Tsikbal: from my perspective

To hear that the Ada Initiative is closing down, is not something an open source advocate wants to hear. Specially when it's an initiative that brings women to the open source community, by empowering them and giving them the skills needed to be a part of the community. Though not all is lost, since their resources are going to be left behind so they can keep benefiting others, the ideal would be that the Ada Initiative to be able to keep on their work. In many ways, there is a need for women to have place like Ada Initiative as support. Though I'd love to see these kind of initiatives moving away from helping women against harassment and those kind of issues, to being being able focus on other kind of support to women who want to move and work on open source software. When we lose an initiative like this, not only women lose. We all lose, since it could mean that many talented women could choose to move away from working on open source software, and deprive the c...

In this article about Google Chrome , there are two main things that I take from it. To begin with, that no software is perfect. As such, all software will have some issues that will affect users in some ways. There is no such thing as a perfect software, there are always issues from security flaws to take care of to quirks that make it do unexpected things from time to time. Some of this bugs won't be a problem to most people, while they can be a deal breaker for other. Good software, will keep this to a minimum. Yet, there will be some for whom it just won't work. Trying to to frame those users as being the guilty ones is not fair, since it's not their fault that the software doesn't work for them. On the other hand, the developers of the software can't be expected to make their product one that works perfectly for everyone who uses it. I'm aware that browsers are a special kind of software that will cover the needs of a broader set of user. B...

As Richard Stallman in this article says, that the NSA uses GNU/Linux or any other FLOSS isn't bad at all. In a way it speaks well on how good the software is, since it can be used in such critical missions. The problem with the NSA lies somewhere else, and not directly with the technology it uses to do its work. To begin with, the NSA shouldn't be spying on everyone in the name of safety. That's a violation of basic human rights, since we all should have a reasonable level of confidence that we aren't being spied by any government at any given point of time without a good cause. Law enforcement agencies shouldn't be able to get any data on anyone without having to give a good reason why an individual should be a target of their investigations. It's better for all, that the bar is high in order to get a warrant to get our data. Also, if law enforcement agencies used FLOSS we the people would have a good reason to be sure that the tools they use ...

If we want a truly open and transparent government, all it's to relay on open standards and open source software. The reliance on proprietary software, and closed standards, would mean that the government would be at the mercy of a particular vendor or whoever hold the rights to the patents to the the standard. This is unacceptable, since the government shouldn't have to be subject to such limitations. What's more, every we all have the right to study the software that the government uses to see how it works and to make sure that it does what the government says it does. After all, we all have to interact with it, and need to be certain that it does what it made for in the best way possible. On the open standards, one of the main reasons to use them is the fact that all should be able to access the government's platforms without any limitation artificially imposed by a third party. By using open standards, government could make sure that all the people have...

That Apple is to open source it's Swift programming language , and that it will have support on Linux, is some good and welcome news. Swift is becoming popular fast, and it seems there are lot of good reasons for it to gain popularity. And that it's backed by a company like Apple, should give people the reassurance that it won't lack support in the long term. Even though I admit some suspicions on why Apple moved to open source Swift, I do welcome the idea to have such a tool for open source developers to use to work with. Specially because it could be a good place for beginners to learn to code, making it less intimidating to learn a skill that is becoming ever more relevant in the modern world. One of the things that Apple does well, is good software. While it's true that it has an iron grip on it, one has to admit that the quality of it is high. Many of the criticisms out there about Apple's software have more to do with the way it manages it, and t...

If you need that the open source model not only works on software, but that it can be adapted to other areas go ahead and read this article at Arstechnica . At the core of the open source model is not sharing for the sake of sharing, but collaboration among people that have a common problem that need to be solved. By allowing collaboration with other people, with whom one normally wouldn't have the chance to do so. Since the network of people working on a common platform on the same problem, the time needed to solve problems and ending with a mature design, is reduced by a wide margin. By adopting an open source model, the benefits out weight the cons that can be encountered by using it. Most importantly, you can concentrate more on differentiating your product rather than on solving the same design problems others are working on or have been already solved. With more time to work on the details that you need to work on to give your target market asks of your product, ...

After having some trouble with Ubuntu not turning off, or suspending, properly on a Gateway NEseries laptop I decided to move on to another Linux distro. The fist one I decide to give a try, was Kubuntu. I've heard great things of the distro itself, and the KDE Plasma Desktop user interface. Though I liked the distro, and KDE, I still had the same troubles I did and KDE didn't do much for me as a user. In someways, I didn't feel as comfortable with KDE as I did with Unity and just couldn't get up to speed or get KDE to my linking. So, I decided to move back to an old known distro. I jumped back to Linux Mint with Cinnamon as the user interface. I'm using 17.1 Rebeca, and I remembered why Linux Mint is, along with Ubuntu, my top pick of Linux distros. All in all, I found that Cinnamon 2.4.8 to be a lot more mature and stable. As such, I haven't had any of the bugs I used to encounter jumping at me. The best thing, is that the system as a whole so...