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More BSD News

Dru Lavigne has found a new cross-BSD news site, BSD News Network.   I would like to see it get away from a generic blog layout and hold something other than RSS feed data, since there’s already TheDailyBSD and BSDNews and BSDPlanet for that.

I may be a bit grumpy about it since sites that aggregate BSD news feeds often end up being something close to 50% composed of words originally typed by me, because of the Digest’s regularity.  I’d like to see BSD news sources with at least a hint of authorial voice, not machine-operated copying.  FreeBSD – the unknown Giant is close to that, for instance.

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Messylaneous: books, lawsuits, git, more

Dear universe, including DragonFly people: stop doing so much stuff.  It’s hard to keep up.

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BSD licensing, in a number of ways

Well, technically, the title is “Twenty questions about the GPL“, but I read it more as reasons for using the BSD license.  (via)

Also, I was going to link to this article about increased BSD(ish) license adoption, and then I wasn’t, and then I found that Dru Lavigne had managed to pull out the quote that summarized the idea perfectly.

While I’m on this theme, this Coding Horror “Digital Sharecropping” article complains that people are effectively doing free labor for companies that plan to profit from that labor.  There’s a parallel between free software and the activity he’s worried about.  Not that he’s wrong, mind you, but there’s more to the story.

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Donation time

The FreeBSD Foundation is seeking donations – not that they aren’t always open to it, but they’re asking now instead of at the end of year rush.  The Foundation does excellent work getting developers to conferences and sponsoring projects, all of which increases the amount of free code in the world.  If you’ve got some spare cash, please donate.  It doesn’t have to be a lot, as having a large pool of donors is almost as valuable as total donation size.

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More news, more articles

Dru Lavigne is going to be doing blogging/tweeting for the FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation.  This is a good thing – BSD in general is helped by more of a conversation about what’s going on.  I daresay this Digest has established that there’s definitely enough events, just with DragonFly, for daily news.

Also, Dru’s published summaries of the articles in the upcoming July ‘Collaboration’ issue of the Open Source Business Resource.

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License reading

Here’s some lazy Sunday reading about software licenses.  Before you panic and quickly click away to something more fun, these are not flamewars.

This InformIT interview with David Chisnall of Étoilé talks about various things, but has an interesting note about BSD code and Apple about halfway down.

I think this is a much better way of encouraging corporate involvement in open source than legal bludgeons like the GPL. The BSD license is easy for even a non-lawyer to read and understand, so there is no confusion when using BSD-licensed code.

I’m thinking about this because there are people who still can’t figure out the difference.

Along the same lines, I was surprised by the number of open source programs found just by license listing in the new Palm Pre.  I wish I had a spare $200.

Wandering even farther off topic, is Étoilé what Windowmaker should have evolved into?

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Roguelike roguelike hacklike

Two recent roguelike items:

Gamasutra has a 4-page article about Rogue, emphasizing its origins being intertwined with the original BSD UNIX.  Read the comments for some BSD history, from that actual people involved.  (via)

The latest @Play column about roguelikes is very long, and that will not be a surprise after you read the title: How To Win At Nethack.  I find articles like this fascinating, but then again, I also enjoyed reading through the AD&D Dungeon Master Guide for the charts.