Software Freedom Day

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SFD Planet

May 14, 2012

FSF news
(fsf-news)

FSF Job Opportunity: Operations Assistant

This position is now closed for applications. Thank you to everyone who applied.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a motivated and organized Boston-based individual to be its full-time Operations Assistant.

This position works closely with the Executive Director and Business Operations Manager to ensure all administrative functions of the FSF run smoothly and efficiently, preserving our 4-star Charity Navigator rating and boosting all areas of our work.

In addition to handling phone calls and being a friendly face for visitors to our office at the center of Boston's Downtown Crossing, these functions include:

fulfilling orders for FSF merchandise,
blogging about merchandise-related news,
processing incoming donations,
coordinating volunteers,
updating our contact database,
organizing fundraising mailings,
diverting sales calls to the appropriate fake voicemail box,
assisting with occasional local events,
maintaining a few areas of our Web site, and
looking after the office space.

This is a great position for a recent graduate who thrives on multitasking, has an eye for detail, lives in the Boston area, and wants to make a difference. With our small staff of ten, each person makes a clear contribution. We work hard, but offer a humane and fun work environment.

Because our mission is worldwide, language skills and a demonstrated ability to interact with people across cultures and age groups will be highly valued. While the position does not require advanced computer skills, a willingness to learn and work with new software is a must. We use free software like CiviCRM, Plone, Emacs, and LibreOffice, all running on GNU/Linux.

The FSF is a growing organization and provides great potential for advancement; existing staff get the first chance at any new job openings. Previous Operations Assistants have often gone on to hold other positions within the organization.

Benefits and salary

This job is a union position. The salary is fixed at $49,140/year and is non-negotiable. Other benefits include the following:

full family health coverage through Blue Cross/Blue Shield's HMO Blue program,
subsidized dental plan,
four weeks of paid vacation annually,
seventeen paid holidays annually,
public transit commuting cost reimbursement,
403(b) program through TIAA-CREF, and
yearly cost-of-living pay increases.

This position is now closed for applications. Thank you to everyone who applied.

The FSF is an equal opportunity employer and will not discriminate against any employee or application for employment on the basis of race, color, marital status, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, handicap, or any other legally protected status recognized by federal, state or local law.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at http://donate.fsf.org. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

Open Source Program Office

Googlers at Large

With May comes the annual ramp up of conference season, and Googlers who are part of the open source community will be giving talks and participating in events around the world over the next two months.

Last week, Jeremy Allison attended Samba XP, the 11th international Samba conference for users and developers in Göttingen, Germany speaking on "The Evolution of IO in Samba".

Our Chicago Google office will host past and present Google Summer of Code students and mentors along with students from DePaul, IIT, Northwestern, UChicago, and UIC Universities on May 23rd (Wednesday) for an evening of lightning talks delivered by accepted Google Summer of Code students and Google engineers. You can find all the details here, including how to register (pre-registration is required).

Chris DiBona will be speaking to the Open Cyber Security Roundtable in Menlo Park on May 30. The roundtable is part of a larger program to get more open source tools and apps into the security arsenal of federal, state and local government.

On June 12th, Cat Allman will be facilitating a session at the inaugural USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) Summit. WiAC will take place as part of USENIX Federated Conferences Week (FCW) in Boston, MA.

Attendees and viewers of Google I/O coming June 27-29, 2012 in San Francisco will hear about a variety of Google’s open source projects, stay tuned to https://developers.google.com/events/io/ for more information on sessions. There will also be a dinner for GSoC Mentors hosted by Carol Smith.

We hope to see you at one of these spring events!

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

May 13, 2012

Nina Paley

Byzantines Smite Romans

The design of the Romans has changed a little since last time, due to nitpicky people on GooglePlus.

May 12, 2012

Nina Paley

Intellectual Disobedience

A little talk I gave about Seder-Masochism-in-progress and Civil Disobedience at Brooklyn Law School’s “Legal Hackathon” several weeks ago.

freeBSD Project

January-March, 2012 Status Report

The January-March, 2012 Status Report is now available with 27 entries.

May 11, 2012

Björn Schiessle
(Björn)

Free Software, Open Source, FOSS, FLOSS – Same same but different

There are two major terms connected to software you can freely use, study, share and improve: Free Software and Open Source. Based on them you can also find different combinations and translations like FOSS, Libre Software, FLOSS and so on. Reading articles about Free Software or listening to people involved in Free Software often raises the question: Why do they use one term or another and how they differ from each other?

Historical background

Historically, Free Software was the first term, created somewhere around 1984 together with the Free Software definition. In 1997 Debian, a project aiming to create a completely free and community based GNU/Linux distribution, defined the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) as a check-list to decide whether a program can be included in the distribution or not. In 1998 the Open Source Initiative was set up as a marketing campaign for Free Software and introduced the Open Source definition by copying the DFSG and replacing “Free Software” with “Open Source”. According to a public statement by Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the OSI and author of the DFSG and Open Source Definition, the Open Source term was introduced as a synonym for Free Software. Perens eventually decided to return to the roots of the movement and to speak about Free Software again. This historical development shows that both Open Source and Free Software describe the complete set of software licenses granting the right to use, study, share and improve the software.

In the course of time people came up with even more terms. Today, terms such as Libre Software, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) or FLOSS (Free, Libre and Open Source Software) are often used to describe Free Software. In some cases people also use terms like “organic software” or “ethical software”. Often the motivation for these terms is to stay out of the terminology debate and to avoid confusion generated by words like “open” or “free”. At the end those terms create more confusion than they help because they virtually invite people to search for differences between the terms where actually no differences exist, regarding the software they describe.

In short, these different terms share the same historical root and describe the same set of software, although the choice of one term over the others highlight different aspects of Free Software.

Usage of the terms by different people and organisations within the movement

Today the Free Software movement is a large and diverse community. People have different interests in Free Software and different motivations to take part in this movement. But these differences are not necessarily related to the language they use. There are many people using the term Open Source and highlight the social and political dimensions of Free Software while on the other hand there are a people in our community who prefer the term Free Software but concentrate more on the practical benefits. This means that the terms Open Source and Free Software are not a good criterion to identify these different motivations.

Beside individuals there are also many well known organisations in the Free Software ecosystem. Many of them play an important role and emphasize different aspects of Free Software. For example, some organisations focus on the technical direction of Free Software projects, some on legal aspects, some on political, social and ethical aspects and some focus on license evaluation. These organisations typically have decided to use one or another term and sticked to it. But this should not lead to the conclusion that the term they use is the critical factor regarding their motivations. The critical factor are the people driving the organisation and the goals of the organisation as such. The practical experience with different organisations and people in the community shows that the line can’t be drawn along the language they use.

This diversity is good, as it reflects that Free Software provides many advantages in many different areas of our life. But we should not divide our community just by the term someone prefers. No matter what term someone uses and what his initial motivation is, at the end most of us work on the same set of software and on the enhancement of software freedom and any other aspect of Free Software.

License evaluation

There are three entities in the Free Software movement which people look to for evaluations of Free Software licenses: The Debian project, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Most of the time they come to the same conclusion. In some corner cases they may disagree. In such cases the differences do not lie in different terms or different definitions, which as already shown have the same origin, but in the fact that it happens quite often that different people come to different conclusions for challenging legal questions. It would be a big mistake to use these cases to divide our community.

Protective and non-protective licenses

Looking at Free Software licenses there are two main categories, protective or Copyleft licenses and non-protective licenses. While Copyleft licenses are designed to protect the rights to use, study, share and improve the software non-protective licenses allow to distribute the software without those rights. Sometimes people think that the terms Free Software and Open Source are used to distinguish between protective and non-protective licenses. The lists of Free Software licenses by Debian, the FSF and the OSI show that both protective and non-protective licenses comply with the Free Software definition and the Open Source definition. This means that neither the terms Open Source and Free Software nor the different definitions are suitable to distinguish between protective and non-protective licenses.

This graphic should visualise the different software categories and their connection

Protective licenses and non-protective licenses are sub-classes of Free Software licenses recognized by the Open Source Initiative and the FSF. Copyleft or non-Copyleft is not a criteria suitable to distinguish between Open Source and Free Software, both terms describe the same set of software.

Development model

When looking at software we have to distinguish between the software model and the development model. While the software model describes the attributes of the software (e.g. free or proprietary) the development model describes different ways to develop software. As described at full length in “What makes a Free Software company?” the different development models are defined independently of the software models and work for both Free Software and proprietary software. Development models that leverage the advantage of an open and collaborative community can show their full strength in combination with the Free Software model. However this does not mean that an open, collaborative development process is a criterion for Free Software. There are Free Software projects developed by a single person or a company with little or no outside input. On the other hand developers of proprietary software have adapted collaborative development models to fit into their software model, e.g. SAP with its partnership program.

While the development model can be a crucial factor for the success of a software project it is not suitable to distinguish between proprietary software and Free Software or one of its synonyms.

Why do I still insist on calling it Free Software if it is all the same?

If all these terms describe the same software people may wonder why I insist on using the term Free Software. The easiest answer is that I simply have to choose a term if I want to talk about Free Software. As explained in the article all the terms describe the same set of software, therefore I don’t see any value in combining them (e.g. FOSS or FLOSS). Quite the contrary, this combinations often create more confusion than clarity. So the remaining terms are Free Software and Open Source and I decided to stick with Free Software.

