Welcome to Free Software Daily (FSD)! This site is designed to provide members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community with news and articles that are of interest to them.
It works by allowing members of the community to submit news and articles relating to FOSS. This same community can then decide what stories should be promoted based on what they consider to be the most important or interesting to the community by voting stories up and down. Stories that receive enough votes are promoted to our homepage.
So community members can:
- read the news (either on the site or through one of our many RSS feeds),
- submit the stories they think will be important or interesting to the community,
- vote for the stories they deem important or interesting to the community,
- vote down the stories they think are unimportant or irrelevant to the community,
- have their say on the stories that have been submitted.
The software we use
FSD is based on Drupal and our specially designed modules for Drupal: Simple Karma and Drigg. All of our software is released under the GPL. Furthermore, all of our staff run GNU/Linux distributions and free software and the site is hosted on a server running a LAMP stack.
Our history
FSD was originally launched back in 2005 by the staff of Free Software Magazine (FSM). Back then, it was based on the Slash CMS, which proved too complicated and resource hungry for the fledgling project. The staff became over-worked as a consequence and to avoid FSM suffering the project was put on hiatus.
In early 2007, it appeared that the Pligg CMS would be a good replacement for Slash and Free Software Daily was relaunched. This time it was far more successful.
By the middle of 2007, it had become apparent that the Pligg CMS was too limited and inflexible to be of continuing use. Furthermore, with possible upcoming Pligg rewrites and potential licensing issues, Pligg's future appeared unstable. Free Software Daily's staff decided it was time to build their own.
Tony Mobily of FSM had already built the Simple Karma module for use on FSM. He realised with a few minor changes and the addition of a new module he could replicate Pligg's functionality and major features. After 1000 hours programming, 13,000 lines of code, and a lot of testing and debugging... Drigg was born. And, on 3rd of December 2007, version 2 of Free Software Daily was launched as the first site running on the Drupal + Drigg combination.
Our future
We will continue to develop our site and aid in the development of the modules and software we use to further improve our site. We will continue to release any code we produce to the free software community. And we will continue to aid the free software community in its promotion of free software.
