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There was once a time when the now-defunct Open Source Development Labs, then the employer of Linus Torvalds, used to style itself as the centre of gravity of Linux. Not long after, the edifice toppled under its own weight - probably the force of gravity shifted. Or maybe the restructuring it had to undergo in 2005 and 2006 was the cause. No matter the reasons, the OSDL then merged with the Free Standards Group at the beginning of 2007 to form the Linux Foundation. Now, 18 months on, it appears that an organisation is no longer the centre of gravity for the Linux kernel - no, that role has apparently been taken on by the shiny, new head of the Foundation, Jim Zemlin.

A stompbox claiming to be "the world's first open source digital guitar effects pedal" is now shipping, after over a year of development. The pedal, the OpenStomp Coyote-1, allows users to create their own effects by writing programs for the pedal's operating system, and uploading them to the device via USB. Writing open source programs means that rather than sticking to the familiar chorus, distortion and so on, users can create entirely new effects, much in the same way that Max/MSP can be used to make synths and effects from scratch. Unlike Max/MSP, however, users are able to run programs solely from the device – without a computer in sight.

The very heart of the Linux operating system is the kernel, the piece of software which makes programs run and work with hardware. It's possibly the largest and most geographical spread open source project in the world. With software projects failing daily how can such a task actually work? It’s well known that Linux Torvalds originated the kernel which he dubbed Linux way back in 1991. Yet, by the release of version 2.6.24 in January this year, Torvalds was responsible for a tiny 0.6% of the changes. This isn’t to say Torvald’s work is insignificant by any means, but rather to emphasise how Linux has evolved from the creative work of a sole developer into a massive project spanning almost 1,000 developers representing over 100 corporations.

Not all user-friendly desktop operating systems are based on Linux; as demonstrated by PC-BSD, it is entirely feasible to turn a "geek" project into a piece of software that can be installed and used by even less technical computer users. In this issue, we talk to Kris Moore, PC-BSD lead developer, about his love affair with FreeBSD and the upcoming PC-BSD 7.0. In the news section, Fedora admits that some of its servers have been compromised, Novell signs a new, US$100 million "interoperability" deal with Microsoft, openSUSE ads SELinux support as an alternative security framework, and gNewSense celebrates its second birthday with an updated release of the "freest" Linux distribution. Finally, FreeBSD announces tentative release dates for its upcoming versions 6.4 and 7.1.

This article summarizes the experiences of one small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) using a heterogeneous mix of Linux and Windows XP systems. Written by the founder of an international PC distributor, it compares and contrasts various Linux-based distributions, and assesses their suitability for business use.

Open source software company Red Hat warned of a network intrusion that compromised some of the company's servers. Though Red Hat considered the advisory critical and issued updated versions of affected packages, it said that a worst-case scenario -- a hacker accessing servers used to sign Fedora or Red Hat applications distributed through their auto-update process -- did not come to pass.

Computerworld Australia is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of [AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame and Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. We've also had a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, as well as Stephen C. Johnson on YACC, Luca Cardelli on Modula-3, Walter Bright on D, and most recently, Brendan Eich on JavaScript.

The Kindle, Amazon’s Linux-powered electronic paper book will have at least one new version out for the 2008 holiday season. The new Kindle, however, may be marketed more for college students returning to school in January rather than for finding a place under the Christmas tree. According to a report by Andreas James, Amazon will be marketing the revised “e-book reader to college students.”

If you've read through Part I and Part II of this tutorial series, you ought to have plenty of templates and clip art for OpenOffice.org (OOo), be typing grammatically-correct papers, and know a few more tips and tricks to ease your transition from Microsoft (MS) Office. Now this part will help you perform a few tasks in OOo that were available in MS Office, just harder to figure out due to the different interface. You'll find out you can still insert WordArt (actually called Fontwork), diagrams, and page numbering in OOo documents.

