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Open for Business (OFB) was an online news blog with a technology focus. It featured articles on topics including computers, technology, politics, current events, theology and philosophy. The site also contained a fiction section with short stories and poetry.
OFB was founded on October 5, 2001 as the "open-source migration guide". It was started by Timothy R. Butler after a mailing list discussion, and featured articles and white papers discussing migration to Linux. Originally, OFB featured very little original content, instead mimicking Slashdot and similar sites that included little more than a few small comments on the articles posted. Steven Hatfield helped add postings to the site.
The site then started to add free and open source software news. About a month after the site was founded, the first original editorial content appeared and OFB continued to publish approximately one original work per month after that. In late April 2002, Butler announced a relaunch of the site that included a reduction in links to other sites and a further increase in original content. The relaunch also brought forth the first version of a blue sphere logo and the new tagline "the Independent Journal of Open Source Migration".
On July 4, 2002, Open for Business, LinuxandMain.com, KernelTrap and Device Forge's LinuxDevices and DesktopLinux.com formed LinuxDailyNews (LDN), an aggregation site that was intended to help increase the publicity of independent open source news sites. LDN featured a center column that showed story highlights and two side columns that displayed all stories from the member sites in blocks. The site was launched as part of DesktopLinux.com's "wIndependence Day" promotion and had an early spike in popularity following a mention on Slashdot. In subsequent months, the site's traffic decreased. It was taken down in 2004 after a hacker managed to deface the site; although plans existed to restore the site, they were never followed through with and Device Forge assumed the rights to LDN's domain name.
In February 2003, the site finalized its transition to an original content provider, as opposed to a site of links, by moving non-original content to a separate "News Watch" section. New contributing editor Ed Hurst began a series on his switch to FreeBSD in September 2003, beginning a long running series of FreeBSD articles [1] that Hurst continued to add until October 2006. Butler also began OFB's coverage of Mac OS X computers. OFB's second associate editor Eduardo Sánchez returned in mid-2004 as a contributing editor. Hurst was promoted to associate editor simultaneously.
The site continued in a similar fashion, with its mix of coverage on Linux, BSD and Mac OS X through early 2006. During this period it changed its motto to "the Independent Journal of Open Standards and Open Source". Due to other obligations, the site's editors ceased writing content for the site in early 2006, though it remained open during this period.
On its fifth anniversary, Butler announced the relaunch of the site on October 5, 2006. The new OFB adopted the site's current general interest focus, de-emphasizing its past emphasis on Open Source and technology. The site changed its purple and blue, PHP-Nuke-based design that had been used with only minor modifications since the site's original launch, to a simpler, content-oriented design using a custom backend. The old site was archived as OFB Classic to preserve access to past articles.
The last article was posted on January 25, 2013. [2]
Regular contributors included:
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. It helped to influence early implementations of successor projects such as KDE and GNOME desktop environment, which largely replaced CDE following the turn of the century.
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 attached to it where users can add online comments. The website was founded in 1997 by Hope College students Rob Malda, also known as "CmdrTaco", and classmate Jeff Bates, also known as "Hemos". In 2012, they sold it to DHI Group, Inc.. In January 2016, BIZX acquired both slashdot.org and SourceForge. In December 2019, BIZX rebranded to Slashdot Media.
XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and was available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the XFree86 License version 1.1. It was developed by the XFree86 Project, Inc. The lead developer was David Dawes. The last released version was 4.8.0, released December 2008. The last XFree86 CVS commit was made on May 18, 2009; the project was confirmed dormant in December 2011.
Rob Malda, also known as CmdrTaco, is an American Internet content author, and former editor-in-chief of the website Slashdot.
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Linux Journal (LJ) is an American monthly technology magazine originally published by Specialized System Consultants, Inc. (SSC) in Seattle, Washington since 1994. In December 2006 the publisher changed to Belltown Media, Inc. in Houston, Texas. Since 2017, the publisher was Linux Journal, LLC. located in Denver, Colorado. The magazine focused specifically on Linux, allowing the content to be a highly specialized source of information for open source enthusiasts. The magazine was published from March 1994 to August 2019, over 25 years, before being bought by Slashdot Media in 2020.
SkyOS is a discontinued prototype commercial, proprietary, graphical desktop operating system written for the x86 computer architecture. As of January 30, 2009 development was halted with no plans to resume its development. In August 2013, developer Robert Szeleney announced the release of a public beta on the SkyOS website. This allows public users to download a Live CD of the SkyOS operating system, for testing and to optionally install the system.
LinuxTag is a free software exposition with an emphasis on Linux, held annually in Germany. LinuxTag claims to be Europe's largest exhibition for "open source software" and aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the Linux and free software market, and to promote contacts between users and developers. LinuxTag is one of the world's most important events of this kind.
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LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to every story. Most news published daily are short summaries of articles published elsewhere, and are free to all viewers. Original articles are usually published weekly on Thursdays and are available only to subscribers for two weeks, after which they become free as well. LWN.net is part of Eklektix, Inc.
The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a written debate between Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds, regarding the Linux kernel and kernel architecture in general. Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix, began the debate in 1992 on the Usenet discussion group comp.os.minix, arguing that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels and therefore Linux was, even in 1992, obsolete. The debate has sometimes been considered a flame war.
KDE Plasma 4 was the fourth generation of the KDE workspace environments. It consisted of three workspaces, each targeting a certain platform: Plasma Desktop for traditional desktop PCs and notebooks, Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and Plasma Active for tablet PCs and similar devices.
Linux is an open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution.
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor. It was merged into the mainline Linux kernel in version 2.6.20, which was released on February 5, 2007. KVM requires a processor with hardware virtualization extensions, such as Intel VT or AMD-V. KVM has also been ported to other operating systems such as FreeBSD and illumos in the form of loadable kernel modules.
Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) is a free and open-source benchmark software for Linux and other operating systems which is developed by Michael Larabel and Matthew Tippett. The Phoronix Test Suite has been endorsed by sites such as Linux.com, LinuxPlanet, and Softpedia.
OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. According to the website, the OpenBSD project emphasizes "portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography."
iXsystems, Inc. is a privately owned American computer technology company based in San Jose, California that develops, sells and supports computing and storage products and services. Its principal products are customized open source FreeBSD distributions, including the discontinued desktop operating system TrueOS, the FreeBSD based file servers and network attached storage systems TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Enterprise, and the Linux based TrueNAS SCALE. It also markets hardware platforms for these products, and develops enterprise-scale storage architectures and converged infrastructures. As part of its activities, the company has strong ties to the FreeBSD community, has repeatedly donated hardware and support to fledgling projects within the BSD community, and sponsors and develops development within FreeBSD, as well as being a sponsor and attendee of open-source community events.
