 Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your bi-weekly GNU slash Linux news video podcast. Packing so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be legal. So join me now and share the software. You'll be free. On this episode of Unfettered Freedom, the LibreOffice team has sent an open letter to Apache OpenOffice. We're going to discuss that also free versus non-free JavaScript. A lot of people seem to be confused about what exactly is non-free JavaScript and why you should avoid it. Also, the Linux Journal is back. The Linux Journal went away for a little while, but now it is back under new ownership. Also, Linux prevents planned obsolescence. It's also important for saving the environment because not having all of these devices being thrown away after just a year or two of use is really putting a lot of pressure on the environment. Linux 5.9 has been released, so we have a new kernel. We're going to discuss the latest features and security fixes in 5.9. I am your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT on YouTube and over on the library. If you'd like to support my work, please consider doing so. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. The first story is that the Document Foundation, which is a non-profit organization that was originally created by members of OpenOffice.org years ago, and they created this Document Foundation as a non-profit and it's designed to manage and develop the LibreOffice suite. The folks behind LibreOffice basically, they sent an open letter and they're trying to appeal to the folks over at Apache OpenOffice to recommend users to start using other alternatives to OpenOffice. Anybody that goes to openoffice.org and is trying to download OpenOffice, please send them to LibreOffice. Why? OpenOffice hasn't seen a major release in many, many years. Apache is really doing nothing with OpenOffice. There have been rumors about Apache shutting down OpenOffice going back at least four or five years now. So it's not really seeing any development that's worth speaking about. So let's get into the letter here. Let me pull up the letter here for those of you watching the video portion of the podcast. The letter was published over at the DocumentFoundation.org website and it reads as follows, quote, Today marks 20 years since the source code to OpenOffice was released and today we say LibreOffice is the future of OpenOffice. Let's all get behind it, unquote, and it goes on to talk about how since 2014 Apache OpenOffice hasn't had a single major release and Apache has been in control of OpenOffice I think since 2014. So pretty much since they got their hands on OpenOffice, they haven't really done anything with it. And there have been 13 major releases and 87 minor releases of LibreOffice in that time span. So LibreOffice sees tons of new features and security fixes and things like this, things that are very important in Office Suite, especially the security fixes. In 2019 alone, LibreOffice had over 15,000 code commits while OpenOffice had 595 commits for the entire year. So LibreOffice has this flourishing community, right? You have thousands of people probably submitting patches and submitting commits to LibreOffice. You know, you've got hundreds of millions of people downloading LibreOffice probably every year. It is the de facto free and open source Office Suite on the planet right now. Now, this was not the case several years back because originally LibreOffice was OpenOffice. There was just OpenOffice.org. It was the free and open source Office Suite and then OpenOffice changed hands a few times. Different companies took over. There were worries about, you know, free software versus proprietary software. People were going to add proprietary bits to it and try to commercialize OpenOffice. And you know how the community is when people try to do that to an open source project. We just forked it. We go rename it. And that's exactly what happened to everybody that worked on OpenOffice left immediately. They forked it, created LibreOffice and just kept going. But a lot of people still because of this legacy, you know, you do a search on the Internet for free and open source Office Suite. OpenOffice still gets recommended. People still find their way to OpenOffice.org, that website. Because OpenOffice had hundreds of millions of users at the time, you know, because that was the Office Suite before LibreOffice. So you still got people going to the website and downloading this software that they really shouldn't be using. Because again, it's not saying any development, no bug fixes, no major improvements to speak of. And the LibreOffice guys just want Apache. Hey, you're not doing anything with this software, this OpenOffice software anyway. Would you please direct your users for their benefit and for their safety? Will you direct them to the LibreOffice website so they can actually download a usable Office Suite? One of the problems that LibreOffice has is that a lot of people still don't know LibreOffice exists. They know OpenOffice. They don't know LibreOffice. Now those of us that use Linux and free and open source software all the time, we know about LibreOffice because it's one of the most free and open source things out there, right? It's one of the leaders in that area. But you have to understand that OpenOffice and LibreOffice are across platform. You know, when I talk about hundreds of millions of users have used OpenOffice and LibreOffice, obviously most of those users are on Microsoft Windows. They're not really up to date on the free software movement, the open source movement, but they didn't follow everything that went down with OpenOffice when it