Adventures In Open Source

The Weekly Rewind

A quick look at my watch tells me it’s Weekly Rewind time again so here comes a round up of what I got up to this week.  It all started on Monday when I recorded an interview with Matt Lee of the FSF for Linux Outlaws. We talked for about half an hour and it came out really well I think, you can hear the results in episode 82 of the podcast. One thing that came out of the discussion was licensing and it really made me think. I’ve tended to just use the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commerical Share Alike 3.0 license for everything in the past and never thought too much about it. It seems though that the NC clause makes it incompatible with the GPL and it’s not considered a free license by the FSF. This came as something of a shock to me but I suppose it’s my own ignorance for not really considering the implications. I was worried about people charing money for my work when I release it for free and I’d like it kept that way. The NC clause does protect from that but in practice this isn’t really how it works. It prevents anyone who has a commercial interest of any sort from using my material, not necessarily just selling it as such but perhaps playing one of my songs on the radio or including something I’ve done in a magazine. In light of this I’ve re-licensed this very blog under BY-SA and I shall use this license for most of my future works. It was quite a learning experience and I suppose the main thing I’ve realised is not to just choose any license quickly, instead put proper consideration into it. Anyway, we recorded and also streamed the rest of episode 82 that evening. Read the rest of this entry »

brewed to perfection

Ok it’s time for another distro review and I’m a bit overdue with this one but I’m a big fan of Debian and the dedicated community who develop it I make no secret of that. When I reviewed Etch (4.0) last year I declared that if I were to finally grow up and settle down with just one distro this would be the one. I like the fact that it’s not backed by any commercial entity and sticks closely to it’s Free Software principals. After some delay version 5.0 Lenny was finally released this Valentine’s Day, how appropriate but would it still be true love? There was only one way to find out…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Itself, Debian is the mother of a lot of modern distros
Packaging – .deb (Managed by the mighty Apt)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.26
Default Desktop – Gnome 2.22.1

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