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(NASA) announced the release of its core Flight System (cFS) Application Suite to the public. The cFS application suite is composed of 12 individual Command and Data Handling (C&DH) flight software applications that together create a reusable library of common C&DH functions. NASA cFS projects are hosted on SourceForge.net

RFIDs—we use them every day. With every visit to the supermarket, public library, bookstore, or department store, we handle objects that have an RFID tag, which stands for Radio Frequency Identification. For one, these small tags make it easier for shop owners to keep inventory by tracking the flow of items as they're brought in, moved around, and purchased. RFID tags are usually composed of a small electronic chip that can store a few thousand bytes and an antenna that commonly takes the shape of a tight spiral—sometimes squared, sometimes circular. This article is about how I tinkered with the Adafruit PN532 controller shield to read and write RFID tags. read more

OpenEmbed launched a 52 x 28mm “SOM9331? COM for IoT that runs OpenWRT Linux on a MIPS-based Atheros AR9331 SoC, and offers WiFi and extended temperatures.

Suppose you’re a developer and want to experiment with Drupal 7.7 or WordPress. Maybe you're a K-12 teacher or university professor and want to teach your students Moodle administration or how to create some network-attached storage. You could download a tarball from Drupal.com or WordPress.org and configure on your own desktop or laptop, but then you would also need to configure Apache and MySQL too. All of these operations take effort and know-how that you may or may not have time for. read more

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at LibreOffice Online, the newest release of SecureDrop, and more! Open source news for March 21 - 27, 2015 read more

Welcome to the Opensource.com Weekly Top 5! Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get our newest video uploads. They will mostly be this weekly Top 5 roundup of the best articles from the past week, but occasionally we'll do something fun like fly a quadcopter around... and into things. Speaking of electronics, Arduino Day is March 28. Check out the article we just published of 6 Arduino projects to tinker with by staff Alex Sanchez. read more

Waartaa is an open source communication and collaboration tool. It is an IRC client focussed to overcome the subtle disadvantages of existing clients. It is a web based IRC client as a service, facilitating some extremely useful services such as: centralised logging, unique Identity, global access, notifications, responsiveness to devices and displays across multiple clients.

A lot has changed since the first Arduino board arrived a decade ago. Today, the Arduino family has grown to include more than two dozen low-cost, open hardware boards and an active community of more than 250,000 tinkerers. read more

A group of technology companies, non-profits and privacy and human rights organizations have sent a letter to President Barack Obama, the director of national intelligence and a wide range of Congressional leaders, calling for an end to the bulk collection of phone metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.

CeBIT attendees on Thursday fell victims to a series of well-executed hacks. Thankfully, they weren't malicious in origin; instead, they were live demonstrations by notorious ex-hacker Kevin Mitnick.

Google is offering a new incentive for using its Google Compute Engine. With Google Cloud Launcher, you can launch more than 120 popular open-source packages.

In my last article, I started to look at multitenant Web applications. These are applications that run a single time, but that can be retrieved via a variety of hostnames.

A common disease of software development is the "not-invented-here" syndrome, a tendency to write new implementations instead of leveraging existing solutions. We then just write it as part of the application we're currently building, thinking it's a small thing. Over time, such helper or utility classes grow as new things are added, but usually stay tightly coupled to the application. read more

Network simulators are tools used to simulate discrete events in a network and which helps to predict the behaviours of a computer network. Generally the simulated networks have entities like links, switches, hubs, applications, etc. Once the simulation model is complete, it is executed to analyse the performance. Administrators can then customize the simulator to suit their needs. Network simulators typically come with support for the most popular protocols and networks in use today, such as WLAN,UDP,TCP,IP, WAN, etc.

When we first open sourced Spark, we aimed to provide a simple API for distributed data processing in general-purpose programming languages (Java, Python, Scala). Spark enabled distributed data processing through functional transformations on distributed collections of data (RDDs). This was an incredibly powerful API—tasks that used to take thousands of lines of code to express could be reduced to dozens. read more

Imagination is hosting a raffle for a 9.7-inch, MIPS-based Ingenic tablet that runs a MIPS port of Firefox OS, which will also support its Creator C120 SBC.

Collabora, a leading contributor to the popular LibreOffice productivity application, has partnered with IceWarp, the provider of global messaging and collaboration solutions, to jointly develop web-based document editing technology and contribute these to the thriving Free Software community around LibreOffice.

It's been years since The Document Foundation announced that LibreOffice would be ported to an online version. It looks like it will finally arrive... in 2016.

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for March 25th, 2015.

Human rights NGO Amnesty International, a movement of more than seven million people, released its Annual Report for 2014-15 at the end of February. This 500+ page print book is published simultaneously in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, and translated into 12 other languages by local teams. It is composed of 160 detailed chapters written by regional experts on the human rights situation in most of the countries of the world. read more