was forked and split off and they created LibreOffice. They just still know about OpenOffice. Many of those people have been using OpenOffice on Windows for decades now, for at least a decade anyway. And so the OpenOffice brand is what they know that brand is strong, even though the software again hasn't had a significant release in at least six years and really is a dead project at this point. Still, the branding is so strong. That's what a lot of people know and that's why they keep going to the website and they keep downloading that program is because they still don't know about LibreOffice and the LibreOffice team and of course the free and open source community, we do our best to promote it, but we've really done all we can do. It really, at this point, is up to Apache to do the responsible thing, to do the right thing, to do the moral thing and start pushing people to LibreOffice. So in the closing part of this open letter to Apache, I'll just read the last line here, quote, we appeal to Apache OpenOffice to do the right thing. Our goal should be to get powerful, up to date and well maintained productivity tools into the hands of as many people as possible. Let's work together on that end quote. I totally agree and hopefully Apache will respond in a positive way to this open letter. Our second story is free JavaScript versus non-free JavaScript. What exactly do these terms mean? You hear people in the free software movement talk about fighting against the use of non-free JavaScript. They want all of these websites on the internet to quit using what they call quote, non-free JavaScript. What do they mean by that? And why is it so important? Why is the free software foundation especially so invested in this fight against non-free JavaScript? If I pull up the page about the free JavaScript campaign that is going on because of the free software foundation, they talk about needing to ensure that all of our computers run free software, which of course if you subscribe to the free software movement, the ideals of the free software movement, you know that you want to run free software versus proprietary software. And one of the problems with the web is many websites load software onto your computer, especially things like JavaScript that carry proprietary licenses. The source code for that software that's running on your computer is not open source. You can't go and look at the source code, right? You don't really know what it's doing to you. You don't know what information it's collecting. So if you want to be able to browse the web without running non-free software, it's difficult. There are ways you can prevent some of that non-free JavaScript from loading, but you're going to have a really tough time getting by on the modern web. But that is one of the fights that the free software foundation is really heavily invested in, is trying to change the way people create websites and to get away from using all of this non-free JavaScript. And when they talk about non-free JavaScript, they're talking about code that's obfuscated that you can't go and audit the code, right? You don't know what that JavaScript is doing. And you got JavaScript on pretty much all the big major sites that you'd probably go to all the time. So video sites like YouTube and library and things like that. All of your big commercial shopping sites like Amazon and the like. Anything that involves online banking has non-free JavaScript. It just does. If you're going to do online banking, you're going to deal with non-free JavaScript. Even on a lot of just personal websites, people just quickly throw up WordPress site or something like that. There's JavaScript running all over most people's blogs. You see JavaScript all the time and things like dynamic menus on websites, buttons, especially dynamic buttons, text editing. You see dynamic text editors where you can format text on forums and blog posts and things like that. So you've got JavaScript running all the time. And contrary to what many people think, all of that JavaScript that they see running on that web page, you know, it's not running on somebody else's machine. That JavaScript that's demonstrating all that, that's displaying all that, a lot of that JavaScript is actually running on your machine. And again, the code is hidden from view. You really don't know what it's doing. So there is the potential for security issues. There's the potential for serious abuse when you have proprietary software running on your computer. So what can you do to fight against non-free JavaScript? What can you do to prevent non-free JavaScript from running on your computer? Well, probably one of the best things you can do is those of you that use Firefox, and I'm assuming that most Chromium-based browsers also have a similar extension or maybe this exact extension. But on Firefox, we have NoScript. Install the NoScript plugin. And when you install it, you know, you can see in the screenshot, those of you watching the video portion of the podcast, is you can tell every website, hey, allow JavaScript to run on this site. Don't allow it. You can allow certain pieces of JavaScript within a website. For example, you can let a site use JavaScript to display menus or something like that, but you can turn off the JavaScript from Google Analytics, for example. Maybe you don't want Google data mining you in any way. So it's a really powerful plugin, the NoScript plugin. Now, I will tell you that by default, it just disables JavaScript entirely on the web. And I promise you, most of the websites that you go to on a regular basis, many of them simply won't even load. Like you go to something like YouTube or something like