The Fedora Award is presented by Red Hat to the brightest stars of the Fedora community. Of the thousands of valuable contributors to Fedora, these are the individual contributors who have most strongly distinguished themselves over the past year. Building a community Linux distribution is hard work, and a lot of “heavy lifting” goes on behind the scenes. Without the dedication of these individual community members, Fedora would not be nearly as successful as it has become. We are extremely pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Fedora awards for 2007.
Last time, we talked about installing Sugar so that you could emulate the OLPC environment on your system. Now it’s time to explore how activities work on the XO.
One Laptop Per Child comes closer to being a reality every day — and every day, more people are looking for ways to get involved with the OLPC project. It will still be quite a while before the XO systems are available for broad distribution, but people can see for themselves what the XO is all about by downloading Sugar, the core of the OLPC Human Interface.
Years ago, we had some great radio stations in Raleigh. One of the greatest was WRDU 106.1. They dominated the airwaves in this town for years; in fact, RDU was consistently voted one of the top rock stations in the country by readers of Rolling Stone magazine. I was one of those readers, and I looked forward to the opportunity to vote for RDU every year. They had top-notch DJs who knew their rock and roll. They were amazing at balancing music I knew and loved with music I didn’t yet know, but would come to love.
Last week, WRDU became “The Rooster” — a Clear Channel codename for “the best country music of yesterday and today, as defined by our algorithms, with no live DJs ever.” The best part: it’s not even the only station called Rooster Country 106. Clear Channel has another Rooster Country 106: WSTH in Columbus, Georgia. Not to be confused, of course, with Rooster Country 93.3 in Jacksonville, Florida — which for some reason can be found at roostercountry107.com.
Some people around here are calling it the end of an era. Some people on Wikipedia are claiming that it’s a stunt, and that WRDU will be back in a few short months on the other end of the dial. Other people apparently don’t care for that interpretation of events, and have re-edited the Wikipedia entry accordingly.
And me? I was disappointed to hear about the format change, and amused to discover that it has evidently spawned a wiki war — but the reality is that, for me and a lot of people like me, RDU died years ago when Clear Channel came to town. I’ve been tuned-out of America’s radio airwaves ever since.
Just because I stopped listening to the radio, didn’t mean that I stopped loving music. It just meant that I had to go about loving it differently.
For me, and for most of my friends, that meant using the internet. Between internet radio and the file sharing revolution, I discovered that I had more opportunities than ever to discover lots of music — some of which was new, but most of which was just new to me.
These days, the online distribution of music is completely mainstream. Apple is working hard to convince everyone that it’s all about iTunes and the iPod. But there’s still a lot of room for innovation in online music delivery — and some of that innovation is happening with the help of open source development.
Slim Devices produces the Squeezebox and the Transporter, both of which are receiving rave reviews from all over for their seamless integration of online music into the home stereo environment. The magic behind both of these devices: SlimServer, a network music server available under the GPL.
Pioneering musicians have been releasing music into the Creative Commons since the first versions of these licenses were first developed almost four years ago. In the early days, it wasn’t easy to find this new “open source music”; persistent Google searches would turn up pockets of music here and there, but it took real dedication to find music under a Creative Commons license. And when you did, honestly, a lot of it wasn’t very good.
