Important Stuff
Links
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The GNU Project is a global project to develop a free, as in freedom,
operating system that anyone, anywhere can use and maintain all of their liberties and God-given freedoms
and rights, including ownership of the software, allowances to modify or make changes to the software, and
the freedom to sell it for their own profit, providing they include the GNU License and allow others the
very same freedoms, liberties, and rights.
The Free Software Foundation is a GNU-based organization devoted to promoting
the GNU Operating System and protecting the rights, liberties, and freedoms
set forth in the GNU General Public License, and associated licenses.
Richard Stallman's Personal Home Page. Richard Stallman is the founder of the
Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project. He is also a politically active figure, and a hero to many.
Bjarne Stroustrup's Home page. Bjarne Stroustrup is the inventor of
C++, a widely used heavily typed high level programming language. He is regarded by many as one of the most influential
men in the world of modern software development, as one can imagine.
Linus Torvalds Home Page. Linus Torvalds invented, developed, and
maintains the Linux kernel, which is the core of the GNU Operating System. A
Wikipedia page was also developed in his name.
Linux.org is the best up to date resource on Linux, the GNU Operating System. Inclded
are links to verious distributions, ISO CD and DVD image downloads, Linux news, supported hardware lists, and much more.
The New Hacker's Dictionary is a resource containing common to rare
jargon, still much in use today among the Hacker (as in programmer) culture today. Included in those cultures might be
AT&T, who is a direct successor to Ma Bell Labs, as one can see
in the similarity of their logos.
Eric S. Raymond is the author of many useful computer books and papers, including the
New Hacker's Dictionary (above).
BSD or Berkely Software Distriubtion is a set of various Unix-based flavors of highly
secure operating systems. The many variants of BSD, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD attempt to maintain an extremely
Unix-similar (Bell Labs Unix, that is) architecture.
GPL-Violations.org maintains a list of companies who use GPL licensed software, but
have violated the license agreements and are thus being sued because of those violations.
NoSoftwarePatents.com is a website devoted to to action
to eliminate software patents in the world. Software patents cause serious problems and controversy in the United States of
America, and other countries have taken steps toward creating software patents. However software patents are not very helpful
except to cause others pain. They also violate the rights of developers and users who use open source software.
End Software Patents is an action to end the use and abuse of software patents in the
United States of America.
Blogs
Personal blog about software engineering experiences and such.
Brett Petichord is a highly influential programmer in the open source web testing
arena. He invented WATIR (Web Application Testing In Ruby), a Ruby-based testing
library based on
HP's (used to be Mercury's) Quick Test Professional product.
Scott Hanselman is a very good computer programmer who maintains his own blog and
RSS feed. He often blogs on specific libraries or methodologies.
Software
GNewSense is the latest Official FSF-supported Linux distribution. It is the official
GNU Operating System.
Ubutu Linux is one of the best and most easy to use desktop Linux distributions available.
Ubuntu used to be the FSF-supported distribution, however because they support non-free and universe repositories in their default
distribution, Richard Stallman chose no longer to support it as the GNU Operating System.
Sourceforge.net is one of the largest hosts of open source software. It is my first resource
when I am looking for a specific piece of software. I also participated in one project on Sourceforge.net, namely
KPC, for which I designed and wrote the GUI front-end.
Java.net is an official Java developer community from Sun Microsystems. They host both individual and
team Java-based development projects.
Groups
Watir General is a users group and mailing list for Watir users.
Copyright (C) Nathan Lane, 2007, 2008