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After Barack Obama's speech last night following his victory, CNN analyst Alex Castellanos -- a Republican pundit -- made a reference to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and implied that the new administration may bring an "open source" mentality to American government.

IBM has started testing Lotus Symphony -- the open source application suite -- for Mac OS X. But that's not all. Big Blue is preparing a channel push and seeking integration partners to help promote Symphony to customers. Here's the scoop.

Python has a good reputation for tasks like systems programming, network programming, and scripting, but Python for the web is becoming red hot. Part of this has to do with the very popular web framework Django, that was developed at a newspaper to help quickly create Content Management Sites. . Another reason is that Google App Engine–Google’s Cloud Computing offering for developers–only exposes a Python API.

Here are 12 tips, tricks, tweaks and techniques to make you say "I didn't know you could do that in Linux." Sure, not every one may be your cup of tea but here are 12 items to help you have the most positive Linux experience you can and to show why Linux is a superior operating system to other alternatives.

A current U.S. court case would make it harder for software patent trolls to file for dubious patents and make legal claims based on existing ones

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Change", (a.k.a KDE 4.1.3), another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. Change is a monthly update to KDE 4.1. It ships with desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, web development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.

Data protection software developer R1Soft (www.r1soft.com) has announced its upcoming release of a free beta version of Hot Copy for Linux, a command line utility that takes instant snapshots of disks or volumes on any Linux server, providing an unprecedented level of flexibility for IT administrators.

The presidential election has nothing on the Apple-Psystar copyright imbroglio when it comes to drawn out affairs. The two companies filed paperwork with the California court hearing their dispute in which they ask the court to set a trial date on Nov. 9, 2009. In the joint filing, Apple and Psystar said they expect the trial to last about 10 days. The court has yet to approve the timetable.

This special edition of Fedora 10 will be available for the OLPC XO Laptop Give 1 Get 1 promotion.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM are expected on Wednesday to announce the Open Document Format Toolkit Union, an open-source project aimed at making it easier for developers to use ODF. Sun is contributing an initial set of code for an application programming interface (API) that developers can use to work with ODF files without having to know the ins and outs of the technical specification, the companies said.

Ultrasol is a collection of nearly 400 different solitaire or patience games. There are games that use the 52 card International Pattern deck, games for the 78 card Tarock deck, eight and ten suit Ganjifa games, Hanafuda games, Matrix games, Mahjongg games, and games for an original hexadecimal-based deck. It includes many different sets of playing card images and all under standard solitaire type window.

The One Laptop Per Child project, launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, was supposed to lead millions of children around the world to information technology and freedom. The plans aimed for low cost, enabling many children to use the machines, and free software, so they would have freedom while using them. I thought it was a good idea; I even planned to use one myself when I found in the OLPC’s promise of free software a way to escape the proprietary startup programs that all commercial laptops used.

"When times are good, people aren't as critical of their applications and they tend to overpay," Mark Hinkle, vice president of community at Zenoss argued. "The economic slowdown has helped to illustrate the value of open source. When times are tough, you start re- evaluating how you do business."

In this article, discover how the Action Web Service module implements Web services functionality in Ruby on Rails. Action Web Service creates server-side support for SOAP and XML-RPC Web service protocols. You can declare and publish APIs using Action Web Service.

If your music library is tied to your CD collection or MP3 player, you can still hit the road without losing access to your tunes. Subsonic is a free, Web-based media streamer that lets you -- and your friends -- access your music collection over the Internet. Subsonic can handle large music collections, running into the thousands of CDs. It also works with video; in fact, it can let you remotely access any format that can be streamed over a standard HTTP connection. If needed, Subsonic will convert your collection to a streaming format on the fly, taking into account the available bandwidth. You can use any browser and media player combination to listen to your music; I went for Firefox and RealPlayer, but other combinations are equally valid.

Untangle and other open source software providers are moving into the fast-growing market for managed services. But many IT consultants and managed service providers have yet to discover the power and flexibility of open source. Will the situation change anytime soon? Here are some thoughts from MSPmentor, which covers managed services and SaaS.

I have an old noname cheapo webcam, that I dusted out of my junk (why? More on that in a post coming soon). I hoped that it would work in my Ubuntu setup out of the box like most of my other hardware. I connected it to my laptop's usb port. dmesg gave the following output:

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I am using an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

Simplify. That, at its heart, is the purpose of XBRL -- extensible business reporting language. XBRL employs a common set of tags for financial terms, making reports more searchable and transparent to everyone who uses them. Designed to provide information to investors and anyone else researching financial markets, it is an open standard that is operating system agnostic.

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was “Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for”. His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of strippers in Perth. Yes, I would classify the link quite work-safe. After talking about it for a while, I decided that it would be a good idea to write a short case study about how I created the site. So, here we go. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.