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Whether in the US or abroad, most everyone is familiar with American Idol. While not an open source project or community, American Idol is a good example of the power of participation, and how understanding this power and providing value can be profitable. American Idol has perfected the art of inspiring millions of people to work together toward one end goal—and the show has made millions. So, how do you get people to participate in something for free and make money from it?

The Linux 3.12 kernel was released on Sunday evening but prior to that was a last-minute pull request that got rejected by Linus Torvalds and with it he reaffirmed the focus of Linux on 64-bit...

Via Technologies announced a line of ARM-based Via Springboard SBCs supported with Android and Linux BSPs, and support services from prototyping to pre-production testing and diagnostics. The first Springboard is the $99, Pico-ITX-based VAB-600, built around a Via WM8950 SoC with a single 800MHz Cortex-A9 core, and featuring an I/O extender card and an optional […]

The release of Fedora 20 has been delayed by another week -- both the due-out beta and the final release -- over unresolved bugs...

With all the benefits of open source, improper management of its use may result in substantial legal, business, and technical risks. Most research and design managers know that they have to manage open source licenses, but not many are monitoring for security vulnerabilities and other bugs in open source libraries they use. Do you know the importance of monitoring open source for vulnerabilities before, during, and after using it?

Mahout greatly simplifies extracting recommendations and relationships from input datasets. Here we look at setting up Mahuout and running its recommender on a small data sample.

Today, transparency is a critical aspect in all areas of government. With Internet access, citizens are looking for more information about what is going on in their cities and are looking for more ways to hold their government representatives accountable. One of the best ways to provide transparency and make it easier for citizens to obtain the city services they require is to become an open source city. An open source city is one that uses a variety of new tools, including apps, to make information availble to citizens and interact with them as well. Following are 10 tools to help open source cities maintain transparency.

By day, Red Hat product manager Burr Sutter works to make developers more successful and productive with open source tools, technologies, and techniques. So it's no surprise that he wants to ensure his own children know how to solve technical problems as well. So when summer vacation rolled around this year, Sutter encouraged his son to complete some courses on CodeAcademy and to sign up for a couple of iD Tech Camps. In this interview, Sutter talks about why he wants his children to know how to fix the tech tools they use every day, how he balances that with other "kid" activities, and more. Parents who are looking for a way to get their children to learn code, to fix their computers, or just learn how online communities work may pick up some tips from Sutter's experiences.

Digia announced an Android and Linux-targeted embedded version of its cross-platform Qt GUI framework called Qt Enterprise Embedded that combines a Qt Creator based IDE with a new embedded Boot to Qt stack. The Digia-backed Qt project also released the beta of Qt 5.2 with a new Scene Graphic renderer and the first production-ready support […]

Major telecommunications companies are intent on transforming the Internet – from an information center for all of us to a profit center for them. They want to charge consumers extra for use of the websites and applications we want most.

First phone to launch with Firefox OS 1.1 South Korean electronics giant LG has joined the likes of Alcatel, Geeksphone, and ZTE by offering a handset based on the Mozilla Foundation's open-source Firefox OS platform.…

Educators in the US and worldwide are increasingly preoccupied with: 1) how children learn, 2) how best to prepare children for the future, and 3) what role digital technology plays in the classroom—all of which is controversial and widely debated. Various theories and models of education and intelligence have played a large role in shaping this discussion. Noted developmental psychologist, Howard Gardner of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, has been instrumental for many years.

Artila Electronics announced the release of an 80 x 50mm computer-on-module (COM) that runs Linux or Android on an ARM Cortex A8-based Freescale system-on-chip. The M-5360A module plugs into application baseboards via three bottom-side headers carrying numerous I/O interfaces including dual LVDS, VGA, SATA, Fast Ethernet, SD, USB 2.0, serial, and CAN bus. The credit […]

I get asked a lot by people who are interested in helping out open source projects, but have absolutely no programming skills. What can they do? Well, here’s a few ideas how non-programmers can contribute to open source projects. It is worth noting that it is best to contribute to software that you actually use yourself. That way you feel the benefits.

In 2009, our friends at Development Seed launched a pretty revolutionary concept—a completely open source intranet-in-a-box called Open Atrium. It was regarded as a giant leap forward for open source, for social collaboration, and for Drupal. Way back then (okay, it was just four years ago), an open source solution that could stand toe-to-toe with proprietary solutions like Basecamp and SharePoint was unprecedented. Open Atrium came on the scene and directly into the limelight because for the first time, a distribution of the open source Drupal code base felt really and truly like an all-in-one product.

If your Linux computer fails to boot after a kernel upgrade, disk swap, or other system change, you're not helpless. The Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) gives you ways to control the boot process and recover. Or, if necessary, emergency boot disks that you create with an external tool can come to the rescue. Learn procedures and GRUB commands that can help you boot in problem situations, and find out about a life-saving external tool for BIOS-based systems.

The Raspberry Pi has replaced the textbook at the State University of New York at Albany in the class, Information in the 21st Century. Ethan Sprissler is the instructor for the 900 student class (split into two sections, 400 and 500 students respectively). He uses the Raspberry Pi instead of the traditional textbook in order to:

Having a built-in navigation system in your new car is pretty common place now (that is, if you want to pay for it). These days many new car owners can just type in the address of where they want to go in to their in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system and a 2D map will pop up with some simple graphics showing them how to get there, or possibly a 3D map if you have a luxury vehicle that offers it.But how is that 3D mapping data collected and updated? And who can access it? Marek Strassenburg-Kleciak is one of the key people behind collected 3D mapping data for OpenStreetMap (OSM), which has been billed as the Wikipedia of maps. As the senior manager for new business development at Elektrobit Automotive, one of the things he loves most about his work is putting technology visions into practice.

For nearly as long as the three of us have known each other, we have talked about the things we would make when we had our own company. The seriousness of that statement grew and waned over time. But early this year, a friend who was just getting into working with the Arduino microcontroller platform built an 8-bit binary counter and an idea was born: Why not make a bigger counter? Why not make it a clock? This idea became the start of Maniacal Labs, a company that we plan to run by following the ideals of open source software and hardware.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC The Eclipse Foundation supports a vibrant an open source community. Those who work on their projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying, and managing software across the lifecycle. Started in 2004, the Eclipse Foundation has an interesting history ( about it here), beginning with The Eclipse Project at IBM in 2001. Currently, Mike Milinkovich is the Executive Director at the Eclipse Foundation, and I caught a moment of his time for a few questions. His talk at the All Things Open conference this week will be about how foundations can stay relevant along with their open source communities. Get to know Mike and the Eclipse community better in this interview.