, the company that has taken over IBM's Personal Computing Division, had made a deal with Novell Inc. to preload SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) on its ThinkPad T60p mobile workstation. For the first time, a major OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has committed to preloading a Linux desktop.

AMD is strongly considering a move to open source its newly acquired ATI graphics drivers, according to a report at InfoWorld. The decision would provide the opportunity for independent developers to ramp up performance for X Window, OpenGL and client virtualization, areas in which ATI binary drivers are currently not available. News of AMD’s deliberations comes hot on the heels of Intel’s decision to open up the source code for 2D and 3D acceleration in its upcoming 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. Linux users will no longer have to rely on proprietary driver software to get the best performance...

The Intel Open Source Technology Center graphics team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of free software drivers for the Intel® 965 Express Chipset family graphics controller. These drivers include support for 2D and 3D graphics features for the newest generation Intel graphics architecture. The project Web site is http://IntelLinuxGraphics.org. This release represents the start of a long term effort by Intel to work with the X.org and Mesa communities to continuously improve and enhance the drivers. While these drivers represent significant work at both Tungsten Graphics and Intel, as our first release of this code, they're still in...