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On March 15, 2013, ComputerWeekly.com, the “leading provider of news, analysis, opinion, information and services for the UK IT community” published an article by Bryan Glick entitled: Government mandates 'preference' for open source. The article focuses on the release of the UK’s new Government Service Design Manual, which, from April 2013, will provide governing standards for the online services developed by the UK’s government for public consumption.

Devon IT unveiled an HDMI stick that can turn any HDMI-compatible monitor or display into an interactive virtual desktop. “Ceptor” is somewhat larger than a typical USB memory stick, runs Devon IT’s Linux-based ZeTOS “zero client” operating system on a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 SOC (system-on-chip), and sells for $99. “Unlike PC Sticks, Ceptor is [...]

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) opened last month. (The official launch had been planned to occur at the Boston Public Library but the temporary closing of the library due to the Boston Marathon tragedy prompted that event to be postponed until the fall.) The aim of DPLA is to provide a large-scale, national public digital library of America's archives, libraries, museums, and cultural institutions in one portal. Leaders from 42 of America's institutions have contributed to the project, from ARTstor to the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Virginia Library. The idea of a national digital library harks to the early 1990s and the desire to provide a portal to make cultural and scientific information available to all. It was conceived as a non-commercial alternative to Google's proposed digital library or an American equivalent to the European Union's Europeana digital library. 

The law of software patents took an interesting, and ultimately encouraging, turn a little more than a week ago. In the CLS Bank case, ten judges of the Federal Circuit issued five separate opinions, without any single legal theory gaining a majority. Their debate showed that the scope of the subject matter requirement for patenting software is far from settled. It also makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will speak to the issue, and get it right.

The Jolla smartphone was demonstrated today in an online announcement. Jolla runs on the linux-based Sailfish OS.

The humble browser. Its main purpose, for many years, was to serve up simple HTML documents and provide information on just about any subject you could think of. In the last decade, with broadband taking over from dial-up, and net connections getting ever quicker, websites have increasingly provided applications usually restricted to the desktop. With the evolution of languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript helping push the limits of what could be done, we find in turn it provides new opportunities in openness and sharing. This has evolved to the point where there's really not much that can't be done or opened up online now.

At long last the third major version of Mageia, the popular community fork of Mandriva Linux, is now available. There's a lot of new stuff to Mageia 3 like a new version of RPM and updated systemd, but the distribution is still not shipping GRUB2 by default...

Zombie language gets XML, Java support IBM is giving its COBOL environment a cloudy flavour with an update to the ancient venerable and unkillable language.…

DNF is the experimental fork of the Yum package manager that premiered in Fedora 18. While much hasn't been heard of this experimental Yum replacement since its debut, work on it has still been progressing and is turning out to be in great shape, is slowly approaching feature-parity with Yum, and is faster...

In an effort to make Enlightenment E17 available through the openSUSE installer and DVD, the lightweight LXDE desktop environment may be pushed away...

On April 19th the United States Patent and Trademark Office finally rejected an application for the trademark open source hardware. The grounds for the rejection were that the term was "merely descriptive." Trademarks are intended to identify a specific source of goods or services, protecting that source from confusion in the minds of consumers with other sources. Naturally then, if you try to obtain a trademark which is just a description of a type of product or service, it is proper that you should be refused; it would not be distinctive and it would distort the market by allowing one source to control the generic term. If I market a car for a hamster, I should not be able to get a trademark for the name hamster car, as that would improperly restrain competitors from bringing their own hamster cars to market. So, should we be pleased that the application was rejected?

At Google I/O today, Google released an early access preview version of an Android integrated development environment (IDE) based on IntelliJ IDEA. To its IntelliJ foundation, Android Studio adds an enhanced drag-and-drop GUI layout editor, Gradle-based build system, Lint tools, Android-focused wizards, and the ability to preview how apps look on different screen sizes. Like [...]

Which repository is your primary choice? SourceForge GitHub Google Code Gitorious Bitbucket Codeplex Other From James Bowes' article, A code hosting comparison for open source projects:

Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a "hook" is—and why Drupal is not a CMS.

Nexcom announced a network security appliance with Unified Threat Management (UTM) services based on Freescale’s new 12-core, 1.8GHz QorIQ T4240 system-on-chip (SOC). The NSA 5640 is equipped with up to 6GB of DDR3 RAM, 2GB NAND flash, mini-PCI Express expansion, eight gigabit Ethernet ports, optional 4-port 10GbE connectivity, and PowerPC Linux support. The NSA 5640 [...]

Arch Linux replaced MySQL with MariaDB, openSUSE gutted MySQL, Fedora replaced MySQL, and now Ubuntu Linux is looking to continue the trend...

With one week to go until the soft feature freeze for KDE 4.11, there's a better idea for the features that are likely to come to the next major release of the KDE Plasma desktop...

NEC has announced an Android smartphone that uses a water-cooling system to keep its quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro system-on-chip (SOC) from overheating. The NEC Medias X 06E integrates a liquid cooling pipe near the SOC to cool off the 4.7-inch phone, which is being marketed at Japanese women. Liquid cooling has been used in [...]

The Linux Foundation has confirmed that NASA will be switching to Debian 6 Linux for its laptop requirements inside the Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) operations.

The open education landscape is set to grow a little more as Stanford University announces plans to team up with edX to build an online learning platform that universities and developers around the world can access for free. edX, a not-for-profit online education project founded in 2012 by MIT and Harvard University, develops online learning courses for students. The project encourages collaboration between teachers, students, and faculty to fit the needs of individual institutions.