Free Republic

OK, so I am NOT one of FR's photoshop artists! For years, all I have used has been Broderbund's PrintShop that came free with something else I was buying. For years I used it to make birthday cards, banners...We moved recently and I need to make some changes to my husband's business card. Since I got a new computer around Christmas, I tried to install Print Shop, just to find out that when I click on "install" nothing happens, absolutely nothing! There seems to be dozens of free software that can be downloaded to make business cards, I just don't...

President Bush gets a lot of grief over the economic woes that have occurred under his watch, but now people can thank him for something spiffy: Free software. It comes courtesy of the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge. In July, St. Paul software developer CodeWeavers came up with the gimmick to make its products available free for a day if any one of five positive (but seemingly unlikely at the time) things happened during Bush's last six months in office: gas drops to $2.79 a gallon, milk drops to $3.50 a gallon, U.S. jobs exceed 138 million, the Twin...

I was looking for the latest releases for Ubuntu, and I found they have re-done their website, forums, and available software pages, too. As well, the available software page now boasts no less than 13 application software providers...from Alacos and IBM, to ruffdogs and Real...all guaranteed to "just work". BTW, Opera for Linux is now part of the standard Ubuntu distro package, and available for download.

A protester calling for free computer software and open-source programming crashed a speech by Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates at one of China's top universities yesterday. Gates, who is very popular on Chinese campuses, had just finished a speech at Peking University and was handing out prizes to students when a Chinese man walked on stage and unveiled a banner with "free software, open source" written on it. Gates and most of the group appeared shocked at the intrusion, which ended when the man ran off the stage and was tackled by security officials. No one was hurt. Gates is...

Free Software? Perhaps you've heard of the Open-Source software movement, but thought maybe they were cheap, college-student-written, "Brand X" knock-offs. Maybe you presumed the only people who could use such programs wore pocket protectors and broken bifocals. Or maybe you had recent experience and found the installation too confusing, with "targzs," incomprehensible "readme files," etc. The open-source movement has come of age, armed with self-extracting files, crossplaform capabilities, and extensive documentation. (That means you simply download the program, and it installs itself; it works on any operating system including, yes, Windows --not just UNIX -- and it teaches you how...

Visual Studio 2005 Express Announcements! Dear Visual Studio Express community, We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently! Prior to this pricing announcement, Visual Studio Express Editions were promotionally discounted to be free for one year, starting on November 7th, 2005. With this announcement, the promotional discount for Visual Studio Express is now permanent and Express will continue to be free. http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

Linus Torvalds, father of the Linux kernel, has fleshed out his unhappiness with GPLv3 in three recent posts on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Torvalds previously stated that the kernel will remain under the licensing terms of GPLv2. Yesterday, Tovalds offered his opinion as to where the battle over DRM should take place: I would suggest that anybody who wants to fight DRM practices seriously look at the equivalent angle. If you create interesting content, you can forbid that _content_ to ever be encrypted or limited. In other words, I personally think that the anti-DRM clause is much...

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Discussion Draft 1 of Version 3, 16 Jan 2006 THIS IS A DRAFT, NOT A PUBLISHED VERSION OF THE GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. Preamble The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make...

.B.M. plans to announce today that it is making 500 of its software patents freely available to anyone working on open-source projects, like the popular Linux operating system, on which programmers collaborate and share code.The new model for I.B.M., analysts say, represents a shift away from the traditional corporate approach to protecting ownership of ideas through patents, copyrights, trademark and trade-secret laws. The conventional practice is to amass as many patents as possible and then charge anyone who wants access to them. I.B.M. has long been the champion of that formula. The company, analysts estimate, collected $1 billion or more...

Mozilla 1.7 Web-browser built for 2004, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editing made simple -- all your Internet needs in one application. Navigator Tabbed browsing gives you a better way to surf the net. You no longer have to open one page at a time. With tabbed browsing, open several pages at once with one click. And now your homepage can be multiple tabbed pages.Popup blockerlets you surf the web without intrusion. Advanced popup blocker notifies you when popups are blocked. You can also block pop-ups on a site per site basis.Image Manager lets you...

Dear Aiden, I think you remember the conversation we had recently at this software conference in Dublin. You came up to me and told me how the stuff I was talking about was mostly useless, because it is closed-source, people need to pay for it and that companies charging for software are evil anyways - especially Microsoft. Unfortunately I don't have your email, but I am sure this will reach you. First, I would like to thank you for the interesting conversation that developed and to make sure that none of what was said just fades away, I'll tell you...

An Interview With Andy Hertzfeld (9/20/2000) Andy Hertzfeld was a member of the original Apple Macintosh team back in 1981, at which time he designed and implemented much of the original Macintosh system software. In that light, it's not surprising that he's still on the cusp of GUI development today as cofounder of Eazel. Eazel's first project, Nautilus, is one of the first open source development projects to aim for commercial success; its innovative file and system management model is poised to open up the world of Linux to a much wider audience. At this year's LinuxWorld Conference in San...

The view from the desktopby Dennis E. Powell It's a year later, and the tears come as readily now as they did then.I was sitting here, at this very desk, in this very chair (itself a survivor of the old New York State Supreme Court Building in lower Manhattan), working on the column that would run the next day on Linux Planet. The phone rang. It was my wife, who was phoning from a meeting at work. There was something on the news about a plane having hit the World Trade Center. The television had been on in the background,...

On the Internet, software wants to be free. But as the Free Software Foundation and many others point out, the word "free" here is not about price; it is about liberty. "Free" is used as in the phrase "free speech" (a right we covet), rather than the phrase "free beer" (always too good to be true) or "free kitten" (which sounds good, but has a high overhead). Confusion arises because free software mostly has a zero price tag as a natural consequence of the original license, the GPL, that enforces the liberty of developers to use code created by their...

Microsoft is worried about Peruvian Congressman Edgar Villanueva's proposal for his nation's government agencies to standardize on Free Software for their own internal use. But Villanueva makes an important point: everybody has to deal with the government. If a government uses proprietary software, its citizens will probably have to use the same software to communicate with it. A government web site that only supports Internet Explorer would lock citizens into that Microsoft product. In contrast, a government site using open standards and avoiding patented software would allow citizens to choose between many different kinds of software to access the site....