Link

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

HOWTO Pay for Free Software

This document is a guide to how to pay for your Free Software. A lot of people have put in a lot of time to make your high quality Free Software. They chose to licence it so that you can modify and redistribute it. They often, although not always, gave you the program without requiring that you pay any money for it.

Despite being cheap to obtain the development, testing, and maintenance of the Free Software you use is not negligible in cost, far from it.

There are already LUG in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Cambridge, England. Why not Cambridge, Ontario? Well, now there is a LUG in Cambridge, Ontario. Or there will be, shortly.

CambridgeLUG Will hold pre-meetings, in December 2006 and January 2007 before the official grand Opening in February 2007.

The December, Organizational Meeting invites the participation and input of those interested in helping to form and mold Cambridge LUG.

The January 2007 Founders Meeting will embrace and extend the work of the first meeting. We'll discuss upcoming meeting schedules, topics for presentations and other matters of the LUG. We'll have our first presentation too.

The Public Patent Foundation is a US-based non-profit. They fight bad patents and bad patent policy. They argue that software patents are particularly bad and they use the legal system to have bad patents overturned, surrendered or rejected.

The Public Patent Foundation (“PUBPAT”) is a not-for-profit legal services organization that represents the public's interests against the harms caused by the patent system, particularly the harms caused by wrongly issued patents and unsound patent policy. PUBPAT provides the general public and specific persons or entities otherwise deprived of access to the system governing patents with representation, education and advocacy.-- from PubPat web site.

The KWLUG (that's us!) was featured in the June 2006 issue (LXF80) of Linux Format (UK) as their Overseas LUG of the Month. See p.102-3 when you run right out and buy a copy.

[url]http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/[/url]

Apparently this does not require Cygwin, but provides an X-server for FREE.

[url]http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/console[/url]

This is offtopic, but it is a cmd.exe replacement that supports a tabbed interface (look at version 2.0). Good if you miss "screen" when using Win32, I suppose. (Screen itself is available for Cygwin as an unofficial build, but I have not tried it.)

What I learned from this week's Debian Weekly News: If you don't enjoy beef, enterprising carnivores can compile their programs with chicken.

Oh. And for those wacky vegetarians, there's Open-COBOL. Sigh.

(Oh. And Drupal has security flaws and needs an upgrade.)

UPDATE: Ace of Penguins has been orphaned! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

This is another plugin for Drupal. It allows wikis that look and feel like wikis, if we want to go in that direction. See:

http://www.ubuntulite.org/dokuwiki/doku.php

for an example.

Ooh. I did not notice that somebody posted a new list of categories.

I wanted to throw out two more links I came across tonight:

http://drupalsites.net - pointers to a lot of example sites. Some of them even look good.

http://www.opensourcecms.com - try out any of the hundreds of CMS sites online. I wish I had known about this before.