The Big Push 2009 -- Free Software Foundation Appeal

Dear Free Software Supporter,

Our community has made enormous progress in creating tools that enhance communication and freedom — with profound effect on people's lives. Free software has become a model for how our society can progress collaboratively, and members of our community are at the forefront in expressing these ideals.

Advocacy, diplomacy, and education are a vital part of the work the Free Software Foundation does for the free software community — but to clear a path for free software adoption, our work has to also reach beyond this community. We reach a wider audience with important campaigns on related ethical issues, such as Defective By Design — our campaign to eliminate DRM, which has had a profound effect on the way people look at digital restrictions on music, games, electronic books and video. And as web applications and other network services become increasingly popular and convenient, we are working to ensure that computer users are not asked to give up their freedom in order to use them. Our release of the GNU Affero General Public License and ongoing discussions with the autonomo.us group represent a solid foundation to tackle this issue and help our community further develop free software alternatives for the benefit of society.

Today, there are many questions that the free software community needs to tackle — Does your employer or school require you to use Microsoft software? Are you required to use proprietary formats to interact with your bank or local government? Are your children being trained to use Microsoft or Apple rather than learning how to be in control of the computers they use?

As advocates for free software, we can challenge the status quo and so-called convenience of using the invasive tools of proprietary software companies, because the opportunities for change have never been better:

The Free Software Foundation through its End Software Patents (ESP) campaign filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in their en banc hearing of in re Bilski — http://endsoftpatents.org/bilski — the Bilski ruling gutted, if not technically overturned, the State Street ruling that in 1998 opened the floodgates to the patenting of business methods and software. The vast bulk of software patents that have been used to threaten developers writing software for GNU/Linux distributions running on general purpose computers has in theory been swept away. The Bilski ruling undoubtedly represents a breakthrough for free software and a success for our campaign, and with this ruling we are on the path to lowering the threats that institutions face when considering adopting free software.

Completely free distributions like the FSF-sponsored gNewSense are now viable, something that just a few years ago seemed far out of reach. Our work with SGI earlier this year means that 3D graphics acceleration can finally be achieved with free software and gNewSense.

The relaunch of our High Priority Projects list highlights that the proprietary software for which there is currently no free alternative and that users feel forced to use is dwindling and being tackled aggressively.

Hardware manufacturers friendly to free software have given us the first free software smartphone, the Neo FreeRunner. The OLPC project gave us the first free software laptop, the XO, that has quickly established the low-cost subnotebook marketplace — where the economics have made GNU/Linux a popular choice. And for the past few months, FSF systems administrators have been working on the forthcoming free software friendly Lemote laptop, which Richard Stallman is using and that we hope will be widely commercially available. The availability of free software friendly hardware has never been greater.

The FSF has been campaigning for free and open formats and standards. Our free audio and video codecs campaign has been winning hearts and minds, and Mozilla's Firefox web browser will soon carry native support for Ogg, giving us an unprecedented opportunity to promote free codecs. Our campaign alongside many partners for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and against Microsoft's OOXML has been successful, with many countries adopting pro-ODF policies.

We celebrated the 25th anniversary of the GNU Project this year with a breakthrough film from the English comedian Stephen Fry, who gave us an important reminder of the alternative vision for the technology we use, a vision where people don't trade freedom for convenience but instead support development of tools that create a better society. More than 1 million people have watched the film and it has been translated into 32 languages.

Combined, these breakthroughs are important because they give us an opportunity to put aside the claims of convenience that are used to promote the monopolists' pervasive tools, and ask important questions of our employer. Why are we using this proprietary software that locks us to this vendor when we could be using free software that would give us control? It gives us the chance to demand open government. Why is it, that my local government is forcing me to purchase one vendor's software to access public records, when there are free formats that we can use that work with free software? And why does this school accept corporate donations of proprietary software that come with handcuffs on my child's education, rather than use free software that will give my child the opportunity to be in control of the technology she learning to use?

