Ubuntu is not a consensus-based community. Consensus communities rarely work, and I am not aware of any Open Source project that bases their work on wider consensus in the community. It would be impossible and impractical to notify our community of every decision we make, let alone try to base a decision on a majority view, but we do try to ensure that major changes are communicated to our leaders first (this is something we have been driving improvements in recently). We always need to find the right balance between transparency and JFDI, and sometimes the balance isn’t quite there, but that does not mean there is some kind of illuminati-ish scheme going on behind the scenes.

SugarCRM continues to grow fast. But is the open source alternative to Salesforce.com, Oracle Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics CRM a serious contender in the IT channel? I believe the answer remains yes. The bigger question is whether SugarCRM will remain independent, march toward an IPO, or seek a buyer over the next couple of years. Here's why.

Linux Advocates is pleased to announce Caitlyn Martin has agreed to become a regular contributing writer. Please make her welcome.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Although Google's keynote at the I/O conference this week focused heavily on the APIs and behind-the-scenes development of the Android operating system, it looks like there's a lot more in store. This idea was especially apparent in a panel discussion today involving eleven members of the Android development team. The team sat for a forty-minute question and answer session, and while they dodged most inquiries about forthcoming features for Android, they did offer a bit of insight into what the future of Android might look like, what developers could do to help further the platform, and what they’ve learned from their journey thus far.

A few days ago, Canonical reiterated its commitment to restoring the Ubuntu "community" Web portal to front-and-center of official Ubuntu websites. At almost the same moment, news hit that the Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to discontinue the Ubuntu Brainstorm site, another part of ubuntu.com that has served in the past as a vector between developers and community members. Bad timing or cognitive dissonance? Here's a look at the details.

Mageia 3 is out. Finally. Linux Advocate Dietrich Schmitz gives a brief run-down of what's new.

The tee command is a little tool which is very useful but often overlooked. The function of tee doesnt sound very exciting, it was created for only one purpose: write STDIN to STDOUT and a file. But tee actually can do a lot for you. Basically if you want to redirect STDOUT of a program as well as printing it to the screen, tee is the right tool to use.

Linux has an ever-expanding library of thousands of free games, many of which are released under an open source license. A good selection of these titles are entertaining, highly addictive, offer captivating gameplay, and are most importantly, great fun to play. Identifying entertaining and challenging games is something that we have a passion for.

If Canonical succeeds in making Ubuntu Linux widespread on phones and tablets, it will revolutionize the role of open source software in mobile computing. But in a sense, the company has already achieved some remarkably revolutionary feats with Mir, the display server it started developing several months ago. This may sound like something only geeks can appreciate, but it could actually become a huge deal for mainstream IT.

When I wrote an article for FSM a few years ago about 3D printing it was a big topic in the open-source community but it had not yet gone fully mainstream. If there was one thing guaranteed to make 3D printing explode onto the mainstream news media it was an item about someone "printing" a gun. That got your attention, didn't it? Mine too. It's controversial of course but it might just be the beginning of a rerun of the Napster/Piratebay episodes in the 21st century - with the inevitable debate between patent-free, non-hierarchical open-source models and patent-encumbered proprietary software and hardware. Napster was a ripple. 3D printing will be a tsunami.

Read the article at Free software Magazine.

Ten years ago, Nick Carr said IT doesn't matter -- sort of.

The jarring headline of Carr's May 2003 article, "IT Doesn't Matter," is what many people remember, and it tends to overshadow his more thought-provoking thesis: that companies have overestimated the strategic value of IT, which is becoming ubiquitous and therefore diminishing as a source of competitive differentiation.

"The opportunities for gaining IT-based advantages are already dwindling," Carr wrote in the Harvard Business Review article. "Best practices are now quickly built into software or otherwise replicated. And as for IT-spurred industry transformations, most of the ones that are going to happen have likely already happened or are in the process of happening."

In m23 rock 13.1 there are a lot of visible changes: the web interface can now be adapted with themes, Linux Mint 13 with Mate and Cinnamon was added and you can now install m23 on a Raspberry Pi.

MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system, the impetus being the community maintenance of its free status under the GNU GPL. As a fork of a leading open source software system, it is notable for being led by its original developers and triggered by concerns over direction by an acquiring commercial company Oracle. Contributors are required to share their copyright with Monty Program AB.

In the open source community focused on graphics tools, GIMP gets a great deal of attention, and there are many free online resources available for it, but if you're in search of an open source illustration tool that can compete with Adobe Illustrator and is increasingly useds by designers for effects, logos and still graphics, give Inkscape a try.

