Ciarán's free software notes

There's now a free software portal on English Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Free_software

Wikipedia has a lot of great articles about free software, but it also has gaps, and confusions about free software (and open source, GNU, Linux, copyleft, etc.) that are common in society are present in some corners of Wikipedia too.

The goals of the free software portal are to provide a starting point for people reading about free software, and to highlight areas where people who would like to contribute are needed. ...and the portal itself needs contributors and suggestions.

Free software portals on the French and German Wikipedia's have existed for a while:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portail:Logiciels_libres
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Freie_Software

(The other languages are still waiting for someone to start one.)

Happy New Year's Parties!

After the free software movement, Wikipedia has to be my favourite computer-enabled community project. It does a first rate job of getting computer users involved, it's articles can be freely copied and modified, and it has lots of useful info.

Since I blogged about it last year, English Wikipedia's Free Software Portal has continued to improve. The "Topics" and "Featured and Good content" boxes on the portal are interesting, as is the separate archive of highlighted articles. There are now also Free Software Portals on 15 of the Wikipedia's in other languages (compared to 6 in March 2007). For the list, see the box at the bottom of the left-hand column of the Portal.

As well as the articles having good info, the references sections at the bottom of each article are very useful. I often dig around the references when I'm looking for an old webpage or news article whose title I can't remember.

Here is a list of some good free software articles. They're good, but remember that you can improve them.

• Alternative terms for free software
• Free software
• Free software licence
• Free software movement
• GNU (the operating system)
• GNU/Linux
• GNU/Linux naming controversy
• GNU General Public License
• GNU project
• History of free software
• List of FSF approved software licences
• Software patents and free software

Of course, there are also plenty of articles that really should be better, such as:

• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Free Software Foundation India
• Free Software Foundation Latin America
• Free software community
• Permissive free software licences

And interesting related articles:

• Copyleft
• Free Java implementations
  
• Free Software Foundation
• Licence compatibility
• Licence proliferation
• Proprietary software
• Richard Stallman
• Software patent
• Software patent debate
• Software patents under the European Patent Convention
• The Free Software Definition

And there are hundreds of articles on specific free software packages: glibc, GCC, Emacs, OpenOffice.org, RockBox, etc.

The coordination WikiProject for Free Software is still there, but isn't used for much.

-- 
Ciarán O'Riordan,
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