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Marcus Hanwell is a physicist by training, but his background in science led him down a different path than most reseachers. Today he is a contributer to a number of open source projects aimed at helping the scientific community better analyze and visualize their data. If you've got a question about finding the right open source tool for a scientific application, Marcus can point you in the right direction.

If you never had a chance to play the delightful Flash-based MMO game Glitch—soon to be rescued from the pit of dead games thanks to Creative Commons assets—I'll let its new tenders explain:

Since this weekend we have known that systemd was winning the Debian init system battle, but now it's official: systemd has prevailed over Upstart in Debian...

The year 2013 continued the trend of the increasing importance of legal issues for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.  FOSS projects have  increased from 900,000 in 2012 to 1,000,000 in 2013, according to Black Duck Software. (add link of report here) Last year, I provided a look at the top legal issues from the year before. Continuing with this tradition, here is my take on the top ten legal developments in FOSS during 2013.

Well it's been roughly eight months since the first major leaks about the NSA's PRISM surveillance program began to appear, and at last a coordinated global protest is imminent. Scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Feb. 11, The Day We Fight Back involves thousands of participating websites as well as protests, speaking events, street theater performances and more.

I'm not really much of a computer gamer. That said, I'm both ashamed and oddly proud of the hours (probably thousands!) I spent playing Dune 2000 back when it was cutting-edge gaming technology. There's just something about real-time strategy games that appeals to those of us lacking the reflexes for the more action-packed first-person shooters.

GStreamer 1.4 is under heavy development ahead of its next release that's due out in March or April. Here's a look at some of the new features coming to this open-source multimedia framework relied upon by many Linux desktop applications. Among the best additions to GStreamer 1.4 is support for H.265, VP9, and Daala. Wayland is also now supported...

In six weeks, a team of three college students with no industry experience and only academic software-specific knowledge, developed and designed a health care provider search system using only open source software. To tell you how they got there, let's start with a little history of open source software in the US federal government workspace.

The Defense Advance Reseach Project Agency (DARPA) is one of the government-sponsored research agencies that most boldly explores the future of science and technology. Given that many of its research projects have military applications, it has been traditional for the agency to be secretive about them. In recent years, however, DARPA has been embracing the benefits of open source, particularly for promoting rapid innovation. Last week, the agency opened to the public a new portal featuring a catalog all its open source projects.

Last year was the last time we had a chance to talk about Wine on Android for running Windows programs on Google's mobile operating system. While it's not quite mainline yet, Wine on Android has been making much progress and can now run Windows' Solitaire game on your Android device...

The latest release of the FSF-sponsored gNewSense Linux distribution is now available for those that can get by without needing any binary blobs for their hardware drivers or non-free software...

Rise and shine, Ruby devs, it's patching time! Ruby on Rails developers using the Paperclip uploader to receive files need to update to a new version, after a developer turned up an XSS bug in the software that could possibly be extended to remote code execution.…

Open source news for your reading pleasure. February 3-7 2014 In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we have great news for Nvidia fans wanting better driver support in Linux, lots of exciting developments from inside the data center, and more.

Smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous -- and so convenient that we often download apps and approve permissions without giving them much thought. Such behavior exposes the data we store on our prized devices to increasing risk. That blind trust is just what app makers count on. Android users, especially, are complacent about synchronizing apps on multiple devices.

There are rapidly growing feature set, high commit rates, and code contributions happening across the globe to Apache Hadoop and related Apache Software Foundation projects. However, the number of woman developers, committers, and Project Management Committee (PMC) members in this vast and diversified ecosystem are really diminutive. For the Hadoop project alone, only 5% out of 84 committers are women; and this has been the case for over the past 2 years.

Openness is changing the world, as a very wise writer pointed out not so very long ago, and what better example than the parade of government-spying revelations we've seen in recent months? It's clearly a different world since Edward Snowden appeared on the scene -- though not everyone agrees on whether it's a better one or not. In the eyes of some, he deserves a peace prize.

One year ago the Puerto Rico Python Interest Group (prPIG) was founded on one purpose; to create a sustainable user community based on software development in Puerto Rico. On February 20, 2014 we will celebrate our first anniversary with an open format meeting with lightning talks from the community.

A recent post on the top events ahead in 2014 for reforming abusive patent litigation focused on efforts by State Attorneys General, the Federal Trade Commission, and US Congress. Let’s now take a look to another field involved in the multi-prong strategy to address patent abuse: the Supreme Court, which is considering a number of important cases.

Starting this past December, the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW) welcomed a new crop of promising young female contributors to several open source projects. These women are currently halfway through their internships, working to improve open source projects across a number of disciplines including code development, visual and UX design, internationalization, documentation, and community-building.

Although GNU/Linux® has the reputation of being a much more secure operating system than Windows,® you still need to secure the Linux desktop. This article steps you through installing antivirus software, creating a backup and restore plan, and using a firewall so you can harden your Linux desktop against most attacks and prevent unauthorized access to your computer.