Free Software

Definitions

What do we mean by free software?

Although you can download everything you see here freely, without charge, we don't mean "it doesn't cost anything". We mean free as in "free speech", i.e. without restriction. This is a strange concept for users of most software today. While we are encouraged to think of anyone who "shares" software as a criminal or a "pirate", there are plenty of people who are developing their own software, to give away freely, knowing that it can be built upon.

We believe in open source software and all code we develop for our own use is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), as free software. If you wish to find out more about open source software, you could start at the Free Software Foundation / GNU page, which can be found here.

We believe in open source because, if we all continue to follow the current pernicious trend for proprietary code and software patents, then we are doomed to continually reinvent wheels. Whereas if we work with free software, we have the real opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants.

This approach to software development is showing huge benefits to mankind. Instead of making one man the richest in history, GNU/Linux is enabling poor countries to develop technologies which are giving real, life changing benefits. This is a noble cause.

Anyway, OUR software, which you see here, may not change lives, but we wholeheartedly approve of the philosophy. This section is completely new and is being built as you read ( October 2008 ). Please come back soon to see the updates. We will be releasing source code for download in this section.

Available Projects:

  • mgo_input
    This is a small project which grew out of the need for a small X Windows dialog box which could be invoked from a shell script. Specifically, I wanted to be able to get a user to enter his password and then fire off a series of smb_mounts for a login. While I could do this in bash quite easily with the read command (and the -s switch for no echo), it's not particularly pretty. As the script is always running under X, this is the solution. It returns the entered text via stdout, so can be easily invoked inside backticks. This is an ideal small project for someone who is looking to start writing GUI apps with GTK+ / Gnome in C. Download the source here.

  • jpegdiff
    This is a cool little utility which allows you to compare two JPG files, perhaps output from a webcam, and allows you to judge how similar they are. You could effectively build motion detection in a bash script with this. You can specify exclusion zones and a "fuzziness" value to counteract camera noise. Requires libjpeg (you've probably got it... try "find / -name libjpeg.so -print 2>/dev/null" to check. Download the source here.