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How can you apply the concepts of open source to a living, breathing city? An open source city is a blend of open culture, open government policies, and economic development. I derived these characteristics based on my experiences and while writing my book, The foundation for an open source city.

Characteristics such as collaboration, participation, transparency, rapid prototyping, and many others can be applied to any city that wants to create an open source culture. Let's take a look at these characteristics in more detail.

I arrived a few minutes early to the main hall of the Oregon Convention Center in preparation for Drupalcon's opening keynote by Dries Buytaert. A random mix of music chosen by the community via Twitter using the #DrupalRadio hashtag played through the hall as people filed in with anticipation.

Open source software is not only about programming code. There exist a vast amount of different organizational structures that facilitate the development and diffusion of open source software. In this article, I explain the main types of organizations within the open source community.

While the Intel Haswell CPUs were just launched days ago, there's already quite a Linux story to them. The Haswell CPU is interesting and the performance is good, but there's still extra headroom to make especially when it comes to the graphics driver and performance relative to Intel's Windows driver. Even so, the Intel Haswell Linux support has already evolved a great deal.

A few weeks ago I was able to attend the Mini Maker Faire in Cleveland, Ohio where I got to meet with local makers and discuss a variety of subjects including Raspberry Pi, 3D Printing, and programming. One of the highlights of my trip there was meeting Dave and Lauren Egts. Lauren was there presenting on the Scratch Game she designed: The Great Guinea Pig Escape.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

On May 22, eighteen senior officials from the Singapore Government gathered at the FutureGov lunch briefing Open Source, Open Government—to discuss how open source technology can drive openness and innovation in the public sector. The senior IT decision makers attending the event were from agencies such as the Ministry of Health, Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore, Land Transport Authority, Urban Redevelopment Authority, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore Management University, and the Ministry of Communications and Information, among others.

The White House on Tuesday announced a broad set of legislative recommendations for Congress and executive actions aimed at thwarting abusive patent infringement lawsuits.

The creators of open source software benefit people they will never meet in person. The kindness is baked right into the product. I'm a former computer programmer, and whenever I use an open source program I have an appreciation for the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of hours of work that went into creating the program.

New York City Comptroller John Liu is about to do something we need to see more often in government. This week, his office is open sourcing the code behind Checkbook NYC, the citywide financial transparency site—but the open-sourcing itself is not what I'm referring to. After all, lots of governments open source code these days.

Since the beginning the Linux desktop era, users and pundits have been asking when the year of the Linux desktop would be here. This past week saw three different answers to that question with the release of Linux Mint 15, Fedora 19 beta and the closing Ubuntu bug #1.

Several Android tablets running on Intel Clover Trail+ Atom processors broke cover at Computex Taiwan. Intel’s dual-core, 1.6GHz Atom Z5260 is fueling a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 tablet, as well as Asus’s 6-inch Fonepad Note and 10-inch MemoPad FHD10 tablets, while Asus also unveiled a hybrid 11.6-inch Transformer Book Trio, combining an Android slate [...]

PulseAudio 4.0 is now available and with it comes many changes to this commonly used but sometimes controversial audio server...

Bugzilla is an open source bug-tracking system that prides itself on offering server software that is free but skillfully designed to help developers manage their work. Their installation list is long and robust. So, how do they manage to not charge expensive licensing fees like most other commercial vendors? I emailed Dave Miller to find out. He's the Project Leader at Bugzilla and an IT Infrastructure Engineer at Mozilla, where Bugzilla is constantly being put to the test.

We were all waiting for it and many of us have been working hard for the last four years to make it happen. Today, Symfony 2.3.0 is available and this is the first long-term support release for Symfony version 2.

Broadcom announced a system-on-chip aimed at network attached storage (NAS) devices and 802.11ac routers, supported by a Linux SDK. The StrataGX BCM5862x Series combines a single- or dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor with a Cortex-R5 based “FlexSPARX” ARM core designed to accelerate storage performance, and features a cryptographic accelerator and dual 6Gbps SATA interfaces. The [...]

Critical Link announced a tiny, Linux-ready, SODIMM-style module based on the Altera Cyclone V SX-U672 ARM/FPGA SoC. The MityARM-5CSX builds on the Cyclone V’s mix of FPGA logic and dual-core 800MHz ARM Cortex-A9 processing power, adding two GigE channels, a PCI Express bus, and 145 GPIO lines. The MityARM-5CSX computer-on-module (COM) is designed for a [...]

Gumstix announced a touchscreen baseboard for its Linux-ready Overo computer-on-modules built entirely with the company’s new Geppetto custom design platform, and available for further modification via the web-based Geppetto. The Alto35 is available with a 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen from InTouch Electronics. Like the Palo35 that it baseboard replaces, the Alto35 supports Gumstix Overo COMs, which [...]

The Dave and Gunnar Show is a new podcast series talking about government, open source, and a sprinkling of Red Hat projects. I recently discovered it and thought the opensource.com audience might enjoy it too. What do you think? Episode 10, Go Ugly Early particulary struck me. Give it a listen:

Version 19 beta: Still alive or dead on arrival? Review The Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, pits the theory of quantum superposition against what we observe to be true.…