Free Software is the oldest terms. All other terms have their roots in the Free Software definition. It is a good tradition in science to use the first term and definition given by its author. Furthermore it is also advantageous if a term can be easily translated into different languages. This enables people to talk about Free Software in the most natural way, in their first language. In many cases Free Software even translates unambiguously into other languages, e.g. “logiciel libre” in French, “software libre” in Spanish, “software libero” in Italian or “Fri Software” in Danish which avoids the ambiguity between freedom and price of the English word “free”. I believe that it is important to use a clear terminology. I want to convey a strong message about freedom. Language is important because it frames how people think about a subject. Different terms focus on different aspects, even if they describe the same software and the language we use influences our thoughts about a subject. For me freedom is a core value of Free Software and I want that my language reflects this.

Free Software, which is easy to translate in different languages and emphasises the aspect of freedom for individuals, business and public institutions, together with the clear definition provides these values. All this makes Free Software the right choice for me and I invite you to follow me.

Conclusion

For historical reasons there are different terms to describe software that is free to use, study, share and improve. All terms, Open Source, Free Software or one of the combinations have the same roots and describe the same set of software. When it comes to people and groups within the Free Software movement we see a large diversity of motivations, different people or groups focus on different aspects of Free Software. But whatever the motivation may be it is not the doing of the software, it is the people. Neither is it possible to distinguish the people according to the term they use nor is it the business of the Free Software movement or part of the Free Software definition to find and define groups within our community. The Free Software movement identifies Free Software and works on the enhancement and adoption of it with all its positive aspects. Regarding licenses, different groups agree in their evaluation of Free Software licenses except for some corner cases which shows the complexity of legal documents but not a division between people, movements or software along the terms they use. Protective (Copyleft) and non-protective licenses are sub-classes of Free Software licenses and are recognised as such by all groups in the Free Software movement. These two categories are not suitable to separate Open Source and Free Software.

Even if all these terms describe the same set of software the terminology we use is still important because it frames how people think about a subject. Different terms focus on different aspects, even if they describe the same software. I want to put freedom first, for me freedom is a core value of Free Software and I want to respect the naming by the founder of the Free Software movement. These are the main reasons why I invite you to join me and speak about Free Software.

But no matter which term we use, we should not allow people to split our community just because of different terminology. At the end most of us work on the same set of software, improve it and foster software freedom no matter what our motivation or preferred term is. The community needs to stay together to have an impact on all levels of involvement and to improve Free Software in all aspects. Don’t let others use the strategy of “divide and conqueror” to harm our movement.

In this context you should also read “It’s time for the community to take charge of its brand”.

Edit: The Comment by Bob McConnell shows that maybe the point “copyleft vs non-copyleft” needs to be addressed more explicitly. Therefore I added the sub-section “Protective and non-protective licenses” which was initially planed but got lost somewhere in the process of writing the article

May 10, 2012

FSF news
(fsf-news)

Richard Stallman speech in Barcelona canceled

At an event earlier today in Barcelona, Spain, FSF president Richard Stallman was not feeling well and paramedics were called.

He was in the hospital but has been discharged. He did not have a heart attack, as has been reported in some places.

Open Source Program Office

Google Summer of Code 2012 by the Numbers: Part 1.1

So many of you have asked about the number of students from your particular country that we’ve decided to simply post the whole list.

Number of Accepted Students by Country

India = 227

United States = 173

Germany = 72

Russian Federation = 56

China = 45

Poland = 42

Sri Lanka = 42

Romania = 40

France = 38

Canada = 36

Brazil = 33

United Kingdom = 31

Italy = 30

Austria = 25

Ukraine = 25

Spain = 23

Singapore = 20

Greece = 18

Czech Republic = 15

Turkey = 15

Hungary = 14

Sweden = 14

Slovenia = 11

Belgium = 9

Croatia = 8

Finland = 8

Australia = 7

Belarus = 7

Ireland = 7

Macedonia = 7

Netherlands = 7

Switzerland = 7

Vietnam = 7

Slovak Republic = 6

Bulgaria = 5

Japan = 5

Serbia = 5

Argentina = 4

Egypt = 4

Latvia = 4

Lithuania = 4

Pakistan = 4

Portugal = 4

Bangladesh = 3

Chile = 3

Ecuador = 3

Israel = 3

Moldova = 3

Norway = 3

Peru = 3

South Korea = 3

Colombia = 2

Estonia = 2

Indonesia = 2

Taiwan = 2

Algeria = 1

Bosnia-Herzegovina = 1

Denmark = 1

Hong Kong = 1

Mauritius = 1

Mexico = 1

Nepal = 1

New Zealand = 1

Saudi Arabia = 1

South Africa = 1

Uruguay = 1

Uzbekistan = 1

Venezuela = 1

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Jiří Eischmann

Summer Internship in Red Hat

Looking for a summer job? Red Hat Czech (based in Brno, Czech Republic) is opening intern positions for this summer!

Do you code in Java, C, Python, Ruby, Perl, or Bash?
Would you be willing to spend 15-20 hours a week on development and testing?
Looking for a way to try what working for Red Hat is about with possibility to eventually get a full-time job?

The selection procedure for summer intern positions has just started!

We’re currently opening the following types of intern positions:

Development Engineering (C/Python/Ruby/Ruby on Rails/Perl)
Quality Assurance Engineering (Python/Bash/Perl)
JBoss Quality Assurance Engineering (Java)
JBoss Engineering (Java)
Kernel Development Engineering (C)
Support Engineering (good English, admin)

Got interested?

send your CV (in English) to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
upload your CV to HR system at https://careers.redhat.com/ext/detail?redhat9337
get ready for the selection procedure that will take place at the end of May (final dates will be emailed to you)

The selection procedure consists of two parts:

A written test that will test your technical skills. There are two types of tests: one for JBoss candidates and the other one for others. The JBoss test consists of common tasks that will test your knowledge of Java language and some specific Java-related technologies. The other test consists of 3 parts: knowledge of Linux OS, QA and developer tests. If you’re more interested in development, the developer test will be your priority (written in your favourite language). If you’re interested in QA, the QA test will be your priority. None of the tests require special preps, they are all very general and test your overall knowledge and skills.
Candidates that will pass the test successfully will be invited to a technical interview with one or more team representatives. The interviews will be organized individually in the next two weeks.

May 08, 2012

FSFE news
(FSFE-news)

Executive summary of the EURA case

Slovak textile importer EURA Slovakia, s.r.o. is facing EUR 5600 in fines because it did not buy and use the Microsoft Windows operating system for submitting electronic tax reports. Slovak tax administration gave EURA only two options: either to buy and use Microsoft Windows or face the fines. This is also how we could briefly summarize the decision of Slovak tax administration from a few weeks ago. The administration imposed several fines on a company, EURA Slovakia, which submitted its tax reports on paper, because the use of electronic form was impossible as the state's web application worked only on the Microsoft Windows operating system. The company now plans to appeal to the court and to demand that the state stops forcing businesses to use a certain product, instead of requiring that the public administration uses a multi-platform technical solution based on Open Standards that is available for everybody.

Background of the case

Since January 2010 Slovakia has a law requiring every monthly tax report concerning value added tax (VAT) to be submitted by electronic means and signed by a certified electronic signature. As many Slovak companies still don't have certified electronic signatures, the law enables an exception under which the company can enter into an agreement with the tax office and then use a special web-based application called “eDane”.

However, the eDane application works only under the Windows operating system together with the Internet Explorer web browser. None of the other operating systems can run this application. As EURA Slovakia uses a competing operating system in the entire company and despite help from its IT staff, it was impossible for it to send anything electronically. When the company notified the tax administration about this problem, nothing happened. The company thus decided to fulfill its statutory obligations at least by submitting the tax reports in classical paper form. The tax office however, consider this to be contrary to the law.

Imposing the fines

When the company pointed to the fact that it could not electronically fulfill its obligation, it received 12 fines from the Slovak tax administration. "We were really trying to respect the law, but in Slovakia there is no state-certified application that would support the electronic signature on the other operating system than Windows. We therefore had to enter into the agreement with the tax office and try to use the web-based application. Unfortunately, neither us, nor our technicians with years of experience, were able to run it," says the director of EURA Slovakia, Mr. František Slivka.

For submitting the tax report in the paper form, the company was fined several times, and so far wasn't successful with a single appeal before various administrative bodies. It has therefore decided to appeal to the court. "Thousands of Slovak companies resigned on this behavior of the Slovak tax administration and simply bought a license to the Windows operating system only to be able to submit this monthly electronic reports. We believe that it is unfair. The administration thus directly forces Slovak companies to buy Windows, even though they do not need it for other purposes," says Slivka.

European problem

"If the state requires the electronic form as a only way of fulfilling the statutory obligation, it has to offer the multi-platform solution, which is available to everybody. Otherwise, the state in advance precludes its citizens to behave in accordance with the law," comments Martin Husovec, member of the FSFE Legal, who assists the Slovak company in filling the case before the court. This problem is not unique for Slovakia.

Many companies in the other member states of the European Union have to deal with the very same problem. However, the Slovak case at hand is one of the most blatant and striking examples of the injustice in society caused by ignorance of the Open Standards in the digital world. It shows that the negligence of state in the field of open standards not only leads to the social injustice, but also hurts the competition, increases costs for the small companies and bureaucracy.

