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  • best analogy to explain free software floss to non geeks

    - by opensas
    How do you explain free libre open source software to a computer illiterate guy? Two well known analogies I've often heard are: free software as a meal recipe, a set of instructions for you to inspect, learn, put into practice, and improve... versus a canned meal that you can only swallow without even knowing what you're eating... and the other is comparing privative software to a car that you aren't allowed to open it's trunk to see inside in case anything goes wrong... I'd like to know what other analogies you know that might help us explain free software to non geeks saludos sas

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  • Advice on software infrastructure for a FLOSS bounty site

    - by michaeljt
    I am planning to set up a simple web site where people can offer bounties for work on FLOSS projects. Unfortunately I have no experience at web development (I am a C/C++ developer), so I was hoping someone might be able to suggest out-of-the-box packages (preferably Debian ones) I could use to build the site from. My idea of how the site would work is to keep things as simple as possible. The person proposing a bounty would enter a description with relevant links (particularly to a bugtracker entry with the project the work is to be done on, where the real discussion and work would take place) and information and place an initial contribution. Other people would be able to add (donate, not pledge) contributions, but any discussion would take place on the project's bugtracker. I am also planning to run a mailing list rather than a forum (at least initially), so that is not a requirement. Paypal seems to me to be the handiest payment mechanism. So overall what I need is probably a simple interface with Paypal integration and a simple database backend. I hope this is the right place for my question, if not I would be grateful for pointers to somewhere better. And of course, this is purely about the technical side, though I am more than happy to discuss other aspects of the project elsewhere.

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  • MonologFX: FLOSS JavaFX Dialogs for the Taking

    - by HecklerMark
    Some time back, I was searching for basic dialog functionality within JavaFX and came up empty. After finding a decent open-source offering on GitHub that almost fit the bill, I began using it...and immediately began thinking of ways to "do it differently."  :-)  Having a weekend to kill, I ended up creating DialogFX and releasing it on GitHub (hecklerm/DialogFX) for anyone who might find it useful. Shortly thereafter, it was incorporated into JFXtras (jfxtras.org) as well. Today I'm sharing a different, more flexible and capable JavaFX dialog called MonologFX that I've been developing and refining over the past few months. The summary of its progression thus far is pretty well captured in the README.md file I posted with the project on GitHub: After creating the DialogFX library for JavaFX, I received several suggestions and requests for additional or different functionality, some of which ran counter to the interfaces and/or intent of the DialogFX "way of doing things". Great ideas, but not completely compatible with the existing functionality. Wanting to incorporate these capabilities, I started over...incorporating some parts of DialogFX into the new MonologFX, as I called it, but taking it in a different direction when it seemed sensible to do so. In the meantime, the OpenJFX team has released dialog code that will be refined and eventually incorporated into JavaFX and OpenJFX. Rather than just scrap the MonologFX code or hoard it, I'm releasing it here on GitHub with the hope that someone may find it useful, interesting, or entertaining. You may never need it, but regardless, MonologFX is there for the taking. Things of Note So, what are some features of MonologFX? Four kinds of dialog boxes: ACCEPT (check mark icon), ERROR (red 'x'), INFO (blue "i"), and QUESTION (blue question mark) Button alignment configurable by developer: LEFT, RIGHT, or CENTER Skins/stylesheets support Shortcut key/mnemonics support (Alt-<key>) Ability to designate default (RETURN-key) and cancel (ESCAPE-key) buttons Built-in button types and labels for OK, CANCEL, ABORT, RETRY, IGNORE, YES, and NO Custom button types: CUSTOM1, CUSTOM2, CUSTOM3 Internationalization (i18n) built in. Currently, files are provided for English/US and Spanish/Spain locales; please share others and I'll add them! Icon support for your buttons, with or without text labels Fully Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), with latest source code & .jar always available at GitHub Quick Usage Overview Having an intense distaste for rough edges and gears flying when things break (!), I've tried to provide defaults for everything and "fail-safes" to avoid messy outcomes if some property isn't specified, etc. This also feeds the goal of making MonologFX as easy to use as possible, while retaining the library's full flexibility. Or at least that's the plan.  :-) You can hand-assemble your buttons and dialogs, but I've also included Builder classes to help move that along as well. Here are a couple examples:         MonologFXButton mlb = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .defaultButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_apply.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.OK)                .build();         MonologFXButton mlb2 = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .cancelButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_cancel.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.CANCEL)                .build();         MonologFX mono = MonologFXBuilder.create()                .modal(true)                .message("Welcome to MonologFX! Please feel free to try it out and share your thoughts.")                .titleText("Important Announcement")                .button(mlb)                .button(mlb2)                .buttonAlignment(MonologFX.ButtonAlignment.CENTER)                .build();         MonologFXButton.Type retval = mono.showDialog();         MonologFXButton mlb = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .defaultButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_apply.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.YES)                .build();         MonologFXButton mlb2 = MonologFXButtonBuilder.create()                .cancelButton(true)                .icon(new ImageView(new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("dialog_cancel.png"))))                .type(MonologFXButton.Type.NO)                .build();         MonologFX mono = MonologFXBuilder.create()                .modal(true)                .type(MonologFX.Type.QUESTION)                .message("Welcome to MonologFX! Does this look like it might be useful?")                .titleText("Important Announcement")                .button(mlb)                .button(mlb2)                .buttonAlignment(MonologFX.ButtonAlignment.RIGHT)                .build(); Extra Credit Thanks to everyone who offered ideas for improvement and/or extension to the functionality contained within DialogFX. The JFXtras team welcomed it into the fold, and while I doubt there will be a need to include MonologFX in JFXtras, team members Gerrit Grunwald & Jose Peredas Llamas volunteered templates and i18n expertise to make MonologFX what it is. Thanks for the push, guys! Where to Get (Git!) It If you'd like to check it out, point your browser to the MonologFX repository on GitHub. Full source code is there, along with the current .jar file. Please give it a try and share your thoughts! I'd love to hear from you. All the best,Mark

