Free Software Magazine

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This article is about the e-zine by The Open Company Partners. For the defunct Chinese magazine, see Free Software Magazine (China).

The cover of the April 2006 issue.

Free Software Magazine (also known as FSM and originally titled The Open Voice) is a bi-monthly, mostly free-content e-zine about free software. It was started in November 2004 by Australian Tony Mobily, under the auspices of The Open Company Partners, Inc. (based in the British Virgin Islands), and carries the subtitle "The free magazine for the free software world".

Free Software Magazine is not only, like many magazines, about Linux and the free software that runs on it; but is also about free software in general, including articles about software freedom and how it can be protected.

Free Software Magazine was originally conceived by its creator as a magazine to be sold in both print and electronic formats, with a higher signal-to-noise ratio than mass-produced print "Linux" magazines.[1] Under this model, the articles were freely licensed six weeks after the print edition's publication. However, the high costs of printing and postage resulted in the magazine moving to exclusively electronic publication via the PDF format. As of Issue 16 (February 2007) the magazine exists in online HTML form only, the PDF version having proven too costly in time and money also.[2]

FSM has three main sections:

Power-up: Non-technical articles about various subjects (interviews, opinions, book reviews, etc.)

User space: Articles aimed at end users.

Hacker's code: Technical articles about what can be achieved with free software.

There are also regular competitions where readers have a chance of winning books reviewed in the magazine by answering simple questions.

Most of the articles are released under a free license (generally a CC License for those in Power-up and the GNU FDL for those in Hacker's code). Some articles are released under a verbatim-copying-only license.

FSM also has a blog section where authors write on more political, philosophical and ethical aspects of the free software world, and discuss free software advocacy and community.

[edit] Free Software Daily

Free Software Daily (FS Daily) was a website created by the staff of Free Software Magazine that posted summaries of articles about free software. It was based on Slash and was similar in nature to Slashdot. However, the project died before it could gain momentum. This was mainly because of the huge hardware resources required by Slash and the time constraints of the staff at Free Software Magazine.

The FSM website's blogs have somewhat filled the gap that Free Software Daily originally planned to fill.