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).

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 United States of America), and carries the subtitle The free magazine for the free software world.

1 History
- 1.1 PDF trouble
2 Content
3 Free Software Daily
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History

FSM 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.

[edit] PDF trouble

At Issue 16 (February 2007) the print-ready, hand-crafted PDF version was withdrawn, having proven too costly in time and money also. The magazine then only became available on-line.^[2] This move sparked a harsh response from the community. Some time later automatically generated PDF versions of issues and articles were made available as part of additional services for registered users. These PDF were generated with HTMLDoc, and weren't comparable quality-wise to the previously available PDFs. At the end of 2007 the formatting language of the magazine changed from XML to Markdown. As a result of this the PDF issues were no longer produced.^[3] However, as of the 6th of March 2008, PDF and printer friendly version of articles are restored and available to all logged-in users.

[edit] Content

FSM devotes most of its context to Linux, the GNU Project and free software in general, including articles about software freedom and how it can be protected. It 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 free software related books reviewed in the magazine.

Most of the articles are released under a free license (generally a Creative Commons License for those in Power-up and the GNU Free Documentation License 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 FSM that posted summaries of articles about free software. At first, it was based on Slash and was similar in nature to Slashdot.org. 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 FSM staff.

The FSM website's blogs somewhat filled the gap that Free Software Daily originally planned to fill. But later, FS Daily came back forst as a Pligg based site,^[4] and then as a Drigg site. Drigg was developed by Free Software Magazine's editor Tony Mobily specifically for FSDaily. However, Drigg is now available as a standard Drupal module.