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  • Who is the enemy of FLOSS today?

    <b>michuk says:</b> "The question in the title of this post was raised by myself recently, after I decided to accept a paid Microsoft ad on one of my Linux websites: http://jakilinux.org and (obviously) I was called a traitor."

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  • Conversation as User Assistance

    - by ultan o'broin
    Applications User Experience members (Erika Web, Laurie Pattison, and I) attended the User Assistance Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. We were impressed with the thought leadership and practical application of ideas in Anne Gentle's keynote address "Social Web Strategies for Documentation". After the conference, we spoke with Anne to explore the ideas further. Anne Gentle (left) with Applications User Experience Senior Director Laurie Pattison In Anne's book called Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, she explains how user assistance is undergoing a seismic shift. The direction is away from the old print manuals and online help concept towards a web-based, user community-driven solution using social media tools. User experience professionals now have a vast range of such tools to start and nurture this "conversation": blogs, wikis, forums, social networking sites, microblogging systems, image and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, podcasts, instant messaging, mashups, and so on. That user communities are a rich source of user assistance is not a surprise, but the extent of available assistance is. For example, we know from the Consortium for Service Innovation that there has been an 'explosion' of user-generated content on the web. User-initiated community conversations provide as much as 30 times the number of official help desk solutions for consortium members! The growing reliance on user community solutions is clearly a user experience issue. Anne says that user assistance as conversation "means getting closer to users and helping them perform well. User-centered design has been touted as one of the most important ideas developed in the last 20 years of workplace writing. Now writers can take the idea of user-centered design a step further by starting conversations with users and enabling user assistance in interactions." Some of Anne's favorite examples of this paradigm shift from the world of traditional documentation to community conversation include: Writer Bob Bringhurst's blog about Adobe InDesign and InCopy products and Adobe's community help The Microsoft Development Network Community Center ·The former Sun (now Oracle) OpenDS wiki, NetBeans Ruby and other community approaches to engage diverse audiences using screencasts, wikis, and blogs. Cisco's customer support wiki, EMC's community, as well as Symantec and Intuit's approaches The efforts of Ubuntu, Mozilla, and the FLOSS community generally Adobe Writer Bob Bringhurst's Blog Oracle is not without a user community conversation too. Besides the community discussions and blogs around documentation offerings, we have the My Oracle Support Community forums, Oracle Technology Network (OTN) communities, wiki, blogs, and so on. We have the great work done by our user groups and customer councils. Employees like David Haimes reach out, and enthusiastic non-employee gurus like Chet Justice (OracleNerd), Floyd Teter and Eddie Awad provide great "how-to" information too. But what does this paradigm shift mean for existing technical writers as users turn away from the traditional printable PDF manual deliverables? We asked Anne after the conference. The writer role becomes one of conversation initiator or enabler. The role evolves, along with the process, as the users define their concept of user assistance and terms of engagement with the product instead of having it pre-determined. It is largely a case now of "inventing the job while you're doing it, instead of being hired for it" Anne said. There is less emphasis on formal titles. Anne mentions that her own title "Content Stacker" at OpenStack; others use titles such as "Content Curator" or "Community Lead". However, the role remains one essentially about communications, "but of a new type--interacting with users, moderating, curating content, instead of sitting down to write a manual from start to finish." Clearly then, this role is open to more than professional technical writers. Product managers who write blogs, developers who moderate forums, support professionals who update wikis, rock star programmers with a penchant for YouTube are ideal. Anyone with the product knowledge, empathy for the user, and flair for relationships on the social web can join in. Some even perform these roles already but