In its effect it also conflicts with European rules and recommendations, like the European Interoperability Framework, which clearly states that "Member States setting up ICT-supported national public services need to be more aware of the risk of creating new electronic barriers if they opt for solutions that are not interoperable. Such so-called ebarriers fragment the internal market and hinder it from functioning properly. Member States and the Commission should step up their efforts to avoid this."

These new electronic barriers "digitally" handcuff the citizens and thus prevent them from behaving in accordance with the law. FSFE calls for a change in this practice.

Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation

FSFE news
(FSFE-news)

State neglected web standards, company now faces EUR 5600 in fines

In Slovakia, a law introduced to reduce red tape has led to injustice. The state has mandated electronic means as a only way of fulfilling certain statutory obligations. However the dedicated web solution excludes some citizens from use as it is not interoperable and runs only on the software from one vendor. In absence of any non-electronic option, this means that state, in fact, prescribed the use of a certain product from a certain vendor. Who did not own the copy, had to buy one. Slovak textile importer deemed that state should not force him to use a certain software for his business and fulfilled its legal obligation by paper. Now the company faces EUR 5600 in fines.

The Slovak tax administration has already imposed 12 fines on EURA Slovakia, s.r.o., which submitted its monthly tax returns on paper, because the use of electronic forms was impossible as the state's web application worked only on Microsoft's Windows operating system together with Microsoft Internet Explorer. All other competing operating systems such as Apple, GNU/Linux, BSDs failed to run the state's application.

The Slovak tax administration has, therefore, precluded citizens who use competing products from fulfilling its obligations towards the state. "This situation is absurd. If another public body decides to use an Apple-only solution for its public services, should then everybody buy Apple's products just to fulfill this legal obligation? How many different products should citizens and companies have to buy just to comply with all the different laws?" asks Martin Husovec, member of the FSFE Legal, who now assists the Slovak company in appealing the fines before the court.

Ironically, instead of reducing the red tape, this negligence only added further complications for the companies. Moreover, the "EURA case" raises a question of why the state should promote any one vendor's operating system. It only hurts the competition, increases costs for the small companies and leads to social injustice such as in this case. If the state requires the electronic form as a only way of respecting the law, it has to offer the multi-platform solution, which is available to everybody. It is the task of the state to be here for everybody and not only for selected citizens.

You can find more information on our executive summary of the EURA case.

Support FSFE, join the Fellowship
Make a one time donation

Marcos Marado

Merankorii (my one-man-band) is going to be celebrating Culture Freedom Day in Lisbon, Portugal, next saturday (May 12) at Flausina.

The concert is free, and you should show up!

More info here.

Linode

NodeBalancer Concurrent Connections

10000 When we were figuring out our NodeBalancer pricing model, we decided to make it simple (a philosophy we apply to most decisions) and to not nickel and dime you. And so we announced the NodeBalancer service with a fixed 5,000 concurrent connections limit and a fixed price of $19.95/month.

Today we are pleased to announce NodeBalancer concurrent connections have been increased to 10,000, with no change in price. All existing NodeBalancers have already been seamlessly upgraded, and all new NodeBalacers will get the new limit.

NodeBalancer pricing:

NodeBalancer Instance	$19.95 / mo ($0.027 / hour)
10,000 Concurrent Connections	No charge
Transfer Out	Deducted from Transfer Pool then $0.10 / GB
Transfer In	No charge

If you’d like to know more about how NodeBalancers can help you:

Enjoy!

-Chris

Georg Greve
(Georg)

On the Kolab Server 2.4 Release

So a while back I gave a primer and insight into what would happen with Kolab 3.0, and now we’ve released an out-of-schedule Kolab Server 2.4 – what’s that?

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the Kolab 3.0 development cycle is well under way, and progressing nicely for the most part, even if we may have to do some feature triaging for the 3.0 release depending on how many contributors come to the task in the next month or two.

But even so it is going to be some time before that release is out after some testing, and simultaneously the OpenPKG set of packages of the Kolab Server is ageing. Quickly. Providing security updates is something that would be done in the ideal world, but it takes around two weeks to wrap a release, as even an individual component easily means the entire stack needs to be rebuilt.

That’s a lot of effort for something that’s been discontinued.

From a business perspective it is also completely wasted, as there are zero customers of Kolab Systems on that particular technology base. None. Some other service providers may have paying customers on that basis, which is fine. But in the way they have chosen to maintain those customers on that basis without upstream support, they have themselves chosen to become the upstream for the solution their customers are on. So we gladly give them everything they need to provide such updates for their customers, but they’ll have to do the work themselves, I am afraid.

Naturally they could also hire us to do this for them. But I’d rather prefer if they didn’t, because this packaging base and some of the technology contained within is fundamentally unmaintainable, while the new basis is much leaner, more modular and each component can be updated as required without affecting the entire stack. In other words: Up to date (release) engineering.

In any case, even if an employee of ours were hired for another OpenPKG release, that person would be missing from other activities, such as the native packages available through our software subscription for customers with upstream support. So I’d much prefer to have the employee work on that, to be honest.

At the same time, we do not want to let our community be without an update for too long, and we want to lower the barrier to becoming active in the Kolab 3.0 development cycle. The answer to all those questions was the intermediate Kolab 2.4 release. That release already gets so many things right that we really encourage anyone with interest in Kolab, Roundcube or Free Software Groupware to take a look themselves.

The fastest way to a running virtual machine is if you’re on Fedora 16 or 17 and have the virtualisation packages installed & the service running.

Simply run the script below kindly provided by Jeroen van Meeuwen, our Systems Architect.

Or take a look at the quick installation instructions on the kolab.org web site.

Fastest way to Kolab, courtesy of Jeroen van Meeuwen

Assumptions to the script:

Purely demonstrative,
Assumes libvirtd managed ‘virbr0′ network,
Assumes no kolab-demo system already exists,
is to be executed with something like as follows:

sudo TMPDIR=/path/to/my/tmp/dir /path/to/setup-el6-k24.sh

Save the following as setup-el6-k24.sh and make it executable (e.g. chmod 755 setup-el6-k24.sh):

#!/bin/bash

virsh destroy kolab-demo
virsh undefine kolab-demo
rm -rf ${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/kolab-demo.img
qemu-img create ${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/kolab-demo.img 8G
virt-install \
--name=kolab-demo \
--ram=2048 \
--vcpus=2 \
--disk="path=${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/kolab-demo.img" \
--location=http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/centos/6/os/x86_64/ \
--extra-args='ks=http://hosted.kolabsys.com/~vanmeeuwen/ks.cfg' \
--network='bridge=virbr0' \
--hvm \
--virt-type=kvm

May 04, 2012

Georg Greve
(Georg)

A bridge leading nowhere: Outlook-centric groupware

I have a confession to make.

I do not believe that Windows is the future of the Free Software desktop.

Perhaps you wonder why I feel it necessary to make this point?

A surprising number of Free Software (or Open Source, take your pick) companies, evangelists and journalists these days advocate some Open Core groupware solutions that focus on Microsoft Outlook as their primary client as “consequential” and “the best approach.” The term “pragmatic” is also quite popular among such comments.

Although some things could and should be said about this, let’s ignore the fact that not everything that calls itself Open Source actually is. That is a case of deception and deceit, of misleading advertising where the users only notice they’ve been locked in at the time they try to make use of the freedoms they thought they had gained. It is not specific to the area of groupware, though, and not the focus for this article.

There is a set of technical and strategic issues that make this approach a dead end.

That is not to negate the strength of Microsoft Windows on the desktop, or to try and ignore it. We always need to take the prevalence of Microsoft on the desktop into account. But there are paths of action that reduce dependency, and there are paths that increase it. Samba, Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org are all excellent examples of solutions that create more degrees of freedom. These are bridge-building applications. But where do these bridges lead?

Their approach is to interoperate by basing themselves on Open Standards that are equally available on all platforms, and then do their utmost to ensure they also support the Microsoft specific formats and the deviations from Open Standards that were often deliberately introduced to create incompatibility in order to facilitate lock-in. So they bridge towards empowering the user with Free Software applications that can now interoperate, thus enabling multiple platforms and reducing dependency upon Microsoft.

A groupware application that focuses primarily around Microsoft Outlook may seem related, but where does this particular bridge lead?

For one interoperability is often achieved at tremendous cost, such as storing the binary blobs of Outlook that are based on the in-memory application specific data structure in SQL databases. A somewhat better approach is MAPI as the transport layer for Microsoft compatibility. As long as there is a truly open and interoperable communication and storage layer and mechanism underneath, that is. The inherent danger is that MAPI becomes the primary and most important protocol in such an application, genuinely turning things back into a “every platform as long as it is Microsoft Windows” situation.

But even more importantly: By building a deeper habitual and technological dependency on Outlook, which only runs properly on Windows.

So that bridge leads towards where users already are: An ever increasing dependency on Microsoft Windows, which is the opposite effect of applications such as Samba, Firefox or OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.

Worse, even, they block in particular the office applications due to a quirk in Microsoft’s licensing strategy which bundles Microsoft Outlook and Office. As a result, where one is already deployed, the other is already fully paid for. For the office suites that means LibreOffice / OpenOffice.org would have to pay users for using them. Everything else would be an added expense. Try getting this across the accounting department in a company that is struggling to stay within budget.

