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After 'version 1.0' of the US Constitution was released to the public on Sept 17, 1787 there was remaining discontent among several states regarding the powers assigned to the new Federal government and a lack of protections for fundamental individual freedoms and civil rights. To fix this bug, the First Continental Congress voted on twelve Constitutional Amendments in September of 1789. Two of them failed to gain enough support and the remaining ten, collectively known as The Bill of Rights, were included in 'version 2.0' of the US Constitution, released in 1791. This refactoring process was open source-minded on multiple levels.

In a previous article, I discussed the complaints that have been leveled against GitHub during the past year and a half concerning the purported problem of public, seemingly-FLOSS code repositories with no explicit licensing. Here I will address the actions GitHub took in July, which were undoubtedly in response to this criticism.

Belgium said on Monday it was investigating suspected foreign state espionage against its main telecoms company, which is the top carrier of voice traffic in Africa and the Middle East, and a newspaper pointed the finger at the United States.

STMicroelectronics (ST), ViXS, and Sigma Designs have each announced new Linux-friendly system-on-chips for IPTV set-top boxes (STBs) incorporating dual Cortex-A9 cores. Some of ST’s STLinux-based “Cannes” and “Monaco” SoCs, as well as ViXS’s XCode 6400 SoC, support UltraHD video and streaming HEVC HD content, while Sigma’s SMP8734 supports Linux or Android on hybrid STBs and […]

Government CIOs have ample resources to do a great job for their communities and citizens. They have smart, well-intentioned people working for them and more low-hanging fruit than most private-sector CIOs dream of. The biggest problem is not budgetary, legal, or policy constraints, although those sure don’t help much—it's about process. It’s a matter of doing things right from day one. It's a matter of doing less, not more. Government CIOs should be thinking smaller, not bigger; setting their sights lower, not higher; and strategizing away from organization-wide change in favor of quick, tangible wins that we can all share. 4 tips for building new systems and shipping quality code in no time:

With the growing popularity of open source, it’s getting harder and harder to attract contributors to new projects. A quick Internet search shows us that there are about 20,000+ FLOSS projects out there, and the number of new projects continues to double about every 14 months.

the NSA was found by its judicial regulators in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to be illegally surveilling thousands of phone numbers both inside and outside the United States without reasonable suspicion, according to documents released Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The failure of a solid-state drive in Linus Torvalds' main workstation has led to new activity during the Linux 3.12 kernel merge window being temporarily suspended...

On the first day of the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) conference, new Intel CEO Brian Krzanich revealed plans for a “Quark” processor family that uses a tenth the power of an Atom chip and is designed for low-power applications ranging from the “Internet-of-Things” (IoT) apps to wearable computing. Intel also unveiled some new details on […]

When most people think about a company's reusable assets, source code doesn't usually show up on the list, even though millions of dollars are spent every year on creating and maintaining code. Most large companies are managing hundreds of millions of lines of code—the majority of which was purpose-built to solve a specific application problem.

Lego began shipping its hackable, Linux-based Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot for $350. Texas Instruments revealed that the robot is powered by its 300MHz ARM9-based Sitara AM1808 system-on-chip and CC2560 Bluetooth chipset. As promised a month ago, Lego is now shipping its Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot kit for $350. In conjunction with the release of the […]

A couple years ago, we were disappointed to see a judge take the technologically wrong stance that data transmitted over WiFi is not a "radio communication," thereby making sniffing of unencrypted WiFi signals potentially a form of wiretapping. Indeed, based on that, the court eventually ruled that Google's infamous WiFi sniffing could be a violation of wiretap laws. This is wrong on so many levels... and tragically, an appeals court has now upheld the lower court's ruling.

Momentum seems to be building in Congress to tackle patent reform. From an open source perspective, any reform that reduces the risk and expense of patent lawsuits is surely a good thing. But the reforms under current discussion so far have largely been focused on the problem of NPEs (non-practicing entities) and have not directly addressed the problem of software patents. Are the two issues best viewed as one? So argues Boston University Professor James Bessen in his recent piece, The patent troll crisis is really a software patent crisis.

PengPod, a low-quantity Linux tablet vendor, released the PengPod 1040 tablet today that they claim will "transform the PC and Tablet world by merging both elegantly together to fit any lifestyle." But will it really pan out?..

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC I first heard of Carlos "Caike" Souza about a year ago while interviewing another developer for my bi-weekly podcast. My guest and I were discussing the things and people who inspired him and helped pave the way for his career. Carlos came up several times during that conversation. Carlos Souza is a developer for Envy Labs, the company behind Rails for Zombies, Code School, and TryRuby.org. I recently got an opportunity to speak with him,

Chinese tech firm Xiaomi announced a 47-inch, Wistron-built smart HDTV based on a Snapdragon 600 SoC less than $500. The Xiaomi TV was announced along with a 5-inch Mi3 phone, which similarly runs a homegrown MIUI Android build on a Snapdragon 800 or Tegra 4 SoC, and offers a 13-megapixel camera. On Sept. 5, Xiaomi […]

If all goes according to plan by Red Hat engineers operating in conjunction with Intel, Fedora 20 will be the first tier-one Linux distribution with decent support for Wayland and a usable desktop environment having its own compositor...

The US intelligence agency NSA has been taking advantage of the smartphone boom. It has developed the ability to hack into iPhones, android devices and even the BlackBerry, previously believed to be particularly secure.

The federal government’s march to the cloud has, at times, seemed more like a cautious ballet than anything else. While cloud-based projects are slowly rolling out, much of the agency emphasis is on private or community clouds as opposed to public providers. Security and data handling concerns play a role in this "tiptoeing," but another reason is far more insidious: the fear of lock-in. The Federal Shared Services Implementation Guide, the agency blueprint to the cloud, makes it very clear that government entities engaging in cloud computing need a clear “exit strategy” for anything as a service. It might seem ridiculous to consider how one should migrate from a technology before it is even implemented, but when it comes to the cloud, being able to get your data out is just as important as getting it in. It's about choice and control.

During the August Congressional recess, the General Accounting Office (GAO) released its long-awaited study on Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs), required under the America Invents Act (AIA). The report paints a rather grim picture of the current patent system. It reinforces the call by key leaders in Congress for legislative reforms that address abusive patent litigation as well as action by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the courts, and the US PTO.