Support us now in our big push to move these questions and more to the forefront in 2009 — become a member or make a donation.

Yours,

Peter T. Brown

Executive Director, Free Software Foundation

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Apple’s take on mobile Unix

Posted by David Morgenstern

The Mac community was buzzing in late November when the director of Apple’s Unix group showed a slide at the LISA (Large System Adminstration) conference that predicted that the Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X would ship in the first quarter of 2009. However, there were more than 100 other slides in the presentation, and they offered some interesting bits of their own.

The talk was by Jordan Hubbard the director of Apple’s Unix Technology Group. From the PDF of the talk (confirmed by some LISA blog postings), he discussed a number of Mac OS X security features and several open source software projects that Apple is supporting, including Apple Syslog (a rewrite of the BSD syslog), MacPorts (an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software), MacRuby (a version of Ruby 1.9, ported to run directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies), and WebKit (the Web engine behind Safari).

Here are some of the 117 slides that caught my eye:

Mobility questions. Hubbard said that “ubiquitous computing is not ‘coming,’ it is already here! He suggested that developers start thinking of ever-smaller devices, meaning power budgets in the milliwatt range.

He offered a number of “lessons” from Apple’s iPhone experience. He said programmers need to avoid making assumptions about power and performance when dealing with a small, mobile platform.

•“Enterprise” features (like code signing) can also be substantially leveraged on mobile devices.
•Mobile device features (like CoreAnimation) can also encourage innovation in “bigger” devices.
•You can actually can run a full Unix on a phone now.
•It’s all about the power, and all resources (memory, flash, CPU) take power. We need to challenge our “Unix assumptions” about power being plentiful.
•Stability is key for something this critical (it can’t crash while dialing emergency services). You just can’t run everything you want to.

Multiple core computing. Pointing to the roadmaps from Intel, Hubbard said we can expect more than 32 cores arriving in “commodity hardware” in 2010. This will create problems for programmers, he said.

One problem with multi-core computers is that processors can run faster than they can fetch data from memory (don’t even talk about retrieving data from the disk!). The processor is said to be “starved,” while waiting around for the data. There are different schemes for improving this performance issue, some under the subject heading of NUMA (non-uniform memory access). NUMA is a cache that can help each processor core hold data that it might need.

Now, AMD’s high-performance group uses ccNUMA (cache coherent non-uniform memory access), which uses a technology that lets the processors better keep track of the cached information.

Of course, Apple chose Intel. Hubbard appears to warn developers that processor developers (or in this case, Intel) won’t spending the money to develop coherency cache engines and that software makers (and OS vendors) would have to figure out ways to do this better. He calls this an “incoming meteor.”

•It means that hardware folks are out of headroom on pure clock speed and must go lateral.
•The hardware folks are also probably tired of paying for the Software people’s sins. ccNUMA is likely to eventually yield (back) to NUMA. Good for them, bad for us!
•Memory access, already very expensive, will become substantially more so.
•Forget everything you thought you knew about multi-threaded programming (and, as it turns out, most developers didn’t know much anyway).
•The kernel is the only one who really knows the right mix of cores and power states to use at any given time - this can’t be a pure app-driven decision.
•We need new APIs and mechanisms for dealing with this incoming meteor.

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The Most Popular Linux Posts of 2008

By Kevin Purdy

Only around five percent of Lifehacker's visitors are using the open-source Linux operating system when they stop by, according to our traffic charts, and only one of our editors (ahem) is regularly using it every day.

Having said that, when we get to write about great Linux-based tweaks or downloads, we get pretty excited—and, apparently, so do our readers and visitors linked in from across the web. Today we're looking back at the Linux-related posts that got the most attention in 2008, so read on to see what you might have missed, and what the open-source crowd is down with. Photo by Ypsy.