library, especially video sites. It's all JavaScript, the embedded videos and everything. As soon as you go to like the library site, for example, I know this for a fact. It's just a blank page. It's just a white background. It won't even load unless you allow JavaScript to be enabled. So you do have to take that into account and just know if you're into online banking, you have to allow JavaScript. If you turn off JavaScript, no online bank will work. Things like PayPal and stuff like that, no payment processing. None of that will work because all of that requires JavaScript and that JavaScript that the banking industry uses is all non-free JavaScript. Another thing you can do, of course, is to support organizations like the Free Software Foundation, help them try to change the dynamic of the web. Help them try to change the culture of people that create websites. So join them and start demanding that the web respect user freedoms. Right? Nobody should be required to have proprietary software running on their own personal computers. That's just not something that should be happening and unfortunately many websites are designed in such a way that they automatically place this proprietary code on your computer and execute it without you really knowing what's going on. And when you take action with people like the Free Software Foundation, what the Free Software Foundation does, of course, they try to raise public awareness, but they also start calling out companies, start calling out big websites that use non-free JavaScript and sometimes they are successful and having some of these big sites actually change what they're doing. Right? And right now they mentioned there's two sites on their radar right now that they're focusing on. They're trying to get Greenpeace, which is an environmental organization. You guys have probably heard about Greenpeace and know who they are. Well, the Free Software Foundation is trying to get them to remove non-free JavaScript from their website and they're also trying to get regulations.gov, which is a website that American citizens can use to give feedback to the government. Of course, all the forms and stuff to give that feedback require non-free JavaScript. So the Free Software Foundation is focused right now on Greenpeace and regulations.gov. But they're just trying to do it right now, I guess one website at a time. But it's changing the hearts and minds of people, really just one person at a time. It's not like people think about social activism. We can make broad sweeping changes just in the blink of an eye. It's not like that, right? You've got to change one mind, one heart at a time. In this case, one company, one website at a time. And our third topic is the great news that the Linux Journal is back. The Linux Journal has been around, I think, since the mid-90s. I think the Linux Journal actually started right after Linux itself was started. Like, you know, the Linux kernel just got to like 1.0. You started seeing good news slash Linux distributions being released. You know, the early ones were Slackware and Debian, things like that. And then the Linux Journal of course started covering all that. It was originally a print journal. Then, of course, it was an online journal. Print journalism, of course, kind of died several years back. And really, online journals are struggling these days to make money. And Linux Journal just couldn't keep the doors open. They shut down just a few months ago. Actually, they shut down. Well, it was recently announced that they're back. They're already publishing stories. I saw a few news articles published by them just this past week. They are under new ownership. They are now owned by slash dot media. I'm sure you guys are familiar with slash dot. I often go to slash dot for Linux news. They do some Linux news aggregation and things like that. But let's talk about Linux Journal is back. Let's talk about the announcement. They announced that they were coming back on September 22nd of 2020. So really just about three weeks ago, they announced coming back. Because it's new ownership. It's entirely new people. It's not going to be any of the same people involved. I don't think unless the new company wants to hire some of the old people involved. So I don't know if the Linux Journal will have the same look and feel. I mean, right now it looks the same as well as the website. But of course, when you get new people involved, it may be completely different in terms of execution or tones of the article. If I go to the Linux Journal dot com homepage right now, of course, that announcement was three weeks ago, but they started putting out new content. Looks like on October the 6th, we got a new article and they put four or five articles up right now. We had one on October the 8th about how to kill zombie processes on Linux. That's a very important thing to know, especially for people that maintain Linux systems. You have one recently about markdown editors in Linux. So the great thing about the Linux Journal, too, one of the reasons I always found it an interesting journal was they did cover a wide variety of Linux e-topics, right? You had things about system administration stuff, IT stuff. Right now they're having one about privacy stuff. Right now they're doing PGP and digital signatures. There's an article about that. Of course, they cover desktop Linux stuff, desktop apps, desktop GNU slash Linux distributions and things like that. So it was a really nice journal. Also, I always found that their articles typically were longer reads and it was nice because they really separated themselves from many of the other Linux publications, online Linux publications that oftentimes