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It's time to take a look back at June and see how open source is changing the world. We'll take a look at what articles where hot, a few that you may have missed, and what the chatter was all about last month. We published 42 articles in June—that includes several posts from our community moderators and many from our open source community of contributors. Find out how you can contribute your ideas.

Colorful language from Linus Torvalds helps to herald the first release candidate of new Linux kernel

For more than a decade, Evan Prodromou has worked to build open source tools that help people share things online. In 2003, he co-founded Wikitravel, a website that lets world travelers collaborate on the ultimate travel guide. Then, in 2008, Prodromou launched StatusNet, a decentralized, federated networking tool whose public face, identi.ca, became the microblogging service of choice for many free software advocates and open enthusiasts.

Oracle will soon be announcing that it's discontinuing development of its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Sun Ray software and hardware and Oracle Virtual Desktop Client product lines.

Linus Torvalds announced the Linux 3.11-rc1 release on Sunday afternoon...

We have long known that Jolla, the company founded by former Nokia employees, has been toying with Wayland for their future smartphones. We now have confirmation that right from the start their first phone will be running on Wayland...

An OpenWRT Linux-based hardware adapter designed for unifying USB-connected storage met its $69,000 Kickstarter pledge goal in 12 hours. The tiny Plug device eschews cloud storage for a localized approach whereby an app or driver installed on each participating computer or mobile device intercepts filesystem accesses, and redirects data reads and writes to storage drives [...]

Slovakia-based Antik Technology has developed an advanced TV set-top-box based on the STMicroelectronics STiH416 ARM Cortex-A9 “Orly” SoC, and running an embedded Android OS. The Juice Extreme 2 combines DVB tuner video with OTT (over-the-top) IP streaming, and can transcode four video input streams while simultaneously streaming multimedia out to smart TVs, tablets, and other [...]

Open Course Library has now released 81 high quality, free-to-use courses to the public. Users are can adapt and distribute content under a  Creative Commons license and download, remix, or teach using them. All content is stored in Google docs making it easy to access, browse, and download.

The One Laptop Per Child organization’s 7-inch, Android 4.2-powered “XO Tablet” will go on sale at Walmart stores in the U.S. next week, according to a July 8 post by OLPC CEO Rodrigo Arboleda on the OLPC’s blog. The device will initially be available exclusively at Walmart starting July 16, but will soon be offered [...]

The Linux Foundation this week formally launched its Tizen App Challenge, touted as a “skills-based” contest meant to encourage application developers to create new apps that “redefine mobile experiences.” The challenge will award a total of $4.04 million to more than 50 developers of Tizen apps in nine categories. Developers can submit mutiple entries at [...]

Seth Vidal, a long time Durham resident most well known for creating the “yum” software used by several Linux distributions, was killed in a hit and run accident last night near Hillandale golf course. He was 36 years old.

With recent news that GitHub is banning storage of any file over 100Mb and discouraging files larger than 50Mb, their retreat from offering download services is complete. It's not a surprising trend; dealing with downloads is unrewarding and costly.

Hacker: It sounds vicious and destructive, just like the malevolent electronic villains it is used to describe. Yet this sense of the term is surprisingly new and, what's more, is completely at odds with the original meaning that arose within computer science...

Groundbreaking contributions to the global Internet are recognized every year in The Internet Hall of Fame by The Internet Society—a leading advocate for a free and open Internet, promoting the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world.

MontaVista Software announced that its MontaVista Linux Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) 6.0 is the first Linux distribution to have been registered for Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 5.0 under the ARM profile. The move reflects an expected surge of ARM processors in networking and telecom gear. According to the company, MontaVista Linux CGE 6.0 is the [...]

Boxee, the Israeli startup that achieved fame first as the developer of an innovative, free, media-streaming software platform, and later through its partnership with D-Link around the iconic Linux-powered Boxee Box device, has been acquired by Samsung. According to reports by Haaretz and the New York Times, the company’s selling price was less than the [...]

After recently delivering a 15-way open-source Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU comparison, here are the benchmarks when tossing in the proprietary AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA graphics drivers too. Besides comparing a diverse selection of graphics processors from the three main desktop GPU vendors, this comparison also shows how the current open-source Linux graphics drivers compare to the official proprietary drivers.

Before the PC, computers were devices: custom hardware combined with software specifically written for the machine, and the machines themselves were usually designed for a select few (if not single) purposes. The problem that PCs seemed to address was diversity. Where customers had previously relied on one company to support both hardware and software, the PC clones opened the doors to a brave new world where anyone could build, support, or maintain a computer. It was a revolution that made computers affordable enough for anyone to own, for any business to adopt, and allowed countless entrepreneurs and skilled technicians to find work for themselves: outside the confines of long established corporate hierarchies. Unfortunately, the open source software revolution took much longer.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers' (PwC) 2013 Patent Litigation Study, 2012 was a "banner year for patent infringement litigation." Patent actions continued their dramatic rise in 2012 with 5,189 filings—the highest number ever recorded, and a 29% rise over last year, primarily resulting from the impact of the anti-joinder provision of the America Invents Act. Meanwhile, the 2012 median damages award, boosted by several unusually large damages awards, rose to nearly $10 million, which is double the average award seen over the previous six years.