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An Up-To-Date Look at Free Software and Its Makers

An Up-To-Date Look at Free Software and Its Makers

COMMUNITY ProjectsSchlagwort sollte hier stehen COVER STORY

An up-to-date look at free software and its makers PROJECTS ON THE MOVE Free software covers such a diverse range of utilities, applications, and projects, that it can be hard to the perfect tool. We pick the best of the bunch. This month we examine , Bidwatcher, KWappen,

Capi4BSD, and current events at the project. BY MARTIN LOSCHWITZ

n anthropologist at the Univer- suitable for filling in those workday stacked, players can swap cards between sity of Chicago recently breaks. stacks. The simple rules for a sim- Adefended a PhD dissertation on As the name suggests, KWappen is a ple game, and this means that the fun ethics and politics of the free software KDE application. The object of the game factor sets in after just a few minutes. movement. Although Debian wasn’t the is to remove four stacks with the coats of The game’s author, Jens Schulz, also sole focus of the work, Gabriella Cole- arms of the 16 German federal states as had the educational aspect of the game man interviewed several Debian devel- quickly as possible. Each coat of arms in mind when he designed KWappen; opers, attended Debian conferences, and has one of the four suits of cards: dia- players also get to memorize the coats was a regular on Debian IRC channels. monds, hearts, clubs, and spades. Two of arms. If you are interested, you can You’ll find an excerpt of the dissertation cards with matching coats of arms on download the program at [2]. at [1]. top of each other are removed from the stack. And if all four cards have the Do I Hear Twenty? KWappen Game same coat of arms, all four disappear. eBay has developed into a national pas- In contrast to modern 3D shooters, Players can interact with the game by time. In some households anything that KWappen does not need a powerful distributing the cards, are dealt has outlived its usefulness ends up in a graphics adapter. KWappen is a game of by the , across their stacks. virtual auction. At the same time, virtual skill, and thanks to the simple rules, it is To improve the way the cards are auctions can lead to genuine bargains,

92 ISSUE 62 JANUARY 2006 WWW. - MAGAZINE.COM Schlagwort sollte hier stehen COVER STORY Free Software Projects COMMUNITY

flexible editor for work with an integrated spellchecker. their own pro- Support for , Perl, and other languages gramming work. is restricted to syntax highlighting. At first, Bluefish Bluefish also has a convincing help was distributed as function that includes a complete index an HTML Editor. of HTML, PHP, CSS, and Python func- Bluefish is still tions. This gives web designers a com- Figure 1: The Bidwatcher user interface may be retro, but it works. advertised as a plete reference with all the information “Web develop- they need for daily tasks. and many items exchange hands at far ment environment”, but now it can also Intelligent project management sup- less than store prices. handle programming in languages such ports the parallel development of various Keeping track of auction items in as Perl. projects by displaying only the files that browser windows is not everyone’s idea The program had a lot of potential and belong to the current project. of fun, but Bidwatcher can help put the followed the path that many free soft- fun back into online auctions. ware applications take: more and more ISDN with FreeBSD Bidwatcher [3] uses the GTK1 inter- developers patched the code and publi- On the server market, FreeBSD is gaining face, which makes it look slightly retro cized their patches. Despite ongoing ground as an alternative to Linux. It is (Figure 1); this said, the GUI is clear-cut development, it took five years for the an excellent for Voice over IP and intuitive. After launching the pro- developers to publicize the milestone 1.0 (VoIP) and landline gateway applica- gram, enter your username and eBay release in January 2005. tions, in combination with , as password preferences, and off you go! The GTK-based interface uses tabs to FreeBSD now has a Capi driver that sup- An input box in the main window lets separate individual sections of code. ports communication over ISDN cards. you input the article number of any auc- Each tab contains buttons that automati- The developer of Capi4BSD, Thomas tions you want to monitor (the number cally generate preset code snippets. Wintergerst, states that he used the is available on the homepage for the HTML is clearly still the main focus of Linux Capi implementation as a know- auction), thus providing an at-a-glance Bluefish: the tabs allow users to specify ledge base for his own work. The Linux overview of the auction status. fonts and insert HTML tables. There is libcapi is a major component of the Bidwatcher shows the official eBay also a separate section for CSS. Capi4BSD environment. Just like on clock, thus giving you official timekeep- Bluefish additionally supports Doc- Linux, the FreeBSD implementation adds ing even if your real time clock is inaccu- book, PHP, and SQL commands. The a kernel driver that handles the commu- rate. Users do not even need to switch to program can also check your nication between the Capi library and a browser to enter an bid; an input box for W3-compliance and spellcheck your the ISDN card. in Bidwatcher takes care of this. Bid input is a useful feature when an auction is drawing to a close. The couple of sec- onds that a browser can take to redraw a web page can be decisive. Bidwatcher also gives you the ability to automate this process; that is, to enter your bid just seconds before the auction closes, although eBay’s conditions of use explic- itly forbid this kind of hacking. Programming Made Simple Many developers still prefer simple edi- tors such as Vi or Nano. In some cases, these programs may have syntax high- lighting for various programming lan- guages. Things start to get more compli- cated if you need to edit multiple docu- ments at the same time, or if you need line numbering. The Bluefish editor (Fig- ure 2) has features for various scripting languages neatly packed in a GUI. Olivier Sessink originally authored Bluefish. Chris Mazuc, Neil Millar, and Hylke van der Schaaf have been with the project right from the outset. The four Figure 2: Bluefish started life as a HTML editor but now supports programming in various needed a powerful and scripting languages.

