It’s just under two weeks until Software Freedom Day is celebrated – and I’m so excited by this year’s event!

It’s promising to be the best Melbourne event ever – with Senator Kate Lundy confirmed to speak on Government 2.0 and Rami Olwan of Creative Commons also speaking. And let’s not forget a raft of short presentations from the likes of Richard Jones, who spearheads Melbourne’s Python community and Colin Jacobs – chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia. Luminaries Donna Benjamin and Ben Sturmfels will also be addressing what is expected to be an audience of several hundred.

I really feel that this year has marked a turning point in the promotion of free and open source (FOSS) tools and a coming of age of the community. Netbooks are now shipped with Linux, GIMP is a term in widespread use and WordPress and Drupal are tools of choice. The community has gained credibility through programs such as the LUV Beginners’ Workshops, and through consistent delivery of engaging and informative events – such as previous Software Freedom Days.

The global financial crisis has highlighted the need to derive significant value for money from the software tools that we use – and in some ways has caused both businesses and individuals to question why they’re paying hundreds of dollars for tools when FOSS equivalents are freely available.

Growing awareness of privacy violations and the general attitude of some large social networking sites toward user ownership of data has also come to the fore, helped in no small part by the efforts of Paul Fenwick. The Patent Absurdity campaign, aiming to abolish software patents, has highlighted the need to reform restrictive practices which stifle innovation – and therefore the information economy.

Interested? More information below

More links:

• Website: http://www.sfd.org.au/melbourne
• Event registration: http://sfdmelb2010.eventbrite.com/
• Global Software Freedom Day website: http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org

Software Freedom Day Melbourne 2010 is kindly and generously sponsored by:

• Multimedia Victoria
• VicNet and the State Library of Victoria
• Linux Users’ of Victoria
• Linux Australia

While doing some investigation for the upcoming Software Freedom Day event to be held at the State Library of Victoria on 18th September, an interesting trend emerged. As I browsed the plethora of free and open source software (FOSS) tools available in different disciplines, it became clear that many so-called ‘open source’ products were presented as such, but were free only in the form of ‘community editions’. Fully featured ‘premium’ versions of the product were only available in paid form. Is this an increasing trend toward open source in name only, with scant lip service paid to the principles of freedom, knowledge sharing and the greater good that ‘old school’ open source strives so hard for? Or is it a inevitable conclusion driven by market forces?

On one hand the stratification of products into ‘community’ and ‘premium’ editions goes some way to solving a dilemma which has plagued the open source sector for decades; how to derive value from a product which does not cost money to obtain. By encouraging adopters to ‘try’ the community edition and providing a seamless upgrade path to the paid version, the ‘owners’ of the open source product build a user base, while the user base is able to get access to a product for minimal financial risk – a seemingly win-win situation.

However, there are a number of problems here. Firstly, if a product starts out as open source and manages to generate an active developer and support community, with contributions made on a good will basis, what happens when that product is forked? Often, the ‘community edition’ is neglected and left to rot, while development effort (and money) is invested into the ‘premium’ edition. This is exactly what has happened to DimDim, once a truly open source product now split into a defunct open source ‘community’ fork, alongside a cloud service (albeit some offerings of which are free).  A similar thing has happened to KnowledgeTree, which once offered a community version alongside its premium, fully featured product. The community edition is no more. Other examples – which still sport community editions -  include SugarCRM and JasperSoft.

If I were a developer who had contributed to the original open source product, I would certainly feel cheated that the eventual product did not exhibit the same commitment to freedom, sharing, community, and the greater good that the antecedent did.

Perhaps the core issue here is one of branding. The term ‘open source’ connotes a sense of freedom; of contributing something for the greater good. There is a sense of emotional identification with a product or organisation which promotes itself as open source; it is a statement which says ‘we’re not just in this for the money’. However, I firmly believe that many organisations are simply using the phrase ‘open source’ as a hollow marketing tool, when their product suite does not reflect the core values of the open source community – free as in beer and free as in freedom.

So what is the answer? Projects like WordPress have employed a different tactic; here a suite of value-adding services such as hosting and personal support are being provided, while the base product remains completely free and open source. To me this is the preferable model – as the product itself remains free, while the organisation can add value (and derive a profit) while enhancing – rather than detracting – from the code base.

Regulation – such as stipulating standards against which organisations must comply if they are to label their products as ‘open source’ are likely to fail in a globalised environment with multiple jurisdictions and no imperative for monitoring.

Perhaps the answer lies in developers and end users becoming more savvy – and being discerning enough to recognise when a product – and the philosophy behind it – is truly open source; and when ‘open source’ is just another buzzword on a marketing brochure.

Having only a 100GB hard disk on my Acer 4070 Travelmate laptop, I made the decision to buy an external hard drive – and chose the a 1.5TB Seagate expansion drive – one that looks like this;

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/expansion/expansion_desktop/

Of course I didn’t check the box or the support documentation before purchasing, but like usual anticipated that I’d be able to get it working under Linux – in my case FC9. Unfortunately in this case every trick in my arsenal has failed. The drive just won’t mount. I admit, my knowledge of Fedora’s mount and fstab functionality is limited, but there is a nagging suspicion that there is a way to make it work!

I’m running a dual boot system – one partition with Windows XP and the other with FC 9.

What I’ve tried so far;

• Booted into Windows XP
• Safely ejected hardware device
• Booted into FC 9
• Ran the mount command and fdisk but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me;

[root@localhost ~]# mount
 /dev/sda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
 proc on /proc type proc (rw)
 sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
 devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
 tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
 none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
 sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw)
 fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
 gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/KathyReid/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=KathyReid)
 /dev/sda2 on /media/ACER type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=lower,uid=500)

fdisk -l

[root@localhost media]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 Disk identifier: 0xecedeced

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
 /dev/sda1               1         509     4088511   12  Compaq diagnostics
 /dev/sda2             510        6303    46540305    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
 /dev/sda3   *        6304        8853    20482875   83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
 1 heads, 63 sectors/track, 46512336 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 63 * 512 = 32256 bytes
 Disk identifier: 0x00d7dd1b

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
 /dev/sdb1   *           2    46512256  1465136032+   7  HPFS/NTFS

When trying to access the drive from the the desktop (I’m running Gnome), it keeps giving the following error;

I’m not ready to admit defeat though.

Does anyone have any other ideas?