Sign In/My Account | View Cart  

advertisement

AddThis Social Bookmark Button

Free Software Magazine

   Print.Print
Email.Email weblog link
Discuss.Discuss
Blog this.Blog this

Andy Oram
Jan. 20, 2005 12:20 PM
Permalink

Atom feed for this author. RSS 1.0 feed for this author. RSS 2.0 feed for this author.

Tony Mobily describes his Free Software Magazine as being half about freedom and half about technology. Altogether, it is meant to help everyone from the curious individual to the head of a government or business department understand what they're getting into and how to make use of free and open source software. Mobily is trying to establish his new magazine as the authoritative source for all kinds of information on free software.

I understand that there's a need here, which others have tried to fill and not quite succeeded. One can get news about free software--and as many opinions as you can stomach--hourly from a number of online sites, but few go into depth and none could be called authoritative. A few sites such as First Monday offer intriguing articles of a more formal and academic nature. And several excellent magazines cover Linux, but they're directed at particular subsets of Linux users and don't have the broad mandate of Free Software Magazine. Is there a niche for Mobily's venture?

The first issue provides some nice nuggets. My favorite article is Malcolm D. Spence's checklist for justifying free software: Free software is not just about "no license fees"!.

Chris J. Karr lays out the various options for programming on Mac OS X.

Mobily's own article Creating Free Software Magazine helps explain the magazine's rather generic-looking layout--the formatting is all done through XSLT and requires no manual intervention.

Free Software Magazine releases its articles under licenses that permit reuse: Creative Commons licenses, the GNU Free Documentation License, or "Verbatim Copying Only." It also puts its articles online--particularly valuable for getting its message out to readers in developing countries. But Mobily is looking forward to paid subscribers for their print version so that the magazine can continue--and pay its writers.

Andy Oram is an editor for O'Reilly Media, specializing in Linux and free software books, and a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. His web site is www.praxagora.com/andyo.

Return to weblogs.oreilly.com.



Weblog authors are solely responsible for the content and accuracy of their weblogs, including opinions they express, and O'Reilly Media, Inc., disclaims any and all liabililty for that content, its accuracy, and opinions it may contain.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.



-->