This year's Google Summer of Code is drawing inexorably to its close: the first indication that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is indeed upon us. The KOffice students are busy tying up the last threads, adding the last flourish of polish that makes all the difference before they will slake the satisfied sigh that goes with work well-done. So - what did we achieve this year? In our very best tradition, read on for an overview!

Last week's 8th Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre (Free Software Regional Sessions) at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was an opportunity for around 1,300 FOSS enthusiasts to share experiences, learn more, and have fun together. Newcomers and advanced users, sysadmins and developers, all learned about and discussed a wide range of issues in more than 140 sessions in three days. There were also a space for the community organizations and companies to show, talk, and advocate about their activities and products.

Although open source software has gained a place in enterprise networks alongside proprietary software, it can't seem to shake doubts about security and intellectual-property issues that have long dogged the movement.

SQL injection attacks can allow hackers to execute arbitrary SQL commands on your database through your Web site. To avoid these attacks, every piece of data supplied by a user on a Web form, through HTTP Post or CGI parameters, or other means, must be validated to not contain information that is not expected. GreenSQL is a firewall for SQL -- it sits between your Web site and MySQL database and decides which SQL statements should and should not be executed. At least that's the idea -- in execution, I found some open doors.

When I wrote the first article in this series, the intent was to show how a html form could be used to transfer external input to existing web pages on the fly. By definition that is dynamic web content. This was the real goal of this series. Unfortunately, security concerns diverted my attention. To reset the balance, I had begun to rewrite the introduction, however, that corrective measure is still not complete. Despite this, I think it is more important to demonstrate the original intent. Thus, I have written this article describing the easiest method to transfer some dynamic content into active web pages.

It's not often we here at LinuxInsider get to write about celebrities -- other than the Richard Stallman variety, of course -- and indeed, many of the geeks who grace our pages from time to time seem to shun the limelight rather than seek it out. So it was with great glee this week that we found cause to mention none other than Jerry Seinfeld.

The bookmark tagging feature introduced in Firefox 3 is not particularly difficult in use: when bookmarking a Web page, enter the tags you like into the Tags field of the bookmarking dialog window and you are pretty much done. Tagging provides a more flexible way of keeping track of bookmarks than traditional folders. The folder-based system provides an "either/or"-solution to filing bookmarks. For example, you could place a bookmark for an article about installing OpenOffice.org on Puppy Linux in either a Linux or OpenOffice.org folder, but not in both. With tags, you don't have this problem: you can assign as many tags as you like, so the bookmark becomes filed under several categories at the same time.

Last week was kind of amazing -- I knew a number of things that were going to be happening at IDF but was blindsided by an announcement Intel made that could change the world as we know it. Nikola Tesla turned over in his grave, and we are one step closer to his Tower of Power. Intel also fleshed out its Atom platform, which I think forms the basis of a new class of cloud computing-based client devices.

[Lookout ahead, Rob Enderle Alert. - Scott]

Once upon a time, a Linux distribution would be installed with a /dev directory fully populated with device files. Most of them represented hardware which would never be present on the installed system, but they needed to be there just in case. Toward the end of this era, it was not uncommon to find systems with around 20,000 special files in /dev, and the number continued to grow. This scheme was unwieldy at best, and the growing number of hotpluggable devices (and devices in general) threatened to make the whole structure collapse under its own weight. Something, clearly, needed to be done.

Two years ago, Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy $240 million worth of support vouchers for Novell Inc.'s SUSE Linux operating system as part of a controversial partnership deal between the two vendors. Now Microsoft is reaching into its pocket again, to the tune of another $100 million. The once-bitter rivals -- which are still facing off against each other in an antitrust lawsuit that Novell filed in 2004 -- jointly announced last week that Microsoft has committed to purchase up to $100 million worth of additional support vouchers from Novell, starting Nov. 1.

Over the past three months, I've been communicating at length with several leaders in the Open Source Software (OSS) community about how best to license software patents in a way that supports the goal of OSS developers, users, and distributors. I've learned a great deal along the way about the uneasy relationship between OSS and software patents.