Author Archives: Peter Loshin

Cool new open source-based businesses

Some new and interesting businesses built around open source software popped up on my radar screen today: Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion (version control system software) system, "making it easy for anyone to setup, browse, track, and manage Subversion repositories." … Continue reading

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Yet another example of why DRM is Bad

DRM, or digital rights management, is the software that content vendors use to punish their loyal customers and (attempt to) control piracy. It adds to the cost of the products "protected" by it, it makes those products less useful to … Continue reading

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Microsoft “Open” Formats vs the World

You can’t underestimate the importance of having open standards: imagine the chaos if, 100 years ago, telephone companies dug in their heels over maintaining their own protocols for telecommunications signals, electric companies mandated that their customers could only use electricity … Continue reading

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Switching to Linux: Peugeot

Here’s a good one: Automaker Peugeot Converts 20,000 Desktops To Linux. It’s not actually news, since Peugeot prominently announced the move over the past year, but it’s nice to see it actually is happening. Peugeot has 72,000 users, so it’s … Continue reading

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Open Source Software Lists

For years, people who wrote about open source software would write articles listing all the coolest and most popular open source software projects–and all the software listed was the same. Mozilla (now Firefox), Emacs, OpenOffice, Linux, Apache, Gnumeric, GIMP, etc. … Continue reading

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Switching to Linux: Mike Kavis

Think you couldn’t switch to Linux because you work in a Microsoft world? Think again: it happens all the time. Mike Kavis has been blogging about his open source dabbling, starting with Eating my own dogfood and following up with … Continue reading

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Grep-Envy

Grep is one of those programs that’s been around forever as a part of *NIX. Its function is straightforward. Grep: searches one or more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern. By default, grep prints the … Continue reading

Posted in Open source applications | Leave a comment

Open Standards: Another Viewpoint

If you have any questions about whether open standards are better than proprietary standards, just check the past 25 years of computer networking: if you stuck with proprietary networking protocols, you were toast. Novell is no longer in the networking … Continue reading

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Open Source Drives Web 2.0

I’m totally not surprised that, according to this article, Web 2.0 is built on Open Source, the biggest/most visible Web 2.0 companies are built and hosted on open source software platforms. Think about it: if you’ve got some crazy idea … Continue reading

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European politicians seem pretty smart…

Last year, it was French parliament switching to Linux. This year, the French picked Ubuntu as their Linux distro. And just this week, we discovered that the Italian parliament will migrate to Linux as well. Which distribution? According to the … Continue reading

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