As the FOSS is getting high attention from different entities in the world, just to mention the UNDP and the European Union, and because of the Technical Committees and Groups around the glob in addition to the number of researches, papers, conferences and meetings, and the different reports about FOSS, we established the Free and Open Source Software in Libyan Group (FOSSiL group) to formalize the efforts and activities that will be in Libya related to this field. We have as one of our main goals is to open the opportunities for our Computer Students within different colleges and institutes, programmers, computer engineers, and enthusiastic in Libya to benefit and to participate in developing huge software packages and exchange with engineers with high experience to improve their performance and have the best and effective way of Knowledge Transfer.
In the following sections we will present the Open Source Definition that is initiated and applied by the Open Source International. It will be followed by two sections each for one of the most commonly used Open Source Software Licenses.

Free and open source software

Last month Dell XPS M1330 has failed me. This time, no amount of technical knowledge can solve the problem–I’ve been hit by the defective NVIDIA GPU issue.  my laptop screen started to freeze up and automatically reboot. This happened seven times in five hours . Now my laptop refuses to boot at all–or, more accurately, boots with these beautiful vertical lines (see below). And no, plugging in an external monitor does NOT fix the issue. This is a video card problem, not a monitor problem. I should note that I am extremely reliant on my laptop–it is my primary computer (I’m almost like a Mac person in that way… perhaps I should take the hint and switch to a Mac?). Thus, I have incurred considerable cost in work time trying to remedy this issue stuck without a computer.

An early indication of failure?

The current state of my machine. Unusable.

Some Background on the Issue
In early July, NVIDIA informed stockholders of the problem:

…the company just informed investors that “significant quantities” of previous-generation graphics chips have been failing at “higher than normal rates,” and that it’s lowering its Q2 estimates due to pricing pressure. NVIDIA will be taking a $150M to $250M charge against earnings next quarter to cover the cost of repairing and replacing the affected chips, but didn’t Read the rest of this entry »