do not realize it. Anne feels the technical communicator space will move from hiring new community conversation professionals (who are already active in the space through blogging, tweets, wikis, and so on) to retraining some existing writers over time. Our own research reveals that the established proponents of community user assistance even set employee performance objectives for internal content curators about the amount of community content delivered by people outside the organization! To take advantage of the conversations on the web as user assistance, enterprises must first establish where on the spectrum their community lies. "What is the line between community willingness to contribute and the enterprise objectives?" Anne asked. "The relationship with users must be managed and also measured." Anne believes that the process can start with a "just do it" approach. Begin by reaching out to existing user groups, individual bloggers and tweeters, forum posters, early adopter program participants, conference attendees, customer advisory board members, and so on. Use analytical tools to measure the level of conversation about your products and services to show a return on investment (ROI), winning management support. Anne emphasized that success with the community model is dependent on lowering the technical and motivational barriers so that users can readily contribute to the conversation. Simple tools must be provided, and guidelines, if any, must be straightforward but not mandatory. The conversational approach is one where traditional style and branding guides do not necessarily apply. Tools and infrastructure help users to create content easily, to search and find the information online, read it, rate it, translate it, and participate further in the content's evolution. Recognizing contributors by using ratings on forums, giving out Twitter kudos, conference invitations, visits to headquarters, free products, preview releases, and so on, also encourages the adoption of the conversation model. The move to conversation as user assistance is not free, but there is a business ROI. The conversational model means that customer service is enhanced, as user experience moves from a functional to a valued, emotional level. Studies show a positive correlation between loyalty and financial performance (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2010), and as customer experience and loyalty become key differentiators, user experience professionals cannot explore the model's possibilities. The digital universe (measured at 1.2 million petabytes in 2010) is doubling every 12 to 18 months, and 70 percent of that universe consists of user-generated content (IDC, 2010). Conversation as user assistance cannot be ignored but must be embraced. It is a time to manage for abundance, not scarcity. Besides, the conversation approach certainly sounds more interesting, rewarding, and fun than the traditional model! I would like to thank Anne for her time and thoughts, and recommend that all user assistance professionals read her book. You can follow Anne on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/annegentle. Oracle's Acrolinx IQ deployment was used to author this article.

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  • Which FLOSS text editor is most like kwrite without being KDE-based?

    - by darenw
    Among text editors on Linux, I usually prefer KWrite. I like that I can quickly turn on/off line numbers and line wrap in the View menu. Other settings are easy to change. Other text editors I've used in the past, such as Gnome's gedit, bury line numbering and wrapping checkboxes deeper into the menu system, making it more distracting to change while concentrating on real work. However, KWrite is a KDE app. On Ubuntu it drags in over a dozen other packages, which I suspect I don't really need. Why would a text editor need all that? It's slower to start up than some other editors I've tried. I'm also trying to run an all-gnome system w/o any KDE, just to see how far I get with it. So, what GUI text editor isn't KDE-based, has few dependencies and quick start-up, easy to change line wrap and numbering, and general similarity to KWrite? What comes closest?

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  • What freeware/floss tools are available to help load data into SPSS?

    - by tardate
    I'm looking for a solution for producing SPSS format data files for loading into SPSS. The few offerings I can find are all commercial. Has anyone experience with generating SPSS-format data files using open-source, freeware or home-grown solutions? I'm not even sure that the file format is "open". Any hints appreciated (any language is fine, although java, perl or ruby preferred).

