Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral comic strip by merc & crimperman

As planned, I did my talk about the thriving fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement at yesterday’s FSFE Berlin Fellowship meeting. I started with the basics of the Free Software ideal, moved on to the problematic issues concerning mainstream GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian and then discussed the solutions to these problems.

I’ve been posting less and less here, simply because I’ve been very happy with my system as it was. My distribution of choice is Arch, my DE of choice is KDE, and my applications of choice are Pidgin, Chromium, Amarok (yes, it’s back), and Transmission. I don’t need more, and I was happy. However.

The Morevna Project aims to create an animated film in a modern anime-style retelling a very old Russian folktale known as "Marya Morevna". It's a free culture production project pushing the envelope in several ways - entirely using free software tools and releasing under the free Creative Commons Attribution license.

The HeliOS Project, some would argue, is a local effort fueled by a handful of people who want to make a difference. Is that what you think? Silly you.

After Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, the last one began to fire many ex-Sun's workers. There are two lead developers of ``GNOME Accessibility'' and ``Orca'' (screen reader for blind people) projects among this big quantity of fired people. One of them have written an open letter to Oracle to review their decision.

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project.

"I will be giving a talk about the fully free GNU/Linux distribution movement in the Free Software Foundation Europe’s Berlin meeting on Thursday, February 11th, next week. The talk will start at 19:30 in the Newthinking Store, Tucholskystraße 48. Hopefully, we will have a chance to continue discussing the topic over a few beers right after the meeting, too..."