With groupware being a critical core functionality of any business, as long as MS Outlook stays firmly entrenched, the Free Software offices continue to have a much harder time catching up. So if your concern is to provide companies and users with more choice, investing into an Open Core groupware on the server can in fact strengthen the dependency on Microsoft Office if the deployment is predicated on Outlook as the client.

To make it worse the customer has now on good faith invested into something that promised openness and finds themselves deeper in the hole. Good luck getting that customer to trust in another solution that promises more degrees of freedom in a similar way and requires migration and further investment.

So while these Exchange competitors provide temporary relief in terms of cash flow, they do nothing to resolve the underlying problems, and companies that provide these kinds of solutions to their customers would be well advised not to oversell them as “Open Source Solutions with all the great advantages of Open Source” because they’d be misleading their customers.

Chances are the customer will anyhow harbour unjustified expectations even without the overselling, but overselling definitely increases the chance of leaving permanently scorched earth for Open Source / Free Software.

So what would be a sustainable approach?

Firstly, the solution should be based upon Open Standards as much as possible.

Secondly, it should be fully Free Software that is deserving of the name.

Thirdly, that solution should not predicate itself primarily upon Microsoft Outlook support. Support for Microsoft Outlook can clearly be a plus, but it should not permeate the design of the solution, nor should it be the only or even primary client of choice. So the client would be focused towards a truly heterogeneous client ecosystem, and ideally one that also assumes a multi platform world.

Then it should come with an up to date web client, mobile phone support and all the technical aspects users require, but it should not require a huge data centre to run it. In other words it should be able to scale up as well as down, to be installable on a single machine in an office as well as in a distributed cloud setup that can serve hundreds of thousands of users.

Why would you care about that level of scalability? Because it provides the grounds for ubiquity. And Microsoft has done a pretty good job at demonstrating how powerful ubiquity really can be. But that ubiquity depends upon a couple more factors. Such as the development process.

Does the solution you’re looking at actually have public development mailing list, issue trackers, wikis and such where the actual developers of the company driving it participate and can the community participate in the steering of the solution on all levels? Is there transparency of the development process, and is there a development process to speak of?

But most importantly: You don’t know your business requirements for the next ten years in advance.

What you do know, however, is that the domain of groupware is going to be a central part of that, because exchanging messages, planning your days and keeping track of the people you interact with is not going to become less important. Neither are the extended functionalities that are often associated, such as instant communication, telephony, video conferencing, collaborating on documents and so on and so forth. In all likelihood, its importance is going to increase as we move towards a more interconnected and cooperative world.

What does this mean for your decision right now?

You want technology that you can innovate upon and integrate into other technologies easily. That is partially covered by the Free Software & Open Standards points above. But there are also architectural aspects to consider here, and conceptual questions as to whether the solution is flexible enough to evolve with your needs.

Especially your groupware solution merits such in-depth analysis before you make a call.

Because lock-in starts at the application level this choice is an essential part of what you will be able to decide in the future. So next time you’re thinking about your groupware strategy you might want to ask yourself: Do you think that Windows is the future of the Free Software desktop? Do you believe it is the only desktop you should ever be able to choose?

If you don’t think so I would unsurprisingly suggest you take a look at Kolab. Good starting points might be the Kolab Story, the Kolab 3.0 Primer, and of course the Kolab Systems web page.

But perhaps even more importantly I believe this shows we need to be addressing groupware & office jointly if we want to displace Microsoft Outlook & Office.

So I invite everyone working on promoting the Free Software office solutions to get in touch and work together.

SFI Official Blog
(SFI)

Celebrate Culture Freedom Day on May 19th 2012

Culture Freedom Day is just around the corner and it's not to late to decide to join the movement! Meant as an international day for Free Culture artists around the world to make themselves heard and known to the public we expect plenty of street concerts, gallery exhibitions and other local demonstrations of Free Culture work. For more information please visit the CFD dedicated website and don't forget to spread the word. Note that we've also made a countdown banner which code can be retrieved from our CFD wiki.

May 03, 2012

freeBSD Foundation

Foundation at BSDCan

BSDCan will be held next week in Ottawa, Canada. The Foundation is a gold sponsor of this event.

8 of the 9 Directors of the Foundation will be attending this event. There will be a Foundation booth during the conference with lots of swag and a shiny new brochure. Be sure to drop by, discuss the Foundation's work, and make a donation.

May 02, 2012

freeBSD Foundation

Why Colocation America Uses FreeBSD

Albert Ahdoot, Director of Business Development, recently sent this testimonial regarding the use of FreeBSD by Colocation America and its customers:

Colocation America provides colocation, dedicated server, VoIP, and managed data center hosting services for businesses that are looking to host their servers in the United States. With 22 data center locations, Colocation America has become one of the leading providers of hosting services. Most of our customers depend on the FreeBSD operating system to provide them with a secure environment to host their network infrastructure. They praise FreeBSD for its ability to encrypt sensitive data and for the ZFS advanced file system that makes managing server files a breeze. Many of our corporate clients choose to use FreeBSD to operate their MySQL database systems and email servers due to the exceptional networking components of the operating system.

Developers that choose to colocate their servers with us also choose to install FreeBSD on their dedicated servers. The open source nature of the BSD license gives them the flexibility they need to develop innovative software. Plus, they have access to an enterprise level operating system that is free, has an active development community, and which lets them contribute their own skills to make the system better for their own development. We have asked several clients why they decided to use FreeBSD and the answer has always been the same: the cost and networking ability of the operating system rivals its commercial license competitors.

Our customers are not the only fans of FreeBSD. We use FreeBSD to manage our shared hosting servers due to the OS ability to manage firewalls and web applications while handling the server loads of several hosting accounts at once. With the WebHost Manager cPanel add-on for managing multiple web hosting accounts on a single dedicated server, our shared hosting server is able to provide customers looking for cheap website hosting. The community support of FreeBSD, along with its open source nature, provides a secure environment for our clients to host in. To find out more about the dedicated server hosting with the FreeBSD operating system, you can visit our FreeBSD dedicated server page.

April 26, 2012

Linode

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – Precise Pangolin

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (release notes) for deployment in the Linode Manager. This is a long-term support (LTS) release by Canonical, which means the operating system will receive support until April of 2017. For help deploying a distribution in the Linode Manager, you can reference our documentation in the Linode Library for deploying a Linux distribution.

There is currently an outstanding bug in the Upstart package that may cause startup job logging to fail during boot, printing errors on your Lish console. Upstart assumes “/dev/pts” will be made available via an initrd before it runs, which doesn’t happen in our (and other) environments. Job logging being disabled during boot should not cause any issues. There is an open bug on Launchpad where you can find a more in-depth explanation about the issue, as well as be notified when a fix has been released.

Enjoy!

-Tim

freeBSD Project

New committer: Isabell Long (doc/www)

April 24, 2012

Marcos Marado

Censorship and Privacy on the Web

"Censorship and Privacy on the Web" is the title to a presentation I made (in Portuguese) for "Crime in the XXI century" 2 days event, as ANSOL's Vice-President. Here's the presentation (yes, I'm trying Google Drive for the first time).

Source, images and resulting PDF can be used and re-used, here.

April 23, 2012

Shirish Agarwal
(shirish)

Ccache and Compilation times

This would be a relatively short post about a tool called ccache and how it can/could reduce the re-compilation time taken. If people had been following this blog, you would know that this blogger likes to compile fresh code for games he’s interested in. I could venture into libraries and apps too but then I [...]

Pockey Lam
(Pockey)

CFD Counter available!

In order to complement the nice web banners already available to place on blogs and websites the DFI marketing team has just launched a CFD countdown to further help with CFD promotion. In the same manner as we handled the different time zones for SFD we followed the same rules allowing everyone to display a countdown matching their own area. Of course translations are welcome (though none are available yet) and full instructions are available on the wiki. Simply ping us on the forum and we’ll activate the additional language right after checking all the files. And for the ones in a hurry just copy the sample code below (assuming you’re at UTC-4):

<a href=”http://www.culturefreedomday.org/”><img src=”http://www.culturefreedomday.org/countdown/banner1-UTC-4-en.png” border=”0″ width=”160″ height=”90″ alt=”Celebrate Free Culture with us on May 19!”></a>.

FLOSSK

Tech Talk with Mr.Fabio Biscaro

Innovations Lab and FLOSSK invites you to the second Tech Talk to be held on Tuesday, April 24 2012 at 6pm in the Innovations Lab premises.
Our guest speaker is Mr. Fabio Biscaro, from Italy, who is going to talk about the importance and challenges of team work in software development and the suitability of SCRUM as an agile methodology to get the best out of software development in teams.

April 21, 2012

Pockey Lam
(Pockey)

CFD Registration is On!

As we are one month away from Culture Freedom Day, event registration has now officially opened! Simply create your event page on the CFD Wiki where you should provide information about the venue, the schedule and anything else you deem important. Then just fill up the form right here and within minutes you should receive an activation email which will validate your participation while displaying your event on our worldwide map. Of course should you have any question or problem during the process you can either post a question in our forum or try to catch us on IRC.

