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The federal government is the single largest purchaser of code in the world. So why is this code—taxpayer-funded and integral to the day-to-day working of our democracy—so often hidden from public view? There are two sides to answering that question: Why does the government so often build on closed platforms, and once built, why isn't the code released to the public? read more

For Careers in Open Source Week here at Opensource.com, I thought I would turn to the people I work with everyday to see how open source has changed their view on things. I interviewed Melissa Lefebvre who joined our Koha support team almost a year ago after working on Evergreen, another open source ILS system, for four years as Project Manager at Bibliomation, Inc., a large public and school consortium in Connecticut. read more

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. This article summarises the five things for August 12th, 2014:

NI’s new 4-slot CompactRIO control system combines a dual-core Atom E3825 with a Kintex-7 FPGA, and features industrial temperatures and NI Real-Time Linux.

There are lots of cool ideas on the Internet that never really make it out of the "startup" phase. IndieBox has been around only for a few months, but I really, really hope it catches on.

I’ve been lucky. My career has always involved open source software. read more

The sun could not have been shining any brighter in Philadelphia on May 28, 2014. But in the basement of Drexel University's Rush Building, home to the school's College of Computing and Informatics, matters were a bit more hazy. read more

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 hit general availability in July, but that doesn't mean Shadowman has stopped polishing the version 6 branch of its flagship Linux distribution, despite it being nearly four years old.…

New SPIR spec makes compute kernel compilation a breeze. Siggraph 2014 As the 41st Siggraph computer graphics conference kicks off in Vancouver this week, industry standards body the Khronos Group has announced updates to two of its most important specs.

The creator of an ultra-secure email service once said to be used by Edward Snowden unveiled his next project at a major hacker conference Friday: he and others like him want to change the very nature of email forever.

We live in an age of ever-expanding copyright law. The length of time that elapses before a creative work enters the public domain is now so long that many items published early last century are still protected by copyright.

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Next-gen standards effort aims to rewrite OpenGL for the modern world. Siggraph 2014 Graphics standards body the Khronos Group has called on industry players to help draft the next generation of the OpenGL spec, a major rewrite that's expected to help unify the OpenGL development model for desktop PCs, mobile devices, and the web.…

A typical data file often has associated "metadata" which is descriptive information about the file, represented in the form of a set of name-value pairs. Common metadata include creator's name, tools used to generate the file, file creation/update date, location of creation, editing history, etc. EXIF (images), RDF (web resources), DOI (digital documents) are some of popular metadata standards.

Open is about sharing and collaboration. It's the idea that "we" is more powerful, more rewarding and fulfilling than "I". I can't promise jobs, but I do know that open is becoming very big. Governments and funders are pushing the open agenda, even though academics are generally uninterested or seriously self-interested. read more

School will soon be in session and a Chromebook may be just what you need for the coming academic year.

A quick scan of Taobao, the popular Chinese e-commerce site operated by Alibaba, shows a vast selection of PCs shipped with Linux rather than Windows.

KeyCoin is today’s Random Coin of the Day for its extensive development, including a full on customized version of TailsOS, the Linux distribution where Tor protects all communication.

The Linux-based operating system grew 50% year-over-year in India. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has partnered with Dell and HP to bundle the OS with certain models of their laptops offered in India.

The Linux Foundation's free online Linux course is now open. Linux powers 94% of the world’s supercomputers, most of the servers powering the Internet, the majority of financial trades worldwide and a billion Android devices. In short, Linux is everywhere. It appears in many different architectures, from mainframes to server to desktop to mobile and on a staggeringly wide variety of hardware.

It’s been exactly ten years since the launch of OpenStreetMap, the largest crowd-sourced mapping project on the Internet.