would write articles that were very short and linked. Sometimes you in the Linux Journal, at least the old Linux Journal, you would get articles that were several pages long. You had to page down a few times to get to the end. You could get some rather lengthy, especially opinion pieces sometimes. And I found those fascinating. I mean, here's one right here, Linux command line interface introduction. I'm reading it and this is not a typical kind of two to 300 word article that you might find on some Linux journals. And then when I say Linux journals, I'm talking about the Linux Journal, but other Linux news sites sometimes, you know, they just speak in very short little. It's not sound bites, but word bites, right? And the Linux Journal, I've always found to be one of the classiest publications out there. I don't know how it's going to be under the new ownership, but I am rooting for them because the more we have as far as people putting out Linux content, the more people are exposed to Linux, the more people that get rid of the proprietary garbage that is things like Windows and Mac and start moving over to the beauty of GNU slash Linux. And the next topic I want to discuss is one that is important to me and it should be important to you guys. And it's one we do not focus enough on in the Linux community. And that is how Linux prevents planned obsolescence. What is planned obsolescence will think about you guys go and buy the latest Apple phone, the iPhone. And, you know, that thing is designed to run a year, maybe two years, and then you go and buy a new iPhone. And that other iPhone that's only a couple of years old, you throw it away. It just, it ends up in a landfill somewhere, right? It ends up in a dump. And you've got billions of these devices just talking about phones, billions of these devices being thrown away every year. And let's not get into laptops, desktop computers. And, you know, you can't keep running. I could go buy the cheap laptops from Best Buy and they're running the latest version of Windows, whatever it happens to be at the time. And within three or four years, that machine starts really slowing down. And after a few years, it really can't even run with the operating system that it shipped with anymore, not like it used to. Linux can revive those machines. It can make those machines work again. And because of that, Linux is really one of the biggest things as far as environmentalism right now, as far as saving the environment. Because literally billions of devices that are being thrown away right now are still perfectly usable if people would put Linux-based operating systems on those desktop computers and laptops and mobile devices, phones and tablets. And what got me thinking about this topic today is I was just browsing Reddit earlier and I saw this post over at the r slash Linux subreddit and it was just a guy posting this little fluff post. You know, it wasn't a news post or anything. He was like, hey, Linux just saved me $1,000 because it brought an unusable PC back to life. He goes on to write that he needed a PC for work and he basically dug this old computer out of the closet. It was a old HP Pavilion P2 running Windows 7 and it just wouldn't run Windows 7 anymore. It was a nice computer at the time, but now it just won't run any modern operating system. You know, the proprietary operating system, of course, on Linux is going to run Blazing Fast, but he was going to have to go buy a new computer. It's a new workstation. He was probably going to have to spend about $1,000 he was saying to get something new. And then he decided, you know what, he was going to format the drive, wipe out Windows 7 and install the latest version of Linux Lite, which is an Ubuntu-based GNU slash Linux distribution that uses the XFCE desktop environment and is designed to be run on old equipment. It's very low on resources and this old computer from 2010, he says, runs like it's brand new. And that really is one of the biggest selling points for GNU slash Linux is the fact that you can take a computer that's 5, 10, 15 years old sometimes in some cases that will absolutely not run Windows 10, but it'll run Linux just fine. I promise you, it's very hard these days to find a computer that's so old that you cannot find a GNU slash Linux distribution that will run on it. And I can't stress how important this thing is as far as how important it is for the environment. How did we get into this planned obsolescence with computer software and hardware? The problem with it really started way before computers. Probably initially the reason planned obsolescence started was the automobile industry. We all know this, even in the early days of the car manufacturers. You know, you always had new models coming out every year. So it's almost like, hey, when the new model comes out, I need to upgrade to the new model because it's got to be better than the one I'm driving now. So you go and trade in that car and go buy a new car. You're constantly getting a new car and the used car is going to somebody else or eventually of course these used cars that probably still should be on the road or end up in the dump as well. And that's kind of what's going on, especially in the mobile space with phones and tablets. Nobody uses their phone or tablet for more than a couple years. It seems like two years is about average. If you find somebody that's still using that expensive smartphone that Samsung or that iPhone five years later, they are the exception. They're not the rule. Typically, especially the phone stores, you know, their phone provider is also pushing it. Hey, your two year contract is up or whatever it is you sign. Hey, you