- This article is about Free Software Magazine by The Open Company Partners. A similar magazine of the same title was produced for a short time in China in 2002.
Free Software Magazine (a.k.a. FSM, The Open Voice) is a monthly, mostly free-content magazine 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 British Virgin Islands).
Free Software Magazine is not, like many magazines, about Linux and applications (free or proprietary) that run on it, but free software in general, including articles about software freedom and how it can be protected. It also aspires to a higher level of content quality than the cheaper, mass produced `Linux' magazines.
The magazine has three main sections:
- Focus
- Two or three articles dedicated to a specific topic examined from different points of view.
- Tech world
- Not-too-detailed technical articles about what can be achieved with free software.
- Word world
- Non-technical articles about free software and issues surrounding it (such as laws laws, people, predictions, history, and current events).
There are also plans for a third section in the future:
- Fiction world
- Short stories that relate to the today's technological world (especially free software).
The magazine is distributed from the USA on paper (or in PDF) to its subscribers around the world.
Nearly all the articles are released under a free license (generally a CC License for those in Word World and the GNU FDL for those in Tech World) six weeks after the edition's publication. Some parts of the magazine may only be release under a non-free license that allows verbartim copying after that period. All the contents of the magazine are made available in HTML and PDF after six weeks.
The magazine uses its own XML DTD for articles (as well as pages on the WWW site) with an RTF-to-XML convertor for author's submissions. The XML is then converted into HTML using XSLT for the WWW, and into LaTeX using a custom-built finite-state-automaton script for the PDF and printed versions.[1]
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