For 6 years, the Bitkom Open Source Guide 2.0 was a tuto­r­i­al for the appro­pri­ate use of open-source soft­ware. It was a bench­mark for Ger­man com­pa­nies. But it has aged over time, nat­u­ral­ly. Good that Bitkom and its ‘Open Source’ work­ing group have tak­en up the top­ic again: In June 2022, there was offi­cial­ly released an expand­ed and refined Bitkom Open Source Guide 3.0, — again intend­ed to be a man­u­al and a bench­mark for com­pa­nies […]

Under Ubun­tu 22.04, Fres­cobal­di starts with an error: The area for dis­play­ing the music sheets says that Fres­cobal­di unex­pect­ed­ly pass­es an argu­ment of the type float to a func­tion in qpageview /highlight.py respec­tive­ly qpageview/shadow.py. Now, you can ‘google’ for the cause — or read the fol­low­ing lines: […]

After hav­ing updat­ed to Ubun­tu 22.04, I recent­ly want­ed to reac­ti­vate my music work envi­ron­ment. But when I installed Musescore‑3 and let it play my music score, I got an ugly mess of back­ground nois­es. And I could not add any sound­font. Obvi­ous­ly, I faced two obsta­cles that I had to over­come […]

Musi­col­o­gists have a hard time — name­ly if they want to enrich their LaTeX texts by score exam­ples and har­mo­ny analy­ses. Up to now, there did not exist any study of whether and how that could be real­ized with free soft­ware. This arti­cle sum­ma­rizes a Ger­man-writ­ten self-ref­er­en­tial tuto­r­i­al teach­ing what’s pos­si­ble and what is not with respect to LaTeX and Musi­col­o­gy: […]

A pre­sen­ta­tion with­out images sucks. There­fore, we are some­times tempt­ed to take some from the Inter­net for beau­ti­fy­ing our work. There are so many excel­lent pic­tures on the World Wide Web. But to legal­ly insert­ing a for­eign pic­ture in one’s own pre­sen­ta­tion is not that easy. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a new type of troll has emerged recent­ly, the CC-BY image trolls: […]

By releas­ing the Open Source License Com­pendi­um and the Open Source Com­pli­ance Advi­sor, Deutsche Telekom has sup­port­ed Open Source Com­pli­ance. At BOSL‑3.0 I was one of the co-authors — on behalf of DT. But DT offers so many com­plex Open Source based prod­ucts that it is too expen­sive to cre­ate the nec­es­sary Open Source com­pli­ance arti­facts man­u­al­ly. Thus, DT needs a prac­ti­cal­ly usable auto­mat­ed tool­chain. This post dis­cuss­es a new method (TDOSCA) and a new tool (OSCake) for automat­ing FOSS com­pli­ance that DT devel­ops and con­tributes under the umbrel­la of the Open Chain Project. […]

In 2000, I released the Gnu Tem­plate Gen­er­a­tion Tools, also known as gtgt. It instan­ti­ates a set of sources that were read­i­ly pre­pared for being devel­oped, com­piled, and installed with the GNU ‘Autoconf/Automake’ devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment. A few years lat­er they were passed — by new lan­guages, tech­niques, and tools. But now — in the con­text of TDOSCA — we could revive gtgt: […]

I am a loy­al soul. But my patience is lim­it­ed. Ubun­tu 20.04 dis­plays the tips from Eclipse in black on black. Hmm. Mark­down edi­tors are cum­ber­some. Oops. And the ‘spell-check’ for Ger­man-Eng­lish texts still does­n’t work. Grrr. So, it is time to con­quer new fron­tiers: every­one is already talk­ing about ‘Atom’. Let us give it a try, even if Atom on Ubun­tu 04/20 enforces us to cir­cum­nav­i­gate some cliffs. […]

Today, the Ger­man Coro­na-Warn-App was released as Open Source Soft­ware. You may know it as CWA. The jour­nal­ists most­ly received it pos­i­tive­ly, even those of Spiegel and Welt. The Ger­man gov­ern­ment want­ed to release it as open-source soft­ware. That should increase the accep­tance of the app by the Ger­man peo­ple. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there is still some skep­ti­cism. Let me com­ment on some of these con­cerns: […]