April 20, 2012

Jiří Eischmann

State of Czech Linux Community

The more I look outside the Czech Republic the more I’m surprised how strong the Linux community in the Czech Republic. We always looked at our neighbour – Germany, where there are huge events such as LinuxTag and a lot of active FLOSS contributors, and felt there is not much going on in the Czech Republic. But that’s logical, Germany has 8 times more citizens. In fact, the Czech Linux community is one of the strongest per capita and there is quite a lot going on here.

There are three big Linux portals that are professional or semi-professional (Root.cz, ABCLinuxu.cz, LinuxEXPRES.cz) and bring articles and news from the world of FOSS every day. There are also FLOSS-oriented websites which are not so big, but still very active (OpenOffice.cz, Linuxsoft.cz, Fedora.cz, SUSEportal.cz, Ubuntu.cz,…). There were also two paper Linux magazines (LinuxEXPRES and Linux+), but they closed up. The market was too small for them and paper magazines don’t have good times generally. There is a digital magazine though - OpenMagazin. We don’t have such big events as in Germany, but there are still quite a few big conferences. LinuxAlt and (Red Hat) Developer Conference are attended by hundreds of people. LinuxExpo, which used to be the biggest event in the country (with 2,000 attendants in the best years), didn’t take place this year, but hopefully will be replaced by another Linux conference in Prague. Local LUGs organize events every month. The strongest one is in Brno, followed by Prague.

A vibrant Linux community was one of the reasons why Red Hat and SUSE chose to start their development offices in the Czech Republic. And those offices keep growing. The Red Hat one has over 400 engineers and the SUSE one about 100.

That’s not bad at all for a country with 10 million citizens. Linux in the Czech Republic also has one of the highest market penetrations in Europe (according to StatCounter). All countries higher in the list have government programs which support Linux and FLOSS. Unfortunately, the Czech government has no such programs. We have no “Munich” or “Gendarmerie Nationale”. Quite the opposite. Government organizations, that adopted Linux, were under big pressure, and many of them eventually gave up. So unlike in other countries with higher Linux adoption, Linux in the Czech Republic is doing well in spite of the government.

Of course, people complain that it used to be better, and there should be more active community members, but there is never enough active members and as I said at the beginning when I looked at possibilities to promote Red Hat and Fedora in other countries in the region, I found out that Linux communities are not so vibrant as in the Czech Republic. Hopefully, we’ll keep up and especially Fedora community will be more and more active.

April 17, 2012

Shirish Agarwal
(shirish)

The liberated Pixel Cup

Hi all, This will be a slightly longish post about a FOSS creating game competition which will be happening shortly. If people have been reading this blog for sometime, they must be realizing that I’m bit of a game freak and not just any game freak but a FOSS game freak. So, it is with [...]

April 10, 2012

Colin Charles
(bytebot)

Twitter, Facebook MySQL trees online – pushing MySQL forward

Just yesterday, I’m sure many saw Twitter opensourcing their MySQL implementation. It is based on MySQL 5.5 and the code is on Github.

For reference, the database team at Facebook has always been actively blogging, and keeping up their code available on Launchpad. Its worth noting that the implementation there is based on MySQL 5.0.84 and 5.1.

At Twitter, most of everything persistent is stored in MySQL – interest graphs, timelines, user data and those precious tweets themselves! At Facebook, its pretty similar – all user interactions like likes, shares, status updates, requests, etc. are all stored in MySQL (ref).

The media has picked up on it too. A fairly misinformed piece on GigaOm (MySQL has problems focused on Stonebrakers fate worst than death? Pfft. Facebook wants to move its code to github? Read the reasoning — its spam handling on LP.), and a shorter piece on CNET.

Both Twitter and Facebook code trees mention that its what they use in their environments, but it’s not supported in any way, shape or form. Facebook recommends Percona Server or MariaDB. Facebook also has tools like online schema change in the repository, amongst others like prefetching tools written in Python.

I haven’t had the chance to play with the Twitter release yet, but it looks like this can only push Percona Server and MariaDB forward. Based on 5.5, some of these BSD-licensed features can make it in, and some have already made it in I’m sure. And what pushes these servers, will push MySQL forward (see lots of new features in MySQL 5.6).

On a personal note, it is amazing to see some MySQL-alumni push this forward. At Twitter, there’s Jeremy Cole and Davi Arnaut. At Facebook, the team includes Domas Mituzas, Harrison Fisk, Yoshinori Matsunobu, Lachlan Mulcahy. Nothing would be complete without mentioning Mark Callaghan (though not-MySQL alumni, active MySQL community member) who led a MySQL team at Google, and now at Facebook.

Colin Charles
(bytebot)

Paybox Services and seeing MariaDB in use

When I was at MySQL, I took for granted that pretty much every website I used had software at the back of it that was basically MySQL. It was a nice feeling. MariaDB is a lot younger, so when I was in Paris and had to make a payment for the taxi I was sitting in, I smiled a little when I saw that Paybox Services was processing my transaction. Some might recall that Paybox Services deployed MariaDB, since the 5.2 release. It was a wonderful feeling that somewhere in that transaction, MariaDB was behind it!

Paybox wanted some features inside of MySQL 5.5 and have been holding out for MariaDB 5.5. Its kind of nice to see that today, MariaDB 5.5.22 has been released as a release candidate. It is only a matter of time before Paybox can benefit from things they’ve wanted like semi-sync replication.

RJ Ian S.Sevilla
(rjian)

DrupalCon Munich 2012 Scholarship now available..

The organizer of DrupalCon Munich 2012 announce last March 26,2012 that they are accepting application for scholarship to attend the DrupalCon 2012. Scholarship applications are now being accepted for Drupal Community members to have registration costs covered for the three-day event who would otherwise not be able to attend without financial assistance.

DrupalCon is an international event that brings together the people who use, develop, design, and support the Drupal platform. More than just another trade show or industry conference, it’s a shared experience that seeks to inspire and engage. DrupalCon Munich will feature dozens of curated sessions and panels from some of the most influential people and brightest minds within the Drupal community and beyond, as well as countless opportunities for networking, code sprints, informal conversations, and more.

For more information about the scholarship you can visit http://munich2012.drupal.org/community/scholarships or you can visit their website at http://www.munich2012.drupal.org for updates.

March 26, 2012

FLOSSK

Tech Talk with Mr.Terry Dwyer

First "Tech Talk" will be held on Thursday, March 29 2012 at 6pm in the Innovations Lab space.
Our first guest speaker is Mr.Terry Dwyer from US, who is going to talk about 3-Tier Applications development (UI, AL and DB).
Mr.Dwyer had worked for 25 years with Bell Laboratories (1970-1995) as software developer and team leader for a number of great projects such as TUXEDO System.

Mark Shuttleworth
(sabdfl)

Unsung heroes

The new privacy features in Ubuntu 12.04 are a lovely example of collaboration and contribution. I’d like to thank Manish Sinha and Stefano Candori who contributed significantly to that effort and hadn’t received a shout-out despite being central to the success. The body of contributors to Ubuntu and Unity continues to grow, and I know the team finds it immensely rewarding to help folk land patches or changes that bring the experience closer to the designed goal. Manish, Stafano, thank you!

RJ Ian S.Sevilla
(rjian)

Culture Freedom Day 2012

Digital Freedom International announce their new project aside from Software Freedom Day(SFD) is the culture freedom day.

Culture Freedom Day is therefore a logical extension of Software Freedom Day bringing an international date for all Free Culture artists and activists to showcase what Free Culture is really about, reach out to the public and use this opportunity to meet like-minded people. We invite everybody who cares about knowledge sharing to organize or join an Culture Freedom Day event in their area.

The event is targeted to celebrate on May 19, 2012 visit their official site at http://culturefreedomday.org/ for more information on joining and celebrating the event.

March 23, 2012

Frederic Muller
(BLUG_Fred)

Culture Freedom Day announced – May 19th 2012

After all this months saying nothing I was in fact working really hard on bringing a new celebration to life: Culture Freedom Day! Of course I didn’t do it alone and was heavily supported in my work by Pockey Lam and the members of the DFI board (yeah, we added a new name to our organization over the winter as many more things will be coming up and SFI was too limiting). I could probably write a lot more about the reasons of creating a new international day “just” for Free Culture but it’s all writen already here.

Two months left to the celebration, real work is actually really starting now !

Happy Culture Freedom Day to all

March 14, 2012

Mark Shuttleworth
(sabdfl)

Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves:

The trend is even starker if you look at what we know of new-style services, like clouds and big data, but since most of that happens behind the firewall its all anecdata, while web services are a public affair.

The key driver of this has been that we added quality as a top-level goal across the teams that build Ubuntu – both Canonical’s and the community’s. We also have retained the focus on keeping the up-to-date tools available on Ubuntu for developers, and on delivering a great experience in the cloud, where computing is headed.

The headlines for Ubuntu have all been about the desktop and consumer-focused design efforts, with the introduction of Unity and the expansion of our goals to span the phone, the tablet, the TV as well as the PC. But underpinning those goals has been a raising of the quality game: OEMs and consumers demand a very high level of quality, and so we now have large-scale automated testing, improved upload processes, faster responses to issues that crop up inevitably during the development cycle, a broader base of users and contributors in the development release, and better engagements with the vendors who pre-install Ubuntu. So 12.04 LTS is a coming of age release for Ubuntu in the data centre as much as its the first LTS to sport the interface which was designed to span the full range of personal computing needs.

