Ciarán’s free software notes

For anyone interested in Richard Stallman’s talk about copyright (in general, not just for software), here’s a recording from yesterday: Here’s the ogg audio And here’s the page introducing the link

I have three efficiency tips. One is to tell people what your goals are, another is to maintian a todo list, and the third is to remember to eat breakfast. Obviously, I still have a lot of room for improvement, so I’m going to read Getting Things Done and see what other good tips I Read more »

From Friday June 29th to Sunday July 1st, FSFE held its annual meeting of the General Assembly in Brussels. Starting at 10am each morning, we were in the meeting room until 8pm, 10:30pm, and 5pm. Being an employee, I was there as a guest. In preparation for the meeting, a two year executive summary of Read more »

The "Linux libc" fork of the GNU C Library is now a mostly forgotten event. The fork lived from 1994 to 1997/8 – just before my time – but I’ve found interesting accounts of it by others. The main sources of information are: Elliot Lee’s essay: A Technical Comparison of glibc 2.x With Legacy System Read more »

Here is a list of links about free software being used in public administration. If anyone has more links, or better links, please send them to me at ciaran atsign fsfe.org. I won’t be able to do a good job of maintaining this list, but I hope it will give someone else a good starting Read more »

Everyone wishes that free software licences were shorter. The good news from the GPLv3 process is that by changing the LGPL from being a whole licence to being an additional permission that can accompany the GPL, the LGPL has shrunk drastically and the proposed GPL and LGPL texts, combined, are shorter than the current GPL Read more »

There’s been plenty of good news in the last few weeks. Not enough to write full blog entries on, but here’s a list, newest first: 2007-03-05: Free software is nothing to fear (about the term) 2007-03-02: The Fedora GNU+Linux distro looks to be moving closer to being fully free software – following the lead of Read more »

I heard recently that another friend is out of action due to hand pains. This reminded me to turn the typing break feature back on on my computer. It should be called "typing and mouse break" – both are common causes of overuse injuries. Some notes: Make sure you have something to do during your Read more »

Here are 10 free software projects that remind me that giving everyone the freedom to tinker produces great projects. Rockbox A group of developers wrote some GPL’d firmware for Archos digital music players, and then they started porting it to similar devices. So you can customise the display, install the games they wrote, add the Read more »

11 days since my last blog entry – I’ve just been busy. I got back home to Brussels on the 27th of April after being at the 2nd GPLv3 conference in Brazil. I spent one day in Brussels and left again on the 28th for Ireland to co-organise an evening lecture by Federico Heinz, with Read more »