Today in Open Source: Is Microsoft committed to open source? Linux users don't think so. Plus: Android flashlight app violates user privacy, and have you been pwned?

Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5 has shipped, here come the derivatives, with both Oracle and CentOS releasing new versions of their respective Red Hat–alike Linux distros.

Mainline Release (Linus's tree) News

3.13-rc2 has been released on November 29th. This release candidate includes several small bug fixes. Please read the 3.13-rc2 release announcement.

The latest iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (6.5) is now available, and it's a serious contender to usurp all other platforms as king of the enterprise space. This particular release was designed specifically to simplify the operation of mission-critical SAP applications. The new release focuses on key enterprise-specific areas, including:

ZaReason's latest incarnation of their Android tablet, the ZaTab ZT2, is a sturdy little chunky monkey.

Version 1.14 of the eBook reader and management software Calibre has been announced on December 6.

That's the headline and question NPR blogger Gene Demby explores in this article. Demby looks at why open source developers tend to be white men, interviewing people who say there are a variety of contributing factors that keep African Americans and Latinos from participating in software development including education, Internet access, pay inequality, and more.

You don't have to be a professional photographer, nor need specialized equipment to create dramatic panoramic pictures. In fact, there are quite a few picture stitch apps (online or offline, desktop or mobile), which can easily create a panoramic view of a scene from two or more overlapping pictures. This tutorial explains how to stitch photos together on Linux, by using panoramic photo stitching software called Hugin.

This tutorial helps you learn the skills required to manage DB2 database servers, instances and databases. Furthermore, you will get introduced to DB2 autonomic computing capabilities and you will learn to use IBM data Studio to perform database administration tasks such as job scheduling and generating diagrams of access plans. This tutorial prepares you for Part 1 of the DB2 10.1 DBA for Linux, UNIX, and Windows certification exam 611.

SteamOS installed on the new Jetpack may be a possibility, allowing for a hidden, mounted Steam Machine behind your TV

Conky, or call it an "Active Wallpaper", is an application that can display dynamic information on what's going on with the computer on our desktop.

Conky is highly configurable in its looks, in what and how it displays, whether text, bar, graph or special iconic fonts and how often and where-about on the screen, in all three dimensions.

Brightest Flashlight Free, available in the Google Play store, has been downloaded over 50 million times, but a complaint from the FTC reveals that the seemingly innocent app transmits “precise location” data to third-party advertisers alongside a unique device identifier.

  These are my reflections on CityCamp Minnesota 2013, which occurred at St. Thomas in Minneapolis on November 9, 2013.  What was it, and what worked well? CityCamp MN 2013, hosted by Open Twin Cities and E-Democracy.org, was an event for civic hackers, open data nerds and advocates, and social justice-minded individuals in the region. Saturday was an open space technology-style unconference event. It was brilliantly planned. While I’ve never been to an unconference before, I was impressed by the way it generally fostered a sense of community, conversation, and connection. This stands in opposition to most conferences I attend (and that is a pretty decent number), which primarily serve to foster a few connections in the hallways between tedious and oftentimes irrelevant-to-me presentations.

Clement Lefebvre has announced a minutes ago, December 6, the immediate availability for download of the OEM installation images of the recently released Linux Mint 16 operating system.

MakuluLinux 4.0 is a Debian-based distribution providing a sleek, smooth and stable user experience on any computer. It includes pre-installed multimedia codecs, device drivers and software for everyday use.

The Netrunner Team releases Netrunner 13.12 RC – 32bit for immediate download and testing.

The oddly-named Wayland Live CD environment for checking out the next-generation Linux display stack has been updated. The Wayland Live CD ships with many enabled tool-kits, the latest Wayland code, Orbital and Hawaii support, KDE Frameworks Wayland programs, and other new native Wayland applications.

The final and stable release of the Almanah 0.11 diary software for the GNOME desktop environment has been officially announced a few days ago, on December 2, 2013.

The quantum crypto business is hardly crowded, but ID Quantique is hoping to set itself apart with a 100 Gbps-capable unit.

While Google Chrome and other modern web-browsers -- even modern versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer -- support separate processes between the user-interface and other rendering tasks, notably missing from the threading party has been Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla developers, however, have been working towards a multi-process Firefox.

Today in Open Source: Valve joins the Linux Foundation. Plus: openSUSE 13.1 review, and a screenshot tour of Tiny Core 5.1.

Humble Bundle presents the Humble Jumbo Bundle. The games included are listed.

Marvell unveiled a more secure, graphics-rich Armada 1500 Plus SoC for Android 4.2.2 smart TVs “with Google services,” but never mentioned Google TV. Welcome to the post Google TV world.

Google entered the cloud infrastructure business this week, but they joined a crowded field. Just because they're Google doesn't guarantee success. They will have to earn their customers just like every other vendor in the space. But worth mentioning it does allow you to use any out of the box version of Linux for an OS.

The latest FreeBSD code (for 10.0) supports not only Intel KMS but also the open-source AMD Radeon driver ported from the Linux kernel. This Intel/Radeon KMS support has since trickled into DragonFlyBSD and other BSD platforms.

Matthew Garrett has written an insightful blog post about security issues pertaining to the Linux kernel's kexec functionality that could defeat any security benefits provided by Secure Boot. Using kexec could even allow you to boot a Windows kernel...

In an interview with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, VentureBeat got a bird’s-eye view of the future of the open-source operating system for 2014. We also addressed the controversial issues of government spying and “backdoors” -- those nefarious windows into our personal online lives that the public recently discovered in most of the services we use every day.

Back on Halloween, when we ran our article on Ross Gardler’s presentation on “Microsoft and Open Source” at the All Things Open conference, we posted a poll that asked, “Is Microsoft committed to open source?” Guess what? You answered “no,” as in “nope,” “nadda” or “ain’t no way, baby.”

In Linux, there are several ways to access Google Calendar natively, such as by using email client plugins (e.g., Evolution or Thunderbird) or calendar apps (e.g., Sunbird or Rainlendar). These solutions, however, typically involve installing unnecessarily bulky software which you will probably not need. If all you want is to access and get reminded by Google Calendar natively on Linux, then you can consider Google Calendar command line interface (or gcalcli), which is much more light-weight. Even better for Linux desktop, you can use gcalcli together with Conky, so that you can integrate Google Calendar into your desktop theme transparently.

After Amazon tipped plans to build delivery drones, hacker Samy Kamkar unveiled a SkyJack drone designed to hijack them with an AR.Drone and a Raspberry Pi. When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes last Sunday to show a prototype of a drone Amazon plans to use for a new Prime Air delivery service, […]