We’re also seeing the wider community respond to the goal of cadence. OpenStack’s Essex release is lined up to be a perfect fit for 12.04 LTS. That is not a coincidence, it’s a value to which both projects are committed. Upstream projects that care about their user’s and care about being adopted quickly, want an effective conduit of their goodness straight to users. By adopting the 6-month / 2-year cadence of step and LTS releases, and aligning those with Ubuntu’s release cycle, OpenStack ensures that a very large audience of system administrators, developers and enterprise decision makers can plan for their OpenStack deployment, and know they will have a robust and very widely deployed LTS platform together with a very widely supported release of OpenStack. Every dependency that Essex needs is exactly provided in 12.04 LTS, the way that all of the major public clouds based on OpenStack are using it. By adopting a common message on releases, we make both OpenStack and Ubuntu stronger, and do so in a way which is entirely transparent and accessible to other distributions.

Quality. Design. Cadence. You can count on them in Ubuntu, and OpenStack.

February 22, 2012

Rafael Carreras Guillén

UGJ in Barcelona

March 3rd, the Ubuntu Catalan community celebrates Ubuntu Global Jam in Barcelona.

It is a perfect opportunity for learn and help the Ubuntu project.

We plan to carry on with these activities:

Translation Marathon with Catalan Translation Team members.
Bug triage: we’ll assess bugs to determine whether or not they have enough information to be worked on and assign a priority to them as soon as possible. You’ll need some English skills so you can communicate with the user reporting the bug.

We’ll be on #ubuntu-cat for those not avaliable to travel and I will be on #ubuntu-locoteams for some chat.

You can do that too

Never run a Jam in your town? Why not try to start one, even if few people can attend? You can find support in a variety of places, including irc sessions. Most of them have already been done, but you can read the whole sessions online.

February 21, 2012

SFI Official Blog
(SFI)

Celebrate Document Freedom Day on Marth 28 2012

Document Freedom Day (or DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It is a worldwide event celebrating Open Standards and raising general awareness about the need for their adoption. DFD is actively redefining perceptions of Open Standards in media, public administration and educational institutions.

In 2012 Document Freedom Day will be celebrated for the fourth time and targeting more than 42 events. To make these plans a reality, DFD needs your support as a partner of Document Freedom Day 2012! Talk with your friends/regional groups, and think about activities and events that you could organise to promote Open Standards.

Digital Freedom International fully endorses the effort and the message behind DFD as it is tightly linked to FOSS goals and hope that we can encourage SFD teams to celebrate the event as well.

Happy DFD to all!

February 13, 2012

Mark Hinkle
(mrhinkle)

Open Source CloudStack 3.0 Is Coming

The new dashboard from the CloudStack 3.0 beta.

Over the last year I have been working on the CloudStack Open Source Cloud Computing project. This month we are getting ready to launch CloudStack 3.0 which really raises the bar for cloud computing platforms. So what is CloudStack ? short It is an infrastructure-as-a-service(IaaS) platform that orchestrates virtualized servers into an elastic compute environment. The project was originally developed by Cloud.com and is now sponsored by Citrix since they acquired Cloud.com in July of 2011.

CloudStack provides multiple methods for interacting with the CloudStack compute platform. Users can request resources through a rich menu-driven web interface. Operations personnel can use an enhanced version of the web interface or interact with CloudStack’s RESTful API or command line interface (CLI). The new 3.0 UI takes things up a notch making it very intuitive for users to administer their own cloud computing so administrators can delegate infrastructure provisioning and focus on more high value tasks than spinning up servers.

Another thing that I think sets CloudStack apart is it’s networking-as-a-service capabilities. CloudStack administrator can create any number of custom network offerings in addition to the default network offerings provided by CloudStack. These offerings can be attached to the virtualized machines deployed by Cloudstack. Cloudstack allows user to choose the type of network architecture that best fits their needs. Out-of-the-box support includes the Basic Network, or flat network mode or advanced networking VLAN support and integration of network elements including external firewalls and load balancers. Administrators can offer different classes of service on a single multi-tenant physical network with a combination of networking offerings that include DHCP, Source Network Address Translation (NAT), Gateway, Load Balancing, Firewall, VPN, Port Forwarding.

You can get the details on the beta of CloudStack 3.0 from the CloudStack open source project and the GA version should be available in the upcoming weeks.

What’s New in CloudStack 3.0

For those of you who are familiar with CloudStack here’s a list of features that will be included in CloudStack 3.0.

Organize Users and Resources by Projects – users can group themselves into projects so they can collaborate and share virtual resources. CloudStack tracks usage per project as well as per user, so the usage can be billed to either a user account or a project.
Support for Citrix Netscaler – Citrix NetScaler(MPX, VPX, SDX) is now supported as an external network element for load balancing in zones that use advanced networking (also called advanced zones). Set up an external load balancer when you want to provide load balancing through means other than CloudStack’s provided virtual router.
Sticky Session Policies for External Load Balancers – Sticky sessions are used in Web-based applications to ensure continued availability of information across the multiple requests in a user’s session. For example, if a shopper is filling a cart, you need to remember what has been purchased so far. The concept of“stickiness” is also referred to as persistence, or maintaining state.
LDAP User Authentication – you can use an external LDAP server such as Microsoft Active Directory or ApacheDS for end-user authentication. Just map CloudStack accounts to the corresponding LDAP accounts using a query filter.
VM Storage Migration - CloudStack administrator can move a virtual machine’s root disk volume or any additional data disk from one storage pool to another in the same zone.
OpenStack Swift for Secondary Storage - In previous versions of CloudStack, NFS storage is supported for secondary storage. In CloudStack 3.0, OpenStack Object Storage (Swift, http://swift.openstack.org) is also supported for secondary storage.
Password and Key Encryption – CloudStack stores several sensitive passwords and secret keys that are used to provide security. Starting in CloudStack 3.0, these values are always automatically encrypted. (Database Secret Key, Database Password
Security Group Egress Rules - In addition to ingress rules that control incoming network traffic to VMs in a given security group, starting in CloudStack 3.0 you can also define egress rules to control outgoing network traffic.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, cloudstack, Iaas, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Networking-as-a-Service, Open Source

February 09, 2012

Matthias Kirschner
(mk)

More love reports instead of bug reports!

(If you are reading FSFE’s newsletters, and you already use one of our banners, you can skip this post because I copy and pasted it. Else please continue.)

Let us admit it, the Free Software community is often very critical. Wewrite bug reports, tell others how they can improve the software, ask them fornew features, and to not spare with criticism. Sometimes we forget to say"thank you, for all your work". As in the last years, we want to change this,at least for one day. So on Tuesday the 14th of February we will celebrate the"I love Free Software" – Day.

Get active, buy your favourite developer a drink or give them a hug (ask forpermission first), write an e-mail/letter expressing your feelings, create nice pictures, donate to a Free Softwareinitiative, use another of our suggestions or becreate yourself to show how you appreciate people, working hard to enlarge ordefend our freedom. Beside that help us to promote the activity with our banners, by e-mail,(micro)blog or in your (distributed?) social networks.

New this year is a whole day event in the Unperfekthaus in Essen (Germany) and that all our Fellowsautomatically get an This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it e-mail alias.

–
Matthias Kirschner
Support Free Software! Join the Fellowship!

February 02, 2012

Matthias Kirschner
(mk)

Du liebst Freie Software? Warum nicht Essen?

Die Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) ruft jährlich alle Unterstützer Freier Software auf, beim "I love Free Software"-Tag mitzumachen. Dazu gibt es eine Mitmach-Kampagne, zu der ihr Material und Ideen auf ilovefs.org finden könnt. Dieses Jahr wird es außerdem erstmalig eine "I love Free Software"-Veranstaltung im Unperfekthaus in der Innenstadt Essens geben.

Freu Dich mit uns über Freie Software. Neben Workshops zum Einstieg in GNU/Linux, Musikproduktion mit Freier Software, QR-Codes zum selbst sprayen und Projektvorstellungen sind immer noch spontane Programmvorschläge möglich. Abends gibt es ein Live-Konzert mit IntroVagant, KIT, /angstalt/ und fukked-up. Weitere Informationen gibt es auf der Veranstaltungsseite.

Die FSFE will mit dieser Veranstaltung möglichst viele Anwender, Entwickler und Unterstützer Freier Software zusammen bringen und mit ihnen gemeinsam feiern. Sowohl jung wie alt, weiblich wie männlich, Profis wie Einsteiger; ihr seid alle mit Freunden und Bekannten eingeladen. Wenn ihr noch eine Idee für die Veranstaltung habt, meldet euch unter This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it – jede Idee ist willkommen.

—
Matthias Kirschner
Unterstütze Freie Software! Mach mit beim Fellowship!

Rubén Romero y Cordero
(huayra)

Precise: 2nd Update

Chatting with friends and old colleagues I thought I would tell you more about my experience with precise. You can read more on that here and the first update here.

