Software Freedom Day is coming up on September 17. Events are planned around the world in most major cities. If you write free software or use free software, attend your local SFD event. Give a talk, help someone install GNU/Linux, or just hang out with other free software and open source people for a few hours. If you're attending or organizing a Software Freedom Day event, post a reply here and tell us how SFD will be celebrated in your city.

In Defense of Negativity

I have often heard criticism of "negative campaigning" in the free software movement. "Negative" campaigns speak out against proprietary software as opposed to "positive" campaigns which instead speak of the benefits of software freedom. This essays unpacks some of the arguments against negativity and makes the argument that negative campaigns, in some forms, can play an critical and important role in free software advocacy.

Losing lifeblood: Advogato's marginal appeal

Two days ago, gesslein announced his retirement, provisionally at least, from Advogato, saying No one can comment on my posts, and it doesn't seem to be reaching anyone.

NHS Scotland Open Desktop Initiative

This article is written in response to the Question and Answer phase
of the NHS Scotland Open Desktop Initiative.
From the initiative's abstract:

NHSScotland is currently in the process of developing a set of standards to
support the development and building of the NHS Scotland Open Desktop.

The response takes into account the clarification of the initiative,
through the QA session, yet the response is also equally applicable advice
to any organisation wishing to have applications written that run across
a very diverse range of devices and platforms without having to develop
and maintain multiple versions of the exact same software.

Evolution of Programming Languages

read about the sad news that Jeff Fox, Forth advocate, passed away on Chuck Moore's blog.

Implementing spam protection in Wiki engines

Spam is really a problem in many Wiki communities, often forcing at least temporary to restrict editing rights. Most of the recent attempts to find a solution focus around captchas and spam lists. Captchas may be efficient to some extent; the problem is that to make them unreadable for bots, they must be twisted enough to become also difficult for humans to read. Lists seem less and less efficient, often accumulating thousands of entries and still leaving enough gaps for spammers. Spammers frequently use the Wiki search box to check if there is already some spam on the site - this shows that Wiki may be purely maintained and they can add more. Hence it may make sense to implement the delayed indexing but it also delays indexing of legitimate content. Blocking IP addresses is also no longer useful due DHCP.

One of the solutions may be to use combined protection rather than relying on some single "killer" approach. The rationale is to make spammer to invest more and more work into building the spam bot. Requiring a complex bot does not make the attack impossible but may statistically eliminate significant percent of spammers that are not willing to invest enough resources.

Triolet

I came up with this triolet to add my two cents to a Chinese physicist and poet's view on Oxford debate 'Poetry is beautiful but Science is what matters' :

Verse and song gave birth to thee
fearful mechanical and scientific device
Love's but a dance
of verse and song sublime to thee
A whisper, a glance, this little death --
"Shall we twirl down in Elysian Fields ?"
Verse and song gave birth to thee
fearful mechanical and scientific device

Diversity statement for Ubuntu

mdz is drafting, with the help of Valerie Aurora, hypatia, and mako, a diversity statement for Ubuntu, and is seeking comments on the current draft.

Bombono DVD reached 1.0

Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is made easy to use and has nice and clean GUI.

GNU recutils 1.1 released

I am happy to announce a new release of the GNU recutils, version 1.1.

Unicode 6.0 is released

Unicode 6.0 was released today. Here is the link to the announcement: http://www.unicode.org/press/pr-6.0.html

The following changes should be interesting to the Persian and Iranianist computing community (based on an original post to the Persian Computing list):

Piracy and Free Software

Over the last few years, many advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the banner of piracy. Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace advocates of piracy as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? I believe that, unintuitively, if we take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced "middle ground" response to piracy is possible. On free culture and free software's terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an shortsighted and unwise way to try to promote sharing that we should not support.

MongoDB 1.5.7 - 1.6RC2 is out and ready for testing

In a message posted by Eliot at Mongo DB list

Horseshit on a stick "Can Open Source be secure" BCS riposte

An article published by the BCS was brought to my attention, and it was full of such glaring omissions and implicit attacks on free software that it had to be dealt with. initially written as a comment, it quickly extended way beyond the length of the original article...