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  • OpenSource License Validation [closed]

    - by Macmade
    I'm basically looking for some kind of FLOSS/OpenSource license validation service. I have special needs for some projects I'd like to open-source. I know there's actually tons of different FLOSS/OpenSource licenses, each one suitable for some specific purpose, and that creating a «new» one is not something recommended, usually. Anyway, even if I'm not an expert in the legal domain, I've got some experience with FLOSS/OpenSource, at a legal level, and it seems there's just no license covering my needs. I actually wrote the license terms I'd like to use, and contacted the FSF, asking them to review that license, as it seems (at least that's written on their website) they can do such review work. No answer. I tried repetitively, but no luck. So I'm currently looking for an alternate legal expertise about that specific license. I don't mind paying such a service, as long as I can be sure the license can be recognised as a FLOSS/OpenSource license. About the license, it's basically a mix of a BSD (third-clause) with a BOOST software license. The difference is about redistribution. Source code redistribution shall retain the copyright novices. The same applies for binary redistribution (like BSD), unless it's distributed as a library (more like BOOST). I hope this question is OK for programmers.stackexchange. I'm usually more active on StackOverflow, but it just seems the right place for such a question. So thank you for your time and enlightened advices. : )

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  • Can I use CodeSynthesis XSD (C++/Tree mapping) together with a GPLv3-licensed library?

    - by Erik Sjölund
    Is it possible to write an open source project that uses generated code from CodeSynthesis XSD (C++/Tree) and then link it to a third-party library that is licensed under the GPL version 3? Some background information: CodeSynthesis XSD is licensed under the GPL version 2 but with an extra FLOSS exception (http://www.codesynthesis.com/projects/xsd/FLOSSE). C++ source code generated from CodeSynthesis XSD (C++/Tree) needs to be linked against Xerces (http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/) that is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Update I posted a similar question on the xsd-users mailing list two years ago but I didn't fully understand the answers. In that email thread, I wrote: I think it is the GPL version 3 software that doesn't allow itself be linked to software that can't be "relicensed" to GPL version 3 ( for instance GPL version 2 software ). That would also include XSD as the FLOSS exception doesn't give permission to "relicense" XSD to GPL version 3.

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  • Did Blowing Into Nintendo Cartridges Really Help?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Anyone old enough to remember playing cartridge-based games like those that came with the Nintendo Entertainment System or its successors certainly remembers how blowing across the cartridge opening always seemed to help a stubborn game load–but did blowing on them really help? Mental Floss shares the results of their fact finding mission, a mission that included researching the connection mechanism in the NES, talking to Frank Viturello (who conducted an informal study on the effects of moisture on cartridge connectors), and otherwise delving into the history of the phenomenon. The most interesting part of the analysis, by far, is their explanation of how blowing on the cartridge didn’t do anything but the ritual of removing the cartridge to blow on it did. Hit up the link below for the full story. Did Blowing into Nintendo Cartridges Really Help? [Mental Floss] How Hackers Can Disguise Malicious Programs With Fake File Extensions Can Dust Actually Damage My Computer? What To Do If You Get a Virus on Your Computer

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  • Make a mosaic picture out of 900 images

    - by unor
    I have ~ 900 pictures (mostly photos) of varying sizes. Now I want to create one big picture that includes all 900 pictures in a small thumbnail-like resolution. The tool should automatically resize the thumnails so that everything fits. All pictures should be added next to each other, so there should be no border/padding. Each picture should be included exactly one time! (however, it would be okay to omit a few so that there is no empty space) I'm looking for a tool (FLOSS, for GNU/Linux) that can do the job. I tried Metapixel, but it needs an input image that should be "resembled" by the thumbnails, and it only uses a selection of all pictures. I found montage, but couldn't get a result yet, because my system was unresponsible for hours after starting it. Maybe there are some tweaks? AndreaMosaic is recommended in this answer, but it's not FLOSS (and needs Wine to run it on GNU/Linux).

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  • SCALE 8x: Free software legal issues

    <b>LWN.net:</b> "But in reality the FLOSS ecosystem relies on a complex legal framework in order to run smoothly and to stand up to proprietary software competition: the various software licenses, contribution agreements, copyright and other "intellectual property" law."

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  • Why doesn't Mozilla release .deb and .rpm packages for their software?

    - by ushabtay
    i use and enjoy Firefox on my Ubuntu 10.04.2 laptop (although Firefox needs work for the Linux/Ubuntu version..) Yet i realize that in comparison to other pieces of software that have an "Ubuntu/Debian" version (.deb file, and usually .rpm files as well), i don't see it in one of the most profound assets of the FLOSS world. The Question is - Why? If Chrom/ium can - why can't they? Easier to get up-to-date software and features and so forth.. cheers,

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  • bigbluebutton or openmeetings?