Mostly everything works as of today:

Skype, Spotify and Dropbox work without any issues
Flash and Sun Java still work
LibreOffice works after initial glitches. Tested Writer, Calc & Impress and they work quite good and are rather fast. Actually I am starting to like LO more and more for every new release
IBM Lotus Symphony still does not work under Precise. I am too lazy to file bugs on that…
Software Manager now works and is A LOT faster than it was on 11.10 (but stil kind of slow)
Almost everything on System Settings is now working. Great improvements in the usability section since my original testing in December
Multiscreen support is super robust. But I can only had two screens (connected to my dock) and cannot then use my laptop screen (which might be because of my chip or driver limitations.
Suspend and Hibernation just work®

There is just one thing that does not work for me this far:

PDF Chain is not helping me on my daily splitting/merging with PDFs. This seems to be an issue between PDFChain and PDFtk, but I have not tested since last week. For now I’ve moved to PDFsam which is not as pretty, but it works.

And I would like to give my thought on HUD:

Conceptually awesome! I use guake daily and having this for application menues is great
Quite useful when you already know what you want: Save for almost any application is a no brainer. But on XChat Save Text.. is the right answer, and that’s what HUD gives you. Neat?
Voice recognition is something I would like to tes as I miss to be able to talk to it and make it do what I want.
A few times it is annoying when I press Alt unwillingly.

That’s all for now.

January 22, 2012

Kathy Reid
(kathyreid)

linux.conf.au talk – ‘The best event in the world and how you can do it too!’

Based on my experiences helping on the Software Freedom Day Melbourne team for several years, and the successful BarCampGeelong, I responded to linux.conf.au’s Call for Papers (CfP) with an outline of a talk around running outstanding events in the free and open source software community. The aim was to provide the skills, resources and techniques that budding organisers would require in order to manage a successful event. Fortunately, the CfP was accepted and as well as being part of the Core Team for linux.conf.au 2012, I had an extra action item – preparing an awesome presentation!

Instead of using Impress for slides, I wanted to find something a little different. At the August WordPress Melbourne meet up, Vernon Fowler used Prezi for his BuddyPress case study. Prezi, while producing impressive slide decks, is proprietary and closed. Something told me this would be unpopular with the linux.conf.au crowd. Having used Inkscape heavily, I was directed to Sozi, a free and open source software tool that creates SVG files and Javascript from Inkscape. This tool is amazing – as you’ll be able to see from the slide deck below. The only drawback I found was afterwards – when trying to upload the Sozi-created SVG file to MediaWiki, it’s detected as a potentially dangerous file because the SVG contains HTML.

After delivering the presentation (link to video below), I received lots of constructive feedback. In particular, Karen Sandler, one of our keynotes for linux.conf.au, let me know that she doesn’t use the camera on her smartphone – because it uses proprietary software. Of course, this meant that all the QR codes I’d included in the slides were effectively useless! So, the slide deck below has been updated with printed URLs.

One of the more positive pieces of feedback received was around the fact I produced and printed a transcript for the presentation so hearing impaired people at the presentation could have a more equivalent experience.

Slide deck done in Inkscape and Sozi (SVG, 25Mb – this will take a while to load. View in SVG compliant browser such as Firefox)
Video of presentation at linux.conf.au 2012 (Youtube video, approx 44 minutes)
best-event-transcript-16Jan12 (ODT Open Office text format, 25Kb)
best-event-transcript-16Jan12 (DOC Microsoft Word, 77Kb)

January 15, 2012

Mark Hinkle
(mrhinkle)

Blood Mary Recipe

One of the many ways I put myself through college was as a bartender. At the time I perfected my Bloody Mary recipe but as time has gone on I have forgotten the exact recipe so I have been trying to figure out the right proportions. This still isn’t quite right but it’s getting close.

Spicy Bloody Mary Recipe

I usually just buy a 64 ounce bottle of tomato juice and pour out the eight ounces so I can use the bottle for the mix.

56 ounces tomato juice (I go for the low sodium Campbell’s but use what you like)
2 TBSP Horseradish (if you grate your own that works, otherwise buy some good german horseradish)
1 TBSP Old Bay Seasoning (crab seasoning if you can’t find the original)
2 TBSP Worcestershire Sauce
4 ounces Clam Juice (if you like clams you can skip this and substitute Clamato for the tomato juice) if you don’t like clams then just start with 60 ounces of tomato juice.
1/2 TSP Celery Salt
1 TSP Hungarian Hot Paprika
1/2 TSP Tabasco
1/2 TSP Sea Salt
1 TSP Black Pepper

Obviously you can mix an 1 1/2 ounces of your favorite vodka. Then garnish with celery, or if you got one a cocktail shrimp. I have toyed with substituting Wasabi for the German Horseradish but I think that would really change the taste.

January 06, 2012

Rubén Romero y Cordero
(huayra)

Update on Precise + Ubuntu Norge

Precise Report

As promised, hereby is my report on Precise Pangoline, due in April 2012 as Ubuntu LTS 12.04.

Working multi-screen setup (had problems with the right screen on 11.10)
System is stable (11.10 was really unbearable)
Fast (It feels a lot faster from cold start to desktop. Improvement also on Suspend/Hybernation)
Sometimes things break (skype & spotify mainly) but after a dist-upgrade (yes, using the terminal for updates as the software center seems REALLY broken) it is all good again!

Ubuntu Norge Update

And, I am stepping down as Contact Member for the Nowegian LoCo team. So please welcome Jo-Erlend Schinstad as the new contact for the team. For me this means two things:

Peace of mind
Being able to contribute to Ubuntu Norge activities without the implicit overhead of being the main responsible person

Hopefully this will translate in more team activity. I am already planning a great release party for Precise in Oslo.

And cannot leave without my promised screenshot:

November 15, 2011

Frederic Muller
(BLUG_Fred)

Screen calibration breakthrough on GNU/Linux

If like me you are running GNU/Linux and have spent a little money on a nice LCD/LED screen (or simply a modern laptop with great colour and resolution) you may have noticed that getting your colours right has been a challenge: indeed all the screen calibration devices are proprietary, do not have native software running on GNU/Linux and are rather pricey. Well this is over! Richard Hughes from the GNOME project among other things has just launched a fully open source hardware/software colorimeter project: the ColorHug!

It has a GPL bootloader, GPL firmware image and GPL hardware schematics and PCBs. It’s faster than the proprietary hardware, and more importantly a lot cheaper. [...] I’m offering a 20% discount on each unit, on the assumption the first users will be testing the firmware and reporting problems. If you want to support a cool open source project, I’m asking £48 for each unit, plus postage and packaging.

.
As the main website puts it the discount is based on the understanding you’re helping out testing the hardware and software and it might be a bit more complicated than just plug-and-play. You will always be able to update the firmware to the latest versions as the hardware is improved.

Well this is what I’ve been looking for for years so I already made my pre-order and if like me you’ve been longing to see real colours on your screens and can help out with the project then just go and pre-order yours as well!

September 17, 2011

Kathy Reid
(kathyreid)

Software Freedom Day Melbourne 2011 focusses on community building

This year’s Melbourne-based Software Freedom Day event took a low-key approach, in stark contrast to last year’s award-winning affair. Hosted by Linux Users Victoria at The Hub in Docklands, the day kicked off with a BBQ (with opensauce – props to Lev Lafayette for a very witty pun). Unfortunately due to a power failure at Southern Cross Station, my V/line train from Geelong was delayed by over an hour – meaning I missed the BBQ.

Ben Sturmfels opened proceedings by explaining the need for software freedom, and why it is so important for us to value freedom – not only in software and computing but in everything we do. A key topic of the discussion which ensued was resolving the tension between hardline ‘fanatics’ in the community – those who baulk from using any form of distribution for example which contains elements of proprietary code – as Ubuntu and Debian do – and those who take a more liberal and pragmatic approach to using free and open source software.

The afternoon saw two groups of three workshops held – and I chose to attend that run by Alex Garber (@clockworkpc) on promoting FOSS and how it can be better marketed. It was clear that people were drawn to free and open source software via a variety of channels. Some arrive from a philosophical or idealistic desire to have more freedom over how they use their computer. Others have pragmatic reasons – such as lack of financial resources – for using FOSS solutions. Additionally, as pointed out by two-term LUV President, Lev Lafayette, FOSS alternatives can offer productivity and processing advantages over their proprietary cousins. This represents a distinct advantage in high performance applications such as those used in science and engineering. Participants in the discussion recounted some of their introductory experiences to Linux and open source software, with many indicating that they took a ‘softly-softly’ approach – often dual booting into Windows and Linux before making the move to a Linux only platform. The ability to use key software packages under Linux operating systems remains a key barrier to adoption; although applications such as EndNote have FOSS alternatives – LaTeX – the data formats they use are often closed or proprietary, thus making data interchange difficult.

I then facilitated a session on building and sustaining FOSS communities. Many of the themes were not new, but what was so encouraging and enlightening about discussions were the depth of passion people felt for the groups of which they were a part (including Andy Gelme – President of Melbourne Community Connected Hackerspaces and Ben Sturmfels, Convenor of the Melbourne Free Software Group).

We covered a lot of ground. Discussions started around community standards – standards of dress, behaviour, deportment andw hygiene are seen as important – both to set expectations and avoid ‘putting off’ potential new members of the community. The need for leadership, management and facilitation skills for those in senior roles in free software groups was discussed, without reaching consensus on whether it would be worthwhile to actually invest money in providing training for key members. This naturally led into a thread on the need for mentoring within the community – and establishing both formal and informal channels for knowledge sharing to continuously nurture a pool of talent ready to take on leadership roles. Diversity, as ever, was a hot topic – and it was encouraging to have three women (including myself) in the group of a dozen or so. The general feeling in the room was that there is no silver bullet to solving issues of diversity and inclusion – other than that as a community we have to critically examine our practises to ensure we are not being unwittingly exclusive in our behaviours.