Fedora 9 Puts Your Desktop on a USB Drive

There are many tools one can use to create live-booting Linux desktops on a USB drive, including the multi-distro UNetbootin. Back when Fedora 9 was officially released, though, the Red Hat spin-off made a splash by giving us an easy-to-grasp, Windows-based tool for automatically downloading the latest Fedora release and putting it on a USB stick, along with allowing for extra space for storing changes you made to your system and documents you worked on . The Live USB Creator still works with Fedora 10, and very well might have inspired Ubuntu's 8.10 release to include a similar tool.

Seamlessly Run Linux Apps on Your Windows Desktop

There's probably a few Windows-only apps that make living in Linux pretty hard for even those intrigued at the idea—but there's also some Linux apps that would be great to have on your Windows system. Adam detailed how you can put what's basically a full Ubuntu installation onto your desktop with andLinux, using it to enable and launch apps like Amarok, the Akregator RSS reader, or whatever else you're into. For the flip side of that Win/Linux coin, see our guide to using Virtualbox to run Windows apps seamlessly inside Linux

Hardy Heron Makes Linux Worth Another Look

Looking at everything newly available in the popular Ubuntu distribution's 8.04 release, your humble editor jumped on the soapbox and made a case for it being a great reason to give Linux a shot. You could actually install it only as a Windows boot option without messing with your system's boot record, or easily access both Windows and Linux-formatted drives from either system. You could share settings between open-source apps like Firefox, Pidgin, and Thunderbird, and your ability to customize your desktop was pretty boundless. We try not to rant too often here, but sometimes it's worth letting fly with the links and inline pictures.

First Look at Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Beta

There wasn't half as much new in October's 8.10 release of Ubuntu as there had been in the majorly re-spun 8.04, but a bunch of seriously helpful usability tweaks made it worth the upgrade. Much-improved network and wireless management (including baked-in 3G card support), a graphical indicator for the installation partition editor, and hardware and dual-monitor managers that explained more of what was happening. Ubuntu-savvy author Keir Thomas also gave us a more in-depth, user-focused look at 8.10.

Lifehacker Faceoffs: Battles of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems and Linux Distros

We describe, you decide. We couldn't pretend to cover every desktop Linux operating system or live-boot-able, portable-minded distro out there, so we offered up a few popular, prime examples and polled our reader for their preference. As of this morning, Ubuntu held a commanding 49 percent in the desktop poll, followed by Ubuntu variants like Kubuntu/Xubuntu, then PC Linux OS (surprising!) and Fedora. In the thumb drive wars, Ubuntu still rules the roost at 29 percent, followed closely by Puppy Linux at 24 percent, then Fedora and Damn Small Linux at 13 and 12 percent, respectively.

Five more popular Linux posts

• Five Tweaks for Your New Ubuntu Desktop—Taken from the first things your editor always finds himself doing upon a new install. Switching to mirror servers, disabling or throttling index services, and setting up automatic home folder backups.
• Make Your Linux Desktop More Productive—Windows and Mac fans thinking about making the switch can benefit from checking out how to give their desktops a familiar, quick-task-switching feel, using dock programs like Avant Window Navigator, quick-launchers Gnome-DO or Launchy, and system tray indicators galore.
• Ask the Readers: Would a Prettier Linux Make You Switch?—Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said he wanted to take an Apple-like focus on creating an elegant, eye-pleasing desktop for Linux distributions, and we wondered if that was a big missing link in Linux adoption. Readers seemed to agree it was important, but, well, another Mac trait—usually seamless hardware compatibility—was more key to your minds.
• Ubuntu 8.10 Gets Optional DarkRoom Theme—Looks like a lot of Ubuntu users are getting a bit tired of the orange/brown theme, and like the eye-relaxing looks of darker-hued desktops.
• Linux Desktops Dressed Up as Macs—For those who don't mind the mental schism between an ultra-proprietary desktop look and open-source guts, there are plenty of tools and tutorials for getting a strikingly Apple-like look on your Linux deck.

What was your favorite Linux app, tweak, or discovery from 2008 (or, if you're not calendar-minded, in recent memory)? Tell us about it in the comments.

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