    - by Adam Monsen
    I want to set up a server for small group meetings. I'm looking for features like audio conferencing, multi-point video, screen sharing... stuff like that. I'm familiar/comfortable administering Ubuntu servers, so for this task I'd likely fire up a small EC2 server running Ubuntu. I'm most interested in using FLOSS. I see there are at least a couple of options out there. For example: bigbluebutton and openmeetings. Anyone installed either (or a different one) and have recommendations/tips? If yes, have you ever upgraded same? I notice bigbluebutton has deb packages, so that might be pretty straightforward. openmeetings appears to support logging in with a facebook account; that might be a good way to avoid having to manage logins.

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  • Deferred Open Source licensing

    - by Thomas W.
    Are there established models for releasing an initially proprietary piece of software under FLOSS conditions after a defined period or a certain point of time? The main problem here is that all parties involved must be able to trust that the Open Source licensing will actually take place at the defined time and no party can further defer or cancel this process. Clearly such a model has its problems, for example it's problematic to deal with contributions from "outside", legally and technically. Ghostscript is a prominent example where a deferred model has been used and abandoned. However, if certain parties involved will insist on keeping the software proprietary, at least for a certain period of time, then the only options are a deferred Open Source licensing model or no Open Source licensing at all. I think I read about services that serve as trusted parties who take care of Open Sourcing the software. However, I was not successful in spotting any of those.

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  • How can I set up multiple dynamic users to update a single network's dynamic IP

    - by d3vid
    On my home network we are allocated a dynamic IP. I want to configure ddclient (or an equivalent) to send IP updates to DNS-O-Matic/OpenDNS only when I am on my home network. I do not want to send IP updates when I'm on my office network. Can this be done? I am prepared to use different FLOSS software or a different free DNS service. Additionally, there are multiple users who may be on the home network or away on other networks. How can we configure ddclient on each machine so that whoever is on the home network updates the IP (i.e. so we don't have to rely on a particular machine being on the network to update the IP). OpenDNS support have said we can't simply install updater software on each machine.

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  • Download/update webpages listed in XML sitemap

    - by unor
    I'm searching a FLOSS tool that downloads all pages (and embedded resources, e.g. images) linked in a XML sitemap (built according to http://www.sitemaps.org/). The tool should "crawl" the sitemap regularly and look for new and deleted URLs and changes in the lastmod element. So whenever a page gets added/deleted/updated, the tool should apply the changes. Some sitemaps list sub-sitemaps in sitemapindex?sitemap. The tool should understand this and load all linked sub-sitemaps and look for URLs in there. I know there are tools that allow me to extract all URLs from the sitemap, so that I could feed them to wget or similar tools (see for example: Extract Links from a sitemap(xml)). But this wouldn't help in getting noticed about updates to pages. Tracking the webpages itself for updates doesn't work, because "secondary" content on the pages changes daily, but lastmod gets only updated when relevant content changed.

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  • Show symbolic links AND their targets in web directory listing (apache)

    - by Erwan Queffélec
    Listing a directory content with ls -l shows this output: total 12 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 11 16:38 2.3 drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Dec 11 16:38 2.4 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 11 16:38 archive lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 11 16:38 current -> 2.4/2.4.1/ lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 11 16:38 next -> 2.4/2.4.2/ lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Dec 11 16:38 previous -> 2.4/2.4.0/ Notice how it shows the symbolic links and their respective targets. I need to know if there is a way of getting the same behaviour in apache directory browsing. If apache is not capable of it as I suspect, is there an application (FLOSS) providing that kind of behaviour ?

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  • What is a generic term for name/identifier? (as opposed to label)

    - by d3vid
    I need to refer to a number of things that have both an identifier value (used in code and configuration), and a human-readable label. These things include: database columns dropdown items subapplications objects stored in a dictionary I want two unambiguous terms. One to refer to the identifier/value/key. One to refer to the label. As you can see, I'm pretty settled on the latter :) For the former, identifier seems best (not everything is strictly a key, and value and name could refer to the label; although, identifier usually refers only to a variable name), but I would prefer to follow an established practice if there is one. Is there an established term for this? (Please provide a source.) If not, are there any examples of a choice from a significant source (Java APIs, MSDN, a big FLOSS project)? (I wasn't sure if this should be posted here or to English Language & Usage. I thought this was the more appropriate expert audience. Happy to migrate if not.)

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