The difficulties of establishing FOSS communities in regional areas – without a large critical mass of interested people – were also touched on. Here, the group suggested having regular groups with a broader focus to ensure sustainability and sufficient interest – such as a programming group rather than one focussing on a specific language or technology.

We also did some ‘blue sky’ work, and envisioned what we would like free and open source software groups to evolve into over the next few years. To summarise, the desire was to be recognised as a legitimate and trusted source of advice both for open hardware and software solutions. In particular, the desire to be viewed by industry and business as a respectable, reputable option viz a viz proprietary options, was highlighted. The need to do more ‘reach out’ type work with other community groups focussing on social equity and justice was also a strong theme of the session.

The threads from the discussion were mapped using FreeMind and are available below.

NOTE: Unlike the rest of the material in this blog, this post is released under the CC-BY license as below.

Mind map (PNG, 408kb)
Mind map (ODT, 10kb)
Mind map (Freemind, 25kb)

Software Freedom Day Melbourne 2011 FOSS Community Building by Kathy Reid is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at blog.kathyreid.id.au.

September 07, 2011

OpenDisc

OpenDisc 11.09 Released!

We’re happy to announce the latest version of OpenDisc is available for free download, with nearly 40 updated versions, and a switch from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice.

As always you can download the disc for free, or make a donation to receive OpenDisc via airmail anywhere in the world.

The updated programs are:

Audacity 1.3.13, Avidemux 2.5.5, Blender 2.59, CaRMetal 3.7.1, Celestia 1.6.1, ClamWin 0.97.2, Dia 0.97.1-2, DjVuLibre 3.5.4+4.7, FileZilla 3.5.1, Firefox 6.0.1, Freeciv 2.3.0, FreeCol 0.10.1, FreeMind 0.9.0, GnuCash 2.4.7, GTK 2.22.0-2, HTTrack 3.44-1, InfraRecorder 0.52, Inkscape 0.48.1, Maxima 5.25.0, Miro 4.0.3, Notepad2 4.2.25, LibreOffice 3.4.3, Pidgin 2.10.0, PokerTH 0.8.3, Really Slick Screensavers 0.2, RSSOwl 2.1.2, Scribus 1.4.0 RC5, SeaMonkey 2.3.2, Sokoban YASC 1.556, Songbird 1.9.3-1959, Stellarium 0.11.0, Sumatra PDF 1.7, Thunderbird 6.0.1, TightVNC 2.0.4, Tux Paint 0.9.21c, VLC 1.1.11, The Battle for Wesnoth 1.8.6, Workrave 1.9.4.

We’d originally planned to co-incide this release with the launch of our new home at http://opendisc.co/ but we’d rather release in time for Software Freedom Day. Stay tuned for the launch!

September 01, 2011

8LayerTechnologies

Software Freedom Day, (www.sfd.ph) goes Future Perfect at ANC

Tonight at ANC's Future Perfect, Our Ms. Deng Silorio and POSNet President Lawrence Libo-on joined TJ Manotoc to feature and discuss the upcoming Software Freedom Day which will be held on September 17, 2011 at St. Paul University Philippines, Tuguegarao, Cagayan.

Deng and Lawrz was accompanied by Meric and Lariz to document the fact in behalf of the sfd.ph team. This stint is truly a mark that the collaborative efforts of the Team SFD.PH exposes our advocacy to be heard, to be seen and to be shared in more venues and media.

Lawrz was able to expound the impact of Open Source and the implications as well of Open Source as concrete manifestations in the tech gadgets and computer applications that we use day by day. He also encouraged students and IT Practitioners to take a look at Open Source, reinvent and share with the community. Thus, having a wider perspective of technology.

Deng in turn was able to plug KahelOS which is an Open Source innovation,free for all to use. But more importantly she did emphasize the reason why we do celebrate Software Freedom Day; 1. As an advocacy to spread the benefit of free open source software as an alternative to commercial ones. 2. A venue for F/OSS Enthusiasts and Practitioners to give back to the community 3. To instill and imbibe innovation and nationalism.

August 31, 2011

Bre Pettis

HackerSpaces: The Beginning (The Book)

Repost of my post on hackerspaces.org. In December of 2008, a group of hackers was sitting on the floor with faces aglow with laptop light cruising the internet and skyping friends in and listening to death metal. It was 12 days before 25c3. Astera and I had a conversation that went something like this:

B: There should be a book.

A: Yes, there should.

B: We have 12 days.

A: We can do it.

The twelve days we had was until CCC started. We figured we would have it done by then. We contacted all the hackers we knew around the world and put the word out. We expected to get about a half a page of writing from each space. We reckoned that it would be a 25 page pamphlet. We also reckoned that it be easy for folks to write up a little summary within a few days of what it was like to get their hackerspace started and get back to us.

Within a week we had been scorched by a flame war, gotten a lot of both written and photographic material submitted and it seemed likely that the book would happen. Then the submissions kept coming… and coming. The hackerspaces around the world told each other about the project and many groups sent some writing in describing the beginning of their hackerspace. Word had even gotten round to groups that didn't have a space yet and they were sending us descriptions of their pre-beginnings too! The 12 days came and went and still the submissions kept coming.

After a few months submissions had trailed off and Astera came to NYC and began designing the book. She's a pro and it shows. This book looks beautiful because she took the material and somehow made it fit together aesthetically, not a trivial task. Jens Ohlig jumped into the process last year to help push the editing process forward. Remember, in our minds it was going to be a project that would take less than two weeks and it turned into something epic. It's been a long wait and I hope you'll think that it's worth it.

Download HackerSpaces: The Beginning!

This book documents where the hackerspace movement was in December of 2008. In that way it's a bit of a time capsule. It's not an exhaustive book, but we hope there are enough stories in here to show that all your excuses for not starting up a hackerspace are invalid. Each group faced down their own dragons to bring their hackerspace into existence including floods, rats, and drama. If they can do it, so can you.

We did this because we wanted it to exist and so it is a reward in itself. If you feel moved and want to support hackerspaces, we suggest contributing to the Wau Holland fund which helps make awesome things happen for hackerspaces. We would also like to thank everyone who submitted photographs and writing, this is your book.

After these years, the book is finally free in the world as a pdf. Download it, read it, and share it. We're open to the idea of making it into a real physical book and if you're interested in making that happen, let us know.

Build, Unite, Multiply!

August 04, 2011

Matt Oquist
(moquist)

everythingisaremix is a rehash

A friend of mine pointed me recently to http://www.everythingisaremix.info/. I watched parts one and two, and I thought they were interesting but underwhelming relative to the thesis.

For example, doesn't every movie buff know that Lucas lifted this shot from Triumph of the Will?

It's quite well-known that Lucas was intentionally hearkening back to the serials of yesteryear, so the Flash Gordon tie-ins, while not something I already knew directly, were hardly surprising.

The "Language of Christianity" piece was even less impressive, because (for me) there wasn't any new trivia to discover. It was also disappointing to discover that a primary achievement of this video is simply to rehash some old confusion again. Take this screenshot, for example:

Well, as Kirby has already said in this video, "salvation" is a word with many meanings. The authors of the scriptures knew that, the Hebrews knew that, the Jews in Jesus' time knew that, Jesus knew that, Paul knew that, Augustine knew that... Now we skip a couple millennia and realize that Kirby's just figuring it out.

Furthermore, since this screenshot shows his attempt to clarify 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, it's obvious that he still doesn't understand the different meanings very well. Those verses are clearly about death and resurrection. (See verse 13 if you're not sure.) Kirby's argument seems to be: (1) The Bible refers to "salvation" in some places in the sense of making things better in this life. (2) 1 Thessalonians 4 seems to be referring to "salvation" somehow (even though the word isn't mentioned at all in , e.g., the NIV, which I happened to check first at biblegateway.com). Therefore, the concept of the "rapture" as it is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 is merely based on confusion about what "salvation" means. There are some problems with that argument as Kirby makes it.

Kirby is one more in a long line of folks who are confused about the Gospel of Christ. It includes both justification (by which Christians are made right with God) and sanctification, the process in which Christians strive to do good as the Holy Spirit refines them in the image of Christ. Justification and sanctification are not the same thing. Kirby's right: words can be tricky. I wish he had done a bit more research on the ones he attempted to expound.

I don't mean to knock what Kirby Ferguson is doing too much -- it's interesting storytelling with some surprising trivia for those of us who aren't experts in each of the areas he covers. It looks like Parts 3 and 4 get into the nature of creativity -- and that sounds more interesting, and more promising.

Lastly, I want to mention that Kirby doesn't really seem to be claiming that everything is a "remix". You "remix" recorded stuff: footage, sounds, etc. He talks about that once in a while, but he's really focused on ideas. I think his real thesis is that everything is a "rehash" of old ideas -- and both Solomon and I agree with Kirby about that:

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9

Perhaps ironically, the fact that everythingisaremix is itself a rehash of a very old observation only goes to prove its point.