''Free Software Magazine'' (also known as ''FSM'' and originally titled ''The Open Voice'') is a Web site that produces a (generally bi-monthly) mostly free-content

online magazine An online magazine is a magazine published on the Internet, through bulletin board systems and other forms of public computer networks. One of the first magazines to convert from a print magazine format to being online only was the computer ma ...

about free software. It was started in November 2004 by Australian Tony Mobily, the former editor of ''TUX Magazine'', under the auspices of The Open Company Partners, Inc. (based in the United States), and carried the subtitle ''The free magazine for the free software world''.

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. Under this model, the articles were freely licensed six weeks after the print edition's publication. As O'Reilly Media's onLAMP.com noted, "several excellent magazines cover Linux, but they’re directed at particular subsets of Linux users and don’t have the broad mandate of Free Software Magazine." However, the high costs of printing and postage resulted in the magazine moving to exclusively electronic publication via

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

PDF version history

Initially a print-ready, hand-crafted PDF version was available for download. With Issue 16 (February 2007), this was withdrawn, with the publishers citing time and money constraints. As a result, the magazine is no longer available in print copy. This move sparked a harsh response from some members of the community. As a result, from March 2008, PDF and printer friendly version of articles and PDF versions of entire issues were made available to all logged-in users. These PDF files are created automatically using

TOXIC Toxicity is the degree to which a chemical substance or a particular mixture of substances can damage an organism. Toxicity can refer to the effect on a whole organism, such as an animal, bacterium, or plant, as well as the effect on a sub ...

and omit the styling and presentation of the print-ready ones.

Content

FSM devotes most of its context to

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

, the

GNU Project The GNU Project () is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collabor ...

and free software in general, including articles about software freedom and how it can be protected. The issues had 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. Most of the articles are released under a free license (generally a

Creative Commons License A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

GNU Free Documentation License The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the r ...

). Some articles are released under a verbatim-copying-only license. In keeping with the move to more on-line content, FSM moved to blog-style columns where regular authors write on more political, philosophical and ethical aspects of the free software world, and discuss free software advocacy and community in addition to tutorials and reviews of free software. There is also a community posts section which allows registered users to post similar blog-style pieces. The site also features a regular

webcomic Webcomics (also known as online comics or Internet comics) are comics published on a website or mobile app. While many are published exclusively on the web, others are also published in magazines, newspapers, or comic books. Webcomics can be c ...

"the Bizarre Cathedral".

''Free Software Daily''

''Free Software Daily'' (''FS Daily'') was a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and W ...

originally created by the staff of FSM that posted summaries of articles about

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

. At first, it was based on

Slash Slash may refer to: * Slash (punctuation), the "/" character Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Slash (Marvel Comics) * Slash (''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles'') Music * Harry Slash & The Slashtones, an American rock band * Nash ...

and was similar in nature to

Slashdot.org ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally advertised itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories concerning science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evalu ...

. However, the project died before it could gain momentum, 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, first as a Pligg based site, and then as a

Drigg Drigg is a village situated in the civil parish of Drigg and Carleton on the West Cumbria coast of the Irish Sea and on the boundary of the Lake District National Park in the Borough of Copeland in the county of Cumbria, England. Drigg and Ca ...

site. Drigg was developed by Free Software Magazine's editor Tony Mobily specifically for FSDaily. However, Drigg is now available as a standard

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwid ...

module. Although Free Software Magazine and Free Software Daily share similar motives and a common root, they are no longer directly connected.Dave Guard of FSDaily on FSM & FSD
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''Free Software Magazine Press''

In 2009 Free Software Magazine Press published their first book under the imprint of Free Software Magazine Press. The book, ''Achieving Impossible Things with Free Culture and Commons-Based Enterprise'' by Terry Hancock, was published both as a printed book and as a series of free articles released under an " Attribution Share-Alike"

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

References

External links

* {{Linux Bimonthly magazines published in the United States Computer magazines published in the United States Downloadable magazines Drupal Free magazines Free software websites Linux magazines Magazines established in 2004 Online computer magazines