know what? It wouldn't be that expensive to go ahead and get that next device, even though the device they're running still works. But they're trying to sell them that new device. And unfortunately, we the consumer oftentimes we're tricked into this and we buy that new device, that new shiny device that we don't even need. And I love the fact that this Reddit post that mentioned distributions like Linux Lite, because I think that's something we need to start talking about, too, is, of course, we've got the big heavy bloated distributions with the big heavy bloated desktop environments, like GNOME and Cinnamon and Plasma and things like that. But a lot of people think, well, you know, most modern computers have plenty of RAM and disk space. Why are people running things like Linux Lite and Lubuntu and Peppermint or even things like Puppy and Tiny Core and Antics and things like that really minimal stuff? Nobody has to use that because most modern computers can run the latest version of Ubuntu or Fedora just fine. Why run one of the lightweight Linux distributions? Well, because really we need to start respecting the environment and our natural resources a little more. We shouldn't just be buying new computers and new phones and new tablets just to be buying them. If the one you have can still work, you should try to make it work. And the final story I want to talk about just briefly is the big release of Linux 5.9. I say it's a big release. Actually, Linus Torvalds kind of downplays this and that it's not really a big release. There's not a ton of new exciting features in 5.9. Of course, with every kernel release, there's a ton of new stuff added. But this isn't one that's going to really generate a lot of sexy headlines. And for those of us on static release Linux distributions, you're not going to see Linux 5.9 until probably sometime next year for those of us on rolling release distributions such as myself. I run an ArchBase distribution Linux 5.9. It's going to be available if it's not already available for me, available within a few days here. So I'm going to pull up this article here from ZDNet. This is written by Stephen J. Von Nichols and he titles his article here, Linux 5.9. It's not a game changer, but a good solid Linux kernel. So kind of echoing what the Linux kernel team is saying. Hey, there's nothing really exciting here, but it's just what we do, right? It's just another Linux release. And again, if those of us on rolling release distros, we can get this thing right away. Those of you on static release distros, Linux 5.9, it's still a long way off before you guys can use it. But if you are adventurous and you don't mind compiling your own Linux kernel, which can take a while depending on your machine, you have to have a beefy machine. And you know, the Linux kernel is not a small program anymore. Right now, the compressed size of the Linux kernel 5.9 archive is 115.5 megabytes. And then that's the compressed size. So the Linux kernel is just massive, right? Millions and millions and millions of lines of code compiling the Linux kernel can take a while. But those of you that want to do it, go for it. But would it be worth it to go out and rush and get the latest Linux 5.9? For most people, probably not. But some of the things that might interest you in Linux 5.9 is you should have better performance as far as Intel, Ivy Bridge, and some of the latest AMD processors because of the support for the FSGS base instruction. But for desktop Linux users, even that, you're not going to see much of a difference because that's really for users that are really pushing their RAM. You know, they're pushing RAM with many different workloads. It's really for those that are really beating up their Linux servers. And desktop users are probably not going to see much, at least in regards to that. The kernel team did spend a little time working on some of the more popular Linux file systems for the kernel 5.9, and some of the file systems they worked on included butterfs, extend4, f2fs, and xfs. They also now have improved support for NVMe 2.0 within Linux. And for those of you running servers, you know, you guys, especially the high-end computer folks, you guys are going to be really happy because of an improved Linux task scheduler that supports a deadline scheduling class. Because until this release, 5.9, the scheduler couldn't deal with computers which had multiple CPUs with different performance levels. That's no longer the case. So all in all, while it's not, you know, just a groundbreaking earth-shattering release, 5.9 is definitely a solid release for the kernel. And I do want to congratulate the kernel team on a job well done. And that is it for this episode of Unfettered Freedom. This was episode 9 of Unfettered Freedom. I try to release a new episode every two weeks now. Originally for the first seven episodes, I was doing weekly podcasts, but here recently I've decided to switch to a pie weekly schedule. I think that makes more sense. So look for episode 10 of Unfettered Freedom two weeks from today. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Corbinia, Mitchell, Devin, Fran, Art 5530, Akami, Chuck, Claudio, Donnie, Dylan, George, Gregory, Caleb, Devil, Suisse, Paul, Scott, and Willie. They are the producers of the show. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, episode 9 of Unfettered Freedom would not have been possible. Also, I need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because, again, this channel has no corporate sponsors. It's supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, consider doing so. Look for Distro Tube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace.