The H archive: features by Richard Hillesley
The following is a list of features that have been written for The H by columnist Richard Hillesley.
Richard Hillesley lives in Totnes in the south-west of England. He was a software engineer for 17 years, and is a former editor of LinuxUser magazine.
Richard Hillesley examines Red Hat's early history and the genesis of the Fedora distribution. With "Beefy Miracle" due to be released soon, a look backwards grants insight on where Fedora is headed in the immediate future
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By leveraging the power of copyright, GPL enforcers can use copyleft to defend free software. Richard Hillesley looks at who does this enforcement and what effect it has on the wider open source ecosystem.
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Having been in development since 2008, Wayland has now seen its first "real release", 0.85; the first full version should appear by the end of 2012. As it is expected eventually to replace the X Window system, Richard Hillesley looks at the problems that have accumulated for X and how the development of Wayland seeks to address these
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The success of Linux Mint is down to its usability - easy to set up and get running and then use. The latest development is a new user interface, Cinnamon. Richard Hillesley looks at the history of Mint and considers whether Cinnamon marks a turning point for the distribution
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GNOME and KDE may be the high profile Linux desktop environments, but they are not to everybody's tastes. Richard Hillesley describes the different approaches taken by a couple of the more prominent alternatives
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Richard Hillesley talked with Dave Neary about his experience working with open source communities and companies, and discovered that the important thing is not so much what the rules are, but that everyone knows what they are
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Ubuntu has come a long way since Mark Shuttleworth was inspired to create the Debian-based distribution in 2004, however, after seven years of success, a release is now being greeted with less than universal acclaim. Richard Hillesley looks at the history of Ubuntu and whether the Unity gamble will pay off
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It has been suggested that Oracle might be planning to move MySQL away from dual licensing to an open core model. Richard Hillesley takes us through the arguments, and the pros and cons of these different models
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The Document Foundation (TDF) and LibreOffice turned one year old last month, and it has been a good year. LibreOffice was a dive into the unknown, and an opportunity to prove what the community already knew: that a chance to swim free could only bring positive results
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Many Linux distributions have taken the path of easy GUI-based installation in order to appeal to a broader mix of users. But not Arch Linux, which emphasises simplicity of technical complexity over general usability. Richard Hillesley explains.
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On a recent visit back to the UK, lead Samba developer Jeremy Allison met up with Richard Hillesley. Richard here relates Allison's description of the history of his involvement with open source, Linux and Samba
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Gentoo is not like other Linux distribution. The Gentoo swims faster than other penguins, and dives deeper. Where more fashionable distributions worry about fast installation and ease of use, Gentoo worries about efficient compilation and degrees of customisation. Richard Hillesley explains its history
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The often predicted tipping point for Linux on the desktop just never seems to materialise, despite a variety of attempts from numerous companies. Richard Hillesley takes us through the history of these attempts, analysing the reasons for failure, and has a modest proposal of his own to offer
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Following the acceptance of OpenOffice as an Apache Incubator project, Richard Hillesley takes a look at how the controversies surrounding LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have highlighted issues with the licensing and corporate governance of open source projects and communities
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As the dust settles and Novell parts company with open source, where does that leave SUSE? Richard Hillesley takes a look at the history and the impact on OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Mono and more, and has some suggestions for SUSE
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As PJ retires from running the influential Groklaw website, Richard Hillesley talks to her about how Groklaw went from being a personal project to "the blog that made a difference"
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Games have always been a part of open source, but oddly the gaming industry has not taken to open source or Linux. Richard Hilleslely looks at the synergies between developers of open source and games and the developing market
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Idealism and pragmatism are attributes that have characterised either side of the free software and open source divide. But is it an appropriate characterisation or are the caricatures overly simplistic? Richard Hillesley looks into the philosophical divide
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Richard Hillesley has a look at Nokia's curious relationship with open source, finds out where it all went wrong and has a conversation with a survivor of its effects
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Linux is now a respected, mature operating system, that's free and open source, so it shouldn't be surprising that it has a generic role as a platform for tools for the repair and rescue of both Linux and Windows operating systems
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