Month: May 2013

Why is Free Software good for you

On my earlier blog post I wrote about the difference between proprietary and Free Software (free as in freedom, not free as a free beer) and use of proprietary software on (mobile) devices. Here I would like to expose more links for you to read regarding this topic :

Trisquel GNU/Linux on my laptop

I am proud that I am now using Trisquel GNU/Linux distribution for my daily work on a laptop. It is a distribution that is endorsed by the Free Software Foundation and it is based on Ubuntu, so if you already know Ubuntu and care for more freedom, you should consider using it, too. There is a list of hardware on H-NODE which is compatible with Free Software distributions. Almost all features on my laptop work, I spotted only a few minor errors, which don’t afffect overall usage. What doesn’t work yet is the 3D acceleration on the GPU, but I don’t even have the need for that. Another thing is that backlight doesn’t go into standby mode when the laptop is idling, but stays turned on at all times (the bug is already fixed in Ubuntu). There is a free Adobe Flash replacement called “gnash” and videos on Youtube are WebM encoded and can be viewed using a pure HTML5 standard. While mentioning HTML5, there is a petition going on for Anti Digital Restrictions Management in HTML5, which you should sign.

From Free Software to Hardware

In order to use free software successfully, we need more free (free as in freedom) hardware available. Because the computer industry requires lots of funds/investments into hardware design, many companies unfortunatelly mostly try to make their hardware proprietary. Therefore making it difficult for free software to run on them without restrictions. Here are some links that I have come accross, that define what are the differencies between free and proprietary hardware and why free hardware would be good for companies to produce. Also keep in mind that you can help FSF campaign by buying AMD CPU chips and not buying Intel, and by publishing statements about what you’re doing. The most uncooperative company is Intel, which has started a sham “open source” BIOS project. The software consists of all the unimportant parts of a BIOS, without the hard parts. It won’t run, and doesn’t bring us any closer to a BIOS that does run. It is just a distraction. By contrast, AMD has been cooperating by releasing major chunks of their BIOS source code and making their technical experts available. Likewise, buy motherboards that support free BIOS. See Supported Motherboards for information on which companies cooperate and which models and motherboards are supported.

Richard M. Stallman about human rights

Richard M. Stallman [1][2] is an American software freedom and human rights activist and the founder/chairman of the Free Software Foundation [3][4]. These are some interesting videos from his lectures :

[1] http://www.stallman.org/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

[3] http://www.fsf.org/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation