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The year 2012 had many important FOSS legal developments which reflects the continued increase in FOSS use. FOSS projects have increased from 600,000 in 2010 to 900,000 by December 2012. In addition, a Dr. Dobbs' survey in the third quarter of 2012 stated that more than 90% of developers are using FOSS in two of the most rapidly growing areas, cloud computing and mobile computing. Continuing the tradition of looking back over the top ten legal developments in FOSS, my selection of the top ten issues for 2012 are as follows.

For years, Jeremy Allison has been one of the better known names in free software development. The lead developer of Samba's implementation of the SMB file server protocol, he is also generally credited as the project's co-creator. True, he jokes that description means that "Tridg [Andrew Tridgell] did all the hard bits, but I was there," and claims not to be current with all aspects of the project -- yet, all the same, few have more of an overview of Samba. Recently, Allison took time to give his personal view of the challenges involved in the recent Samba 4.0 release, and of the directions in which Samba might be heading next.

Fedora 18 is to get no further delays, with a last minute bug fix to one of their release candidates

While CES is known for bringing a storm of new gadgets, just a few products really stand out each year. On Monday, Kingston announced one such device. In Las Vegas this week, the company unveiled the world's first 1TB USB stick.

The newly released Google Chrome 24 web browser, the actual version is 24.0.1312.52, promises to be a lot faster than previous releases, which also means faster startup times.

Microsoft released a concept video of the future of gaming using projectors... and FOSS games Red Eclipse and SuperTuxKart.

My experience with “free” programs for Windows is that such shenanigans are business as usual, and justified by the fact there is no charge for the software and a buck has to be made somehow. The old saying, “there’s no such thing a free lunch,” is defined by such bad behavior.

Chinese electronics firm ZTE is ramping up its efforts in support of the Mozilla Foundation's open source Firefox OS for mobile phones, and if all goes well, it could deliver a device targeting European customers as early as this year. In an interview at the CES 2013 conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, Cheng Lixin, CEO of ZTE's US business unit, told Bloomberg that the company was already working with a European carrier to develop a Firefox OS device.

Percona Server is a drop-in replacement for MySQL. It offers more performance and scalability than the default MySQL server coming with your Linux distribution, while it uses the same init scripts and command line tools which makes it easy to use. This tutorial explains how to install Percona Server 5.5 on Ubuntu 12.10.

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition: A linuxy gun, Steam fun, Fuduntu, Slax, Samsung source and rekonq.

Has Ubuntu got what it takes to enter the mobile operating system meat-grinder?

I've just uploaded a new Bodhi rootfs.img (which can be gotten from our source forge page here). This image brings a few improvements...

Prior to the start of 2013, it seems fair to say that there hadn't been too many major shakeups in the world of mobile operating systems.

Canonical demonstrated a Galaxy Nexus running Ubuntu's phone interface at the Consumer Electronics Show, but product manager Richard Collins explained that the company isn't quite ready to let us use it. "We're just doing all of the driving for the demos for now simply because we understand how the experience works," Collins told me when I asked if I could test it out. In other words: No touching!

We do expect to be getting a hands-on experience within a few weeks, because Canonical says it will be releasing a version that can be installed by anyone on a Nexus. Today, Ars reporter Andrew Cunningham and I settled for the controlled demo and an interview, with Andrew taking pictures. Canonical's wireless Internet on the CES expo floor wasn't working, but we could get a sense of the phone's basic functionality.

In 1998, Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. The lecture he gave, titled "The Possibility of Social Choice," succinctly captured both the subject of his work (generalizing economic theory to cover social groups of disparate actors rather than just individuals or corporations) and his irrepressible sense of humor (because the generalization applied to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem). Sen's crucial insight (for me) is this (emphasis mine):

How to customize the font and color of the panel clock in Linux Mint Mate

A joint statement from Red Hat and VMware sets out to allay fears over the future of the vert.x project. Options such as forking or moving to a foundation are still on the table as discussions continue

Content companies used to getting their way on Capitol Hill got humbled last January when an unprecedented wave of public protest shut down the SOPA and PIPA proposals that would have regulated online copyright. Now that the public has been awakened to the issue, those interested in a more balanced copyright system are thinking over their strategy.

"Everything is on the table, including copyright terms," said Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge, speaking at a panel at CES 2013. "Let's put it to those who want greater, longer, stronger CR enforcement... why shouldn't we have some balance? Let's turn the clock back and think about the original need for copyright." This year, says Sohn, will be the year "we push our own, affirmative, agenda."

Unifying the most basic bits of our stack is unlikely to be ever complete, but at least we’d like to unify the most boring bits where there’s really no point at all in being different.

When navigating the Linux file system you are sure to encounter different file types. The most used and obvious file types are regular files and directories. However, the Linux operating system has more to offer in terms of file types as it also includes another 5 file types. This short article will help you to recognize all the 7 different file types within the Linux operating system.