Screencast Review of 11 of the best Free and Open Source Games available for Linux. I'm doing this demo on Ubuntu Linux 9.10 64bit Karmic Koala. The Games I review are: Torcs, Alien Arena, Chromium BSU, Extreme Tux Racer, Battle for Wesnoth, Glest, Hedgwars, Sauerbraten, Slune. Super Tux Kart, Warzone 2100. These are some of the best Games in Linux, but there are hundreds more that I have not covered yet. Lots of Linux tips and tricks in this educational video from http://www.OSGUI.com Tech Show.

There was an interesting announcement from Eduardo Lima of the Canola project in his speech in Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend yesterday in Brazil. The Canola project announced that they are going to license their project with additional permissions to GPLv3 in order to provide their code “in different kinds of business models and product offerings, especially in CE devices.” This is the first times that this particular permission is being used. The GPLv3 license is an important one and developers should be aware of the facts and motivations in this particular case.

My company has recently launched an Open Source Certification service and I wanted to discuss why we think it provides real benefits to our customers. The way we design this program allows the certification to be a watermark for organizations that have led or are leading Open Source projects both behind and beyond their firewall. Ultimately, this certification can be awarded to entities whose operations or business model fully integrates Open Source.

Any old standards hand forced to choose the single most disputed issue in standard setting over the past decade would likely respond with a deceivingly simple question: "What does it mean to be an 'open standard?'" A similar debate rages in the open source community between those that believe that some licenses (e.g., the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses) are "open enough," while others would respond with an emphatic Hell No! (or less printable words to similar effect).

Source: www.linux-foundation.org

If you’re in the open source world, you probably don’t need a lot of convincing about the high quality software that results from the open source development model.  Mass collaboration coupled with vociferous peer review makes for better code and products. It just does.  No matter how much of a monopoly might exist today, this collaboration cannot be duplicated within the proprietary software model.

Source: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/why_open_source_not_free_so...

Choosing to release a piece of software under the terms of a free software license is an important step through which many programmers and writers first approach the free software community. However, the myriad of licenses available can sometimes confuse and disorient the user, sometimes making this first step much harder than it should be. Let’s try and make things clearer.

http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/blog-entry/its-nearly-2009-open-source-he...

Last week, Saugatuck Technology published a new whitepaper that detailed the affect open source software has had on business and the affect business has had on open source.

The big takeaway--at least the one most touted in the follow-up blogs and news reports about the paper--is that open source is driven more by the contributions of corporations and vendor-run projects than by individual developers.

Upon reading this conclusion, and some of the others gleaned from the highlights of the paper, it strikes me that there is still this radical disconnect between what people think open source software is about versus what open source software is.

Source: https://fossbazaar.org/content/can-good-governance-clash-business-interests

Today I would like to mention an issue that is somewhat of a taboo inside the Free and Open Source world. There is a categoy of software that is developed, released and distributed in full compliance with the license (GPL, Apache, BSD, etc.) but that ends up locking in its users because of poor or absence of documentation and complete lack of access to software information.

This adherence to software is thus not the apanage of proprietary software. Yet, sometimes some software that are released under a FOSS license are just as bad as proprietary software.  This issue can be addressed in two ways.

Wiki evolution

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed a toolbar in the screenshots. This is the wikia evolution extension which adds a toolbar to the browser (it works in both Firefox and Netscape Navigator). This is a really, really useful addon because it means you can still help Wikia to build the web index and the search engine even when you are not searching directly from the Wikia search page.

The toolbar gives you the main features you have when working directly from Wikia itself. So, I opened a page from one of my bookmarks about adding repositories to the Asus EeePC and clicked on the “Add URL to Keyword”. A dialogue box opens and you are prompted to submit a search term under which the URL will be submitted to the Wikia search index. You will know that your URL has been added because an entry will have added to the toolbar.

Mention Jimmy Wales and you automatically think Wikipedia; however, that is not his only love child. The Wikia search engine is his latest offspring — or least it was when it was launched in January 2008. Wikia has been devised as a free software and open source alternative to Google and othersNow.

In an article in June I speculated about how the internet might change the way we think.; I mentioned in passing the Wikia search engine. Enough time has passed to see how this attempt to democratise a web search engine has come.