ciaran
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Giovedì, 01 Giugno 2006
Here are
10 free
software projects that remind me that giving everyone the
freedom to tinker produces great projects.
- Rockbox
-
A group of developers wrote some GPL'd firmware for Archos digital
music players, and then they started porting it to similar devices.
So you can customise the display, install the games they wrote, add
the features you hate the pre-installed firmware for not having,
etc.
- GnuPG (gpg -c)
-
The simplest use case: if you ever wished that gzip or bzip2
supported encryption, or if you just want to encrypt a file so that
a password is required to decrypt it, then the answer is
"gpg -c". The "c" tells gpg to make a
password protected file requiring no keys. GnuPG compresses files
before encrypting, so this command makes a compressed, encrypted
file and the recipient just uses "gpg -d" and enters
the password to decrypt the file.
- GNU Classpath
-
I'm impressed by the progress being made in this field. Mark
Wielaard of GNU Classpath recently
published a summary of the
collaborations of recent years.
- Gnash
-
Many people can't resist the temptation to install proprietary Flash on their
otherwise-free system. Gnash is the most promising free alternative.
- gPhoto
-
It must be hard to make all these devices work when the hardware
manufacturers give you no help.
- LinuxBIOS
-
Unfortunately, my computer isn't supported by LinuxBIOS, so I only
know the theory behind this project. It seems to be a full Linux
kernel, compressed, running as your BIOS. Some say it's a big win
in terms of preventing DRM from being imposed on users.
- GCC
-
If compiling our software meant putting it in a black box and using
whatever came out the other end, software freedom would be a joke,
or a leap of blind faith at best. No wonder a compiler was one of
the first packages the GNU project made.
-
Ken Thompson highlighted the importance of a free compiler in his
1984 paper Reflections
on Trusting Trust (look for Figure 6). He describes a trojan
horse that could easily be put into a compiler.
- GNU wget
-
Robust, featureful, simple.
- GNU Standard C library
-
This must take massive amounts of work, and it is so problem-free
that it is usually forgotten about.
- GNU Emacs
-
This is not a text editor. It's a productivity tool, or a working environment.
It contains 1000s of useful features and the interface is informative. It took
a while to get used to, but it's clearly my favourite piece of software.
UPDATE: there's a nice article just published about the new features in GNU grep.
