Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond.
Free software, libre software, or libreware is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.
The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, The Four Essential Freedoms of Free Software, is termed free software.
Slashdot is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.
Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary film that traces the twenty-year history of GNU, Linux, open source, and the free software movement.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
Groklaw is a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003, by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.
Pamela Jones, commonly known as PJ, is the creator and was editor of Groklaw, a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open-source software community. Jones is an open source advocate who previously trained and worked as a paralegal.
Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK) is a cross-platform widget library for graphical user interfaces (GUIs), developed by Bill Spitzak and others. Made to accommodate 3D graphics programming, it has an interface to OpenGL, but it is also suitable for general GUI programming.
Jon "maddog" Hall is the board chair for the Linux Professional Institute.
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software, where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is publicly available so that people are encouraged to improve the design of the software. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright or licensing and the source code is hidden from the users.
Linux Users' Group of Davis is a users' group of students and faculty from the University of California, Davis, Information technology professionals from the Sacramento region, and hobbyists interested in Linux and free and open-source software. It holds regular meetings in Davis, California, and holds installfests on a regular basis. Its members participate with each other online in numerous mailing lists and via Internet Relay Chat.
LinuxWorld Conference and Expo was a conference and trade show that focused on open source and Linux solutions in the information technology sector. It ran from 1998 to 2009, in venues around the world.
Atul Chitnis was an Indo-German consulting technologist. He was one of the organizers of FOSS.IN, which was one of Asia's free and open source software (FOSS) conferences.
Harald Welte, also known as LaForge, is a German programmer.
Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
FreedomHEC was an "unconference" for computer hardware engineers and device driver developers that ran from 2006 to 2012. It focused on making computer hardware interoperate with free software and open source operating systems, especially Linux.
A Linux User Group or Linux Users' Group (LUG) or GNU/Linux User Group (GLUG) is a private, generally non-profit or not-for-profit organization that provides support and/or education for Linux users, particularly for inexperienced users. The term commonly refers to local groups that meet in person but is also used to refer to online support groups that may have members spread over a very wide area and that do not organize, or are not dependent on, physical meetings. Many LUGs encompass FreeBSD and other free-software / open source Unix-based operating systems.
Criticism of desktop Linux is a history of comment on the perceived shortcomings of the Linux operating system when installed on desktop computers. These criticisms have been aimed at the plethora of issues and lack of consistency between Linux distributions, their usefulness and ease of use as desktop systems for general end users, driver support and issues with multi-media playback and audio development.
Linspire is a commercial operating system based on Debian and Ubuntu and currently owned by PC/OpenSystems LLC. It had been owned by Linspire. Inc. from 2001 to 2008, and then by Xandros from 2008 to 2017.