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One paragraph in particular gave rise to criticism: the license lets the original author of a document tag some passages as unchangeable. This clearly contravenes the rules for free software, and this is what prompted the Debian project to remove all texts published under the GFDL from the Debian distribution. As this was not pos- sible prior to the Sarge release, the task was postponed. Frank Lichtenheld from the Release team has now made it clear that Debian is getting serious. He called for all main- tainers to check their packages for non- free documentation and remove it [5]. The bug tracking system classifies reports of non-free documentation as serious, and that makes them release- critical. Unfortunately, nearly all the GNU doc- umentation is now under the GFDL, and this causes some to question the useful- Figure 3: The GNU Free Documentation License is a source of a dispute between GNU and ness of a distribution without documen- Debian. tation for essential features such as GNU Glibc or the GNU . As of this writing, it is still fairly diffi- ing branch, which will be the next stable The idea of moving the documentation cult to integrate Capi4BSD with an exist- branch, in the guise of the Debian-Edu to Debian’s non-free area also seems ing system. If you would like to experi- project (Skolelinux). impracticable. This would force users ment with the ISDN suite, you can start Joey Hess states that users should not who wanted to read the documentation by downloading the of the regard this service as an adequate to have access, as non-free is not project and patching the Free- replacement for security support in the available on the distribution CDs. BSD kernel and userland sources before stable release. The security team in the rebuilding. Patches are available for the testing branch does not resolve security On this note… current stable version 5.4, but if you issues by replacing a vulnerable package … it’s time to say goodbye again, for this have FreeBSD 6, you will need to create directly with a patched package. Instead month at least, but we do have one your own patches from the Capi4BSD it aims to resolve problems when pack- request before we go: if you can recom- source first. ages migrate from unstable to testing. mend a program that you would like to Finally, install libcapi and chan_capi see featured in Projects on the Move, why for Asterisk from [4] and enable chan_ Trash? not mail me with your suggestion [6]? I capi in Asterisk. The Asterisk documen- The dispute between the Debian project look forward to your comments! ■ tation describes how to use ISDN lines and the GNU project that has been going with Asterisk. on for a few months now often degener- INFO Capi4Hylafax gives you the ability to ates to emotion-laded flaming. The cur- [1] PhD thesis on Debian by Gabriella use your telephone system as a digital rent bone of contention is the GNU Free Coleman: fax machine. At this time of writing, Documentation License “GFDL.” http:// lists. debian. org/ debian-devel- only active ISDN cards are supported; Shortly after the GNU Free Documen- announce/ 2005/ 08/ msg00010. cheaper cards are typically passive. But tation License (GFDL) was published [2] KWappen, a game for KDE: if you have an old AVM-B1 card, you (Figure 3) representatives of nearly all http:// www. lcs-chemie. de/ kwappen_ eng. htm might like to try your luck. camps in the open source scene criti- [3] Bidwatcher: http:// bidwatcher. cized the license for being “non-free.” The testing Branch sourceforge. net/ [4] chan_capi for FreeBSD: http:// One reason for the delays to the Sarge Martin Loschwitz is from a small www. junghanns. net/ en/ chan_capi. release was the ongoing issue of security German town called Nieder- html support for the new version. There were krüchten. He is a developer for [5] Frank Lichtenheld on the GFDL: not enough machines available to auto- Debian GNU/Linux. http:// lists. debian. org/ debian-devel- mate update builds. To avoid similar Martin’s leisure time is mainly occu- announce/ 2005/ 09/ msg00007. html issues with the next release, Joey Hess pied with activities in the Debian [6] Tips and suggestions:

THEAUTHOR projects@linux-magazine. com first up security support for the - and GNU communities.

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