FOSS Pop Culture

What's Hot Now?

• Oracle has been on a purchasing spree of FOSS companies. SleepyCat software, the creators of the popular BDB embedded database, has been purchased for an undisclosed sum. There are strong rumours that Zend (primary company behind the popular PHP platform) and JBoss (of the widely used JBoss middleware software) are next in the acquisition spree.
• First Draft of Version 3 of the GPL, as an update to GPL version 2, has received wide spread attention due to its inclusion of anti-DRM and anti-patent clauses. Linus Torlands has explicitly stated that he will not be using GPLv3 for the Linux kernel. Other notable kernel developers disagree.
• Ubuntu is a Linux distribution with user-centric focus and hence, vast appeal among those new to *nix systems.

Knowing The Global FOSS Community

The Developers

• Miguel De Icaza's contributions are legendary - notables include starting the GNOME project, the popular gnumeric spreadsheet, starting Mono (a truly portable FOSS .NET platform), helping in the port of the Linux kernel to SPARC machines and many more
• Rasmus Lerdorf was the initial developer of the PHP platform and is still a driving member of the PHP core team.
• Linus Torvalds was the initial developer of the Linux kernel and remains the benevolant dictator of the development team.
• Guido van Rossum is the author of the Python programming language.
• Marshall Kirk McKusick has done extensive work on the BSD kernel.
• Andrew Tridgell (also commonly referred to as God) was the original author of the extremely popular Samba project and the widely used rsync algorithm. For his work analyzing ways for free software to interact with widespread proprietary systems to allow people to more easily move away from those systems, he was awarded the 2005 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software.
• Theo De Radd has done extensive work on the BSD's and is the co-founder of NetBSD and founder of OpenBSD.

The Freedom Fighters

• (from wikipedia) - Richard Matthew Stallman (RMS) is the founder of the free software movement, the GNU project, and the Free Software Foundation. An acclaimed programmer, his major accomplishments include Emacs (and the later GNU Emacs), the GNU C Compiler, and the GNU Debugger. He is also the author of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or GPL), the most widely-used free software license, which pioneered the concept of the copyleft.
• Lawrence Lessig is a Stanford professor and lawyer who represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the case Eldred v. Ashcroft. His fight to preserve the public domain and against the ever lengthening copyright terms saw the increased support from a large set of content producers and the subsequent formation of the Creative Commons to facilitate the sharing of digital works.

The Business Folk

• Michael Tiemann
• Mark Shuttleworth is an African entrepreneur who founded and consequently sold Thawte to Verisign. He founded the Ubuntu Linux distribution in 2004 which since has become one of the most popular Linux distributions for desktop use. He also HBD Venture Capital, an investment company based in South Africa, along with The Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to social innovation in Africa with a particular focus on education.

Policy, Law and Philosophy

Social Contracts, Philosophy and Anthropology

• Debian Social Contract
• The GNU Manifesto
• Lessig's inspiring OSCON2002 speech on the importance for fighting for Free Culture. Listen to this every 6 months to keep your mojo going :-)
• John Perry's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
• Cathedral and the Bazaar

Licensing

• GPL FAQ
• The Open Source Definition
• Understand Open Source and Free Software Licensing
• Open Source Software Licenses Explained - Redhat video on software licenses
  

Open Standards

• Is ODF An Open Standard? -- a comprehensive discussion on whether the OpenDocument Format (ODF) used in OpenOffice constitutes an open standard.
• Bruce Peren's Open Standards Definition

Technology

New to FOSS?

• Asking questions, the smart way. FOSS is a friendly community but don't abuse the friendliness. There's an etiquette to asking questions, the gist being that do your homework, be precise and always be polite.

Studying for the LPI

• Savannah GNU
• Excellent Excellent IBM developer work resources with tutorials and exams.
• LinuxIT Resources
• LPIC 101/102 templates

Networking

• RFC 1180 - This RFC is a tutorial on the TCP/IP protocol suite, focusing particularly on the steps in forwarding an IP datagram from source host to destination host through a router. It does not specify an Internet standard.
• Linux Network Administrator's Guide, 2nd Edition
  

PHP

• Comfortable editing with VIM - an excellent resource for those vim as an editor for PHP.

VI/VIM

• VIM - Main website
• VIM Book - Excellent PDF on how to use VIM
  

Just Stuff You Should Read

Classic Technical Articles

• Reflections on Trusting Trust
• The Art of Unix Programming

Biographies and Fiction

• The Right To Read -- a dystopian short story on the chilling effects of "Digital Rights Management" by Richard M. Stallman
• In the Beginning was the Command Line - Colorful, humourous and an almost succinct history of operating systems by well known science fiction writer Neal Stephenson
• Free as In Freedom - The life story of Richard M. Stallman and his trials and tribulations in creating the Free Software Movement