Adobe Photoshop is not just a requirement for web designers, but it is a growing need of professional photographers as well. Not everyone who wants to use the Adobe photoshop can use it and the reason for it is not the lack of skills, as we all know there are plenty of tutorials available for almost every functionality of this image editing tool. The reason why so many people cannot use Adobe Photoshop or the reason why so many people are looking for open source alternatives to it is its price. The current version, which is the Adobe Photoshop CS6, costs $628.88 on Amazon.com. Now considering its price as high as it is, it is almost impossible for many people to afford it, which is why we have compiled the best 4 open source alternatives to Photoshop, so you can fulfill your photoshop needs without having to spend a fortune over it.

Over time it is common for fans in laptops to become clogged with dust, fluff and even hair. The symptoms are usually a hotter laptop and a noisier fan that runs more frequently. The solution is to open up the laptop’s body in order to get at the fan and remove the crud with tweezers and by blowing. However, dismantling many laptops to access the fan makes the Mission Impossible break-in look simple, and this seems to be getting worse as laptop prices continue to decrease. If you are not confident you can unblock the fan yourself, you’ll have to find a local computer repair shop and you may find it’s not cheap.

I use the Debian Experimental repository to update Iceweasel to the latest Firefox release version provided by the Debian Mozilla team.

Linux Advocate Dietrich Schmitz makes his "Top Ten Sleeper Distros" picks. What's a sleeper? Read and find out.

DNF is the experimental fork of the Yum package manager that premiered in Fedora 18. While much hasn't been heard of this experimental Yum replacement since its debut, work on it has still been progressing and is turning out to be in great shape, is slowly approaching feature-parity with Yum, and is faster...

By default the Linux kernel uses the "ondemand" CPU frequency governor for achieving maximum clock frequency when system load is high and a lower clock frequency when the system is idle. However, it turns out that for at least modern Intel CPUs, this is likely no longer the case. This default kernel choice may lead to poor battery life and performance for modern Linux systems.

If in The Funding Crowd we do a weekly review of the Linux games being crowdfunded, here in The Cheapskate's Corner you will find all the current bundles and major sales which include at least a Linux game.

At its annual I/O conference in San Francisco this week, Google unveiled a new version of its Native Client technology that allows developers to deploy binary code for web applications in an architecture-independent way. With the original version of Native Client (NaCl), developers could write modules in C or C++ and compile them into binary packages to be executed inside the browser at near-native speed. The initial release only supported 32-bit and 64-bit Intel x86 architectures, but Google added support for ARM in January.

On Monday a U.S. judge in Boston ordered that sealed documents in the criminal hacking case against Aaron Swartz be released. Swartz, who was charged with stealing articles from a database, committed suicide in January.

The Linux Mint project yesterday unveiled version 15 of the increasingly popular desktop operating system, with upgrades to the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments as well as new applications for managing software and drivers. Code-named "Olivia," Linux Mint 15 is based on the most recent version of Ubuntu and will be supported until January 2014. Linux Mint 15 is in the Release Candidate stage, with a final release coming later.

Building upon our F2FS file-system benchmarks from earlier in this week is a large comparison of four of the leading Linux file-systems at the moment: Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and F2FS. With the four Linux kernel file-systems, each was benchmarked on the Linux 3.8, 3.9, and 3.10-rc1 kernels. The results from this large file-system comparison when backed by a solid-state drive are now published on Phoronix.

It's been a very hard week, putting out two variants of the JULinux distribution. JULinuXP and JULinOX_OS for Mac users. Two different interfaces, for two different types of users, both are very fast, and don't need compiz. Both protect your privacy and keep your private data secure online...

Microsoft announced its support for an international standard on secure software development, while an industry group offered a free training program for developers. A collection of large software companies has thrown its weight behind two initiatives that attempt to make the process of developing secure software more attainable to smaller software makers.

Three British members of the notorious LulzSec hacktivist crew and a hacker affiliate were sentenced today for a series of attacks against targets including Sony, News International, the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency. The youngest of the four accused avoided jail with a suspended sentence while the other three were jailed for terms ranging from 24 to 32 months.

It's been just a week since KDE 4.10.3 was announced, but 4.11 is already reaching its first milestone freeze. TSDgeos reminded developers today that the 4.11 Soft Feature Freeze happens in just one more week. What does that mean for users? Soft feature freeze mean developers have to have any new feature plans on the official Feature Plans list. So, any new little goody not listed at that time will have to wait for another release. They'll have two weeks to get their code ready because after the June 5 Hard Feature Freeze, only bug fix commits are allowed. What this means for you is, we can get an idea what might be included in KDE 4.11.

I've been a professional UNIX/Linux systems administrator for 18 years now. I've had to implement, maintain and support servers from all of the enterprise distributions and a few distributions not generally used in the enterprise as well for my employers and customers over the years. I'm a big advocate for Red Hat and the various free clones (CentOS, Scientific Linux and Springdale Linux) as the best solution for most organizations.