This is FredPod, a podcast about creativity and technology from the Fredericksburg, Virginia area
This podcast is available in MP3 format via iTunes and at marwalk.podomatic.com. You also can get this podcast in the open source Ogg Vorbis format; look for the Ogg Vorbis RSS link on the home page at marwalk.net.
FredPod is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
This is your host, Mark Walker.
Show notes for this podcast are available at marwalk.wordpress.com, under the category Podcast.
Intro
This episode was produced on September 24th, 2011—and today’s topics will include:
Selections from “yum info recent” on the Fedora Linux project.
The Latest from FredLUG.
Today’s feature is “a short collection of thoughts after doing Software Freedom Day 2011.”
And we’ll close with a Creative Commons licensed work by
Canopy, entitled Freedom.
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FredPod by Mark Caldwell Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Here are some recently updated items in yum at the Fedora project:
Name : flash-plugin
License : Commercial, and it’s from the adobe-linux-i386 repository
Description : Adobe Flash Plugin 10.3.183.10
: Fully Supported: Mozilla SeaMonkey 1.0+, Firefox 1.5+, Mozilla
: 1.7.13+
Name : google-chrome-beta: google-chrome-stable : google-chrome-unstable
Description : Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.
Name : tor as in The Onion Router
Description : Tor is a connection-based low-latency anonymous communication system. Applications connect to the local Tor proxy using the SOCKS protocol. The local proxy chooses a path through a set of relays, in which each relay knows its predecessor and successor, but not others. Traffic flowing down the circuit is unwrapped by a symmetric key at each relay, which reveals the downstream relay.
:
: Warnings: Tor does no protocol cleaning. That means there is a
danger that application protocols and associated programs can be induced to reveal information about the initiator. Tor depends on Privoxy and similar protocol cleaners to solve this problem. This is alpha code, and is even more likely than released code to have anonymity-spoiling bugs. The present network is very small — this further reduces the strength of the anonymity provided. Tor is not presently suitable for high-stakes anonymity.
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You can find additional information on these, and many other recently updated packages, by typing yum info recent at the command line.
The Fredericksburg Linux Users Group, FredLUG, meets on the third Monday of each month at the main Library on Caroline Street downtown—meeting time is 7 PM 1900 US Eastern time. FredLUG also meets on the “last-Saturday-of-the-month” at the England Run library branch, which is west of Falmouth in Stafford County. A Google-maps link is in the show notes.
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=CRRL+england+run&hl=en&cid=7228995606117168324
Our most recent activity was doing Software Freedom Day on Saturday, September 24th—that was a week later than the International date of September 17th. We decided to avoid a conflicting schedule date with the local Oktoberfest.
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You can find the Fredericksburg Linux Users Group email list at calypso dot tux dot org (http://calypso.tux.org/mailman/listinfo/fredlug). Feel free to join the list.
Besides the FredLUG email list, you’re also welcome on the IRC channel pound FredLUG on irc dot freenode dot net.
Visit the new Fredlug website at fredlug dot info for more details and resources.
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Feature
Today’s feature is “a short collection of preliminary thoughts after doing Software Freedom Day 2011.” The banner sent out by Software Freedom International made a difference in the percentage of passers by who stopped to talk with us. In addition to the other SWAG (as in Stuff We All Get) from SFI, we had some T-shirts and DVDs from the Fedora project to give away as well.
Of the people who stopped to talk, here are some immediate observations:
The vast majority had never heard of, or knew very little about, free and open source software. We found ourselves explaining very basic concepts. That there is any alternative at all to Windows or Mac OS was a surprise to quite a few people. But going into the differences between GNU GPL, BSD, Apache, and proprietary licensing was far beyond the scope possible with the time available.
The Live DVDs were popular items, especially as they let people test drive Linux with minimal risk. And if they liked what they saw, they could install it to their hard drive—after saving their data to a safe place.
The Open Disc DVDs were also welcomed, and most people who took disks took both a distro and an Open Disc copy.
Many people only wanted to do the common things that are done with a computer. They mentioned web browsing, email, documents and accounting tasks—all of these are well supported by FOSS. The only exceptions discussed were computer games, most of which are Windows-only—and advanced audio and video editing capabilities beyond that provided by FOSS workhorse apps such as Audacity.
A basic point of confusion we encountered was the difference between a browser and an operating system. Some people answered the question of what OS they were using by saying Firefox or that “E” program to get onto the Internet.
Those not in the Open Source community are naturally puzzled as to why all this matters. One gentleman kept referring to us as “true believers,” and seemed unmoved by concerns about vendor lock-in, price gouging, and patent trolling.
One reason why it matters is that some visitors appeared to be not at the top of the economic food chain. For people in this situation, free and open source has a logically increased appeal. But it also matters as a wise investment for any size company—for example, Google.
One thing was clear at the end of the day—and that was we have much more work to do in articulating and publicizing the personal and business cases for free and open source software.
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Today’s podcast will close with a Creative Commons licensed work by
Canopy, entitled Freedom, from music.mevio.com. Enjoy.
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