Free Software Magazine, issue 21

In this issue of Free Software Magazine David Jacovkis reports from Colombia and explains why free software is an ethical choice. Colin McGregor interviews several key people in the GNU/Linux world as well as explaining how to get KDE looking fantastic. Then we have Terry Hancock covering the Open Hardware project and making a comprehensive list of Linux-friendly hardware. Steven Goodwin shares how much he saved by using free software for his great beer podcast, and Alan Berg entertains us with free software easter eggs, while Andrew Min will explain the basics of HTML... Monty Python style. Gary Richmond enlights us about touchpads and Google Firefox extensions you don't want to miss. For ultimate hackers, Gianluca Pignalberi manages to do sound filtering by using... the Gimp (!) while Yousef Ourabi reviews FreeBSD 7 and its graphical installer. Talking about server-side topics, Ryan Cartwright covers the installation of Exim and Spamassassi, David A. Harding explains how to create a mailing list from home, and Ken Leyba makes sure you know how to protect your server with Deny Hosts. Finally, Andrew Krause tells you all you need to know about C in order to create GTK applications.

Read it online.

New Firefox Ad Fight Against Boredom

GNU Free Essay

Richard Stallman. He started it all; Linux, Open Source, Free Software, all this has roots in his vision about software, freedom and user rights. It's all in the first chapter of his selected essays about the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.

At the same time, when he was changing the world, and for the better, he do it at his own expense with the help of some earlier pioneers. He quit MIT AI Lab to dedicate his energy and effort to the cause, the cause of sharing, freedom and helping your neighbor, by his own words. Has a marginal gain, this movement also provide a solution for whom software cost of ownership his prohibitive.

Information is power, so they say, but without the tools for processing this information is lost as a dumb raw of meaningless data. And now is available to all (or almost). It isn't just free or open source software, it's SOCIAL SOFTWARE.