Reading

I encourage all of you to either listen to or read the transcript of Terry Gross' Fresh Air interview with Joseph Turow about his discussion of his book “The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, And Define Your Power”.

Now, most of you who read my blog know the difference between proprietary and Free Software, and the difference between a network service and software that runs on your own device. I want all of you have a good understanding of that to do a simple thought experiment:

How many of the horrible things that Turow talks about can happen if there is no proprietary software on your IoT or mobile devices?

There are a lot of problems in our society, and particularly in the USA, right now, and plenty of charities who need our support. The reason I continue to focus my work on software freedom is simply because there are so few focused on the moral and ethical issues of computing. Open Source has reached its pinnacle as an industry fad, and with it, a watered-down message: “having some of the source code for some of your systems some of the time is so great, why would you need anything more?”. Universal software freedom is however further from reality than it was even a few years ago. At least a few of us, in my view, must focus on that cause.

Shane would like to say thank you and God bless you to all the people who are offering kind words... Read more »

The post THERESE MACGOWAN RIP appeared first on Shane MacGowan.

[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I had the privilege of attending Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELC EU) and the OpenWrt Summit in Berlin, Germany earlier this month. I gave a talk (for which the video is available below) at the OpenWrt Summit. I also had the opportunity to host the first of many conference sessions seeking feedback and input from the Linux developer community about Conservancy's GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers.

ELC EU has no “BoF Board” where you can post informal sessions. So, we scheduled the session by word of mouth over a lunch hour. We nevertheless got an good turnout (given that our session's main competition was eating food :) of about 15 people.

[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]

I’ve been a registered nurse for a mere six months now and am very aware of my ignorance. University did not teach me about the paperwork and associated procedures to arrange things like outpatient xrays. However I know I’ll figure that stuff out with experience. In the meantime …

There are plenty of mailing list threads to read, and I don't actually recommend the one that I'm talking about. I think it went on too long, was far too “ad hominem” rather than real policy. Somewhere beneath the surface there was a policy discussion being shouted down; if you look close, you can find find it underneath.

As he always does, Jon Corbet did an excellent job finding the real policy details in the “GPL defence” ksummit-discuss thread, and telling us all about it. I am very hard on tech journalism, but when it comes to reporting on Linux specifically, Jon and his colleagues at lwn.net have been, for nearly two decades, always been real, detailed, and balanced (and not in the Fox News way) tech journalism.

According to the Wayback Machine tregeagle.com has been running my blog for over 16 years now. I’m pretty sure I had it running in some sort of decrepid state a bit before that even. So, maybe not posting anything for almost a year and a half is OK …

Last Friday, I gave the first keynote at GUADEC 2016. I was delighted for the invitation from the GNOME Foundation to deliver this talk, which I entitled Confessions of a command line geek: why I don’t use GNOME but everyone else should.

The Chaos Computer Club assisted the GUADEC organizers in recording the talks, so you can see here a great recording of my talk here (and also, the slides). Whether the talk itself is great — that's for you to watch and judge, of course.

The time has come that I must speak out against the inappropriate rhetoric used by those who (ostensibly) advocate for FLOSS usage in automotive applications.

[ This blog was crossposted on Software Freedom Conservancy's website. ]

Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don't mean that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend at FOSDEM 2016, where he and I co-organize the Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues, Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).

Shane MacGowan has teamed up with Les Cronins (brothers Johnny and Michael Cronin) and comedian Joe Rooney (Father Damo from... Read more »

The post SHANE MACGOWAN, CRONIN BROTHERS AND JOE ROONEY CREATE EURO 2016 ANTHEM FOR IRELAND appeared first on Shane MacGowan.

I've posted in the past about the Oracle vs. Google case. I'm for the moment sticking to my habit of only commenting when there is a clear court decision. Having been through litigation as the 30(b)(6) witness for Conservancy, I'm used to court testimony and why it often doesn't really matter in the long run. So much gets said by both parties in a court case that it's somewhat pointless to begin analyzing each individual move, unless it's for entertainment purposes only. (It's certainly as entertaining as most TV dramas, really, but I hope folks who are watching step-by-step admit to themselves that they're just engaged in entertainment, not actual work. :)

I'm finally configuring Kodi properly to watch over-the-air channels using this this USB ATSC / DVB-T tuner card from Thinkpenguin. I hate taking time away, even on the weekends, from the urgent Conservancy matters but I've been doing by-hand recordings using VLC for my wife when she's at work, and I just need to present a good solution to my home to showcase software freedom here.

So, I installed Debian testing to get a newr Kodi, I did discover this bug after it had already been closed but had to pull util-linux out of unstable for the moment since it hadn't moved to testing.