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Here is a submission as a result from a conversation I had with mrcoolbp over email.
I want to present the following idea for a regularly-occurring SoylentNews story: a weekly promotion of an open source software project.
The current vision is to have a weekly post on the main page with an open source project presented (I suggest Sunday afternoon EST time, helping fill the slow news day). After a short description of the project and the normal collection of relevant links (homepage, downloads, etc.), the submitter presents the project to the SoylentNews community. This takes the form of an extended post (similar to the SoylentNews meta posts that often have a short blurb for main page and "Read more past the break").
Keep reading 'past the break' for more:
While we already see a number of open source related articles, typically they are associated with larger projects and with an "event". One of the ideas behind this proposal is to feature less popular projects during business as usual. I would encourage promoting projects which you have personal experience with, i.e. you develop for the project or are an avid user.In an effort to provide some independent journalism, the content 'past the break' is loosely defined. This could be a review or description of the software, an interview with the dev team, a story about how the software saved your life, poem, and so on. While I currently have these high and mighty dreams for the feature, I also want to encourage those who aren't as inspired by writing to post; SoylentNews is driven by our submissions, and I would rather read a short blurb than have no post.
When a post is selected, the highlighted project should be made aware, not only because it would be polite (and indirectly promote SoylentNews), but if the article goes live at a convenient time, perhaps the dev team might take part in the comment discussion.
What it will take to implement this idea:
- An "OSS Plug" topic (https://soylentnews.org/topics.pl). It could fall under other categories but it will be much easier to parse submissions with a dedicated topic.
- A decision on the permission required from the parent project. Many "contact us" emails are ignored, so would it be acceptable to make a post without warning the project?
- Submissions. Similar to regular articles, this could go dry if people don't participate.
- A selection process. If the SN team wants to own this or if a different solution is needed (I'm not familiar with what happens now).
A quick example (short as I don't use the software directly myself):
Weekly OSS: Slashcode!
Slashcode is an OSS project used to run news websites, in particular SoylentNews. From the developer's page:
Slash -- Slashdot Like Automated Storytelling Homepage -- is the code that runs Slashdot. More than that, however, Slash is an architecture for putting together web sites. It comes with functionality for posting articles, conducting polls, having discussions, and more; but it can be extended in innumerable ways.
Slash is written in Perl, and is built on top of Apache and mod_perl. It requires a database backend, though the only well-supported database used with it is MySQL (more databases will become well-supported as time goes on; PostgreSQL support is already well on its way). Slash is fast, scalable, and secure (as evidenced by one of the best test cases you could have, running Slashdot itself). Slash was originally written by CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal.
Through a plugin system, developers can add functionality to Slash. Through themes and templates (which are written using Template Toolkit), the look and feel of a Slash site can be customized.
Read more past the break:
For some reason I cannot put my finger on the first time I saw a website running Slashcode. It must have been ten years ago, but that is a big blur in my memory. I do remember the introduction of SoylentNews, the forefront news website running Slashcode.
Slashcode has a sophisticated commenting system for stories posted. What makes it so innovative is the rating system for each comment. This helps off topic comments get weeded out, and for the more insightful comments to be highlighted. This does depend on the community to prevent abuse, however I have seen very few cases of the commenting system fail.
Some improvements have been made to Slashcode in recent history, and the usability has evolved with the development of SoylentNews. I particularly like how gracefully the site fails thanks to the lack of javascript dependencies and the resulting clean interface.
There are also a number of features present that I have yet to use, and I am unsure how well they will integrate into the news website format. Particularly the Journals. Each user may make posts to their own user Journal. Beyond the site admins I see little need for this feature for regular users, and there are many other social media websites that provide similar functions. However, if this is the extent of feature creep I am satisfied with this project.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday May 04 2015, @07:49PM
"Open source" is a better term when dealing with the general public than "Free software". If you talk to some random Windows user about "free software", they're going to think you're just talking about freeware, software which doesn't cost anything. When you say "open source", this might make sense to them, and if not, it's easy to explain what this means in terms they can understand, and then they'll remember the term "open source" easily. No, it isn't perfect, as Free software is preferable, however "Free software" has a lot of problems with it:
1) There is no way to differentiate "Free" and "free" in colloquial speech. And if you start saying "capital-F free software", you're going to look weird.
2) The word "free" is ambiguous in English, since it can mean either libre or gratis. And you can't use those words with the general public because they're too uneducated to know what they mean since they aren't English and most Americans don't know any languages besides English (and never took any foreign languages in school).
Lots of people seem to have a basic understanding what "source code" is, that someone who has access to it can easily make changes. But when you use the term "free software", they're not going to make that connection.
To put it bluntly, I'd be less than amused if SoylentNews advertised a product where you could read the source ("open" source) but denied you other rights.
Yes, and how many times have you actually seen anything called "open source" which had a license like that? I've only heard of that with Microsoft, and even there they used the "Shared Source" term.
"Libre Software"
You can't use that term with the general public in America. They won't understand it, because it's not English.
However, I do think you can use these terms with the appropriate audience, like among people one sites like this who are well-versed in such things, but there's a good reason the "open source" term took off and "Free software" did not, and it's because one makes much more sense to the general public than the other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @09:47PM
"Open source" is a better term
Not with Redmond's latest tactic of doing everything they can to distort that meme.
With their "open" apps, MSFT includes a PATENTS.TXT file [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [github.com]
which makes it clear that
- you cannot alter their code
- you cannot reuse their code
- you cannot redistribute their code
...yet they still want you to believe that, because you can -look- at it, that software is "open".
.
...and the OP's use of "OSS" was not good either as that is the moniker of one specific existing protocol. [wikipedia.org]
.
I generally just say "FOSS"; sometimes "gratis and libre"[1].
When I want to make it abundantly clear, I say Free(dom) Software.
[1] If you receive the blank look that you get from your dog, just educate the monolingual individual^W^W USAian.
-- gewg_