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Film effects specialist Sony Pictures Imageworks has released five digital image-manipulation software tools under open source licenses. While Imageworks has released other open source software in the past, the release of five tools at once brings its involvement in open source to a new level, the company said on Monday, in an announcement marking the beginning of the Siggraph computer graphics trade show in New Orleans.

One of the most striking features of any desktop environment is its selection of icons. While wallpapers and window decorations hold a larger stage, it is the bright, colorful icons that draw ones attention and speed up the process of finding what one is looking for. The myriad of available icon themes may find themselves feeling a bit lonely in the near future, however, as the GNOME Art Team has decided that — at least some of them — will face the firing squad.

Look for PC users to soon get their hardware in the same way that they get their cell phones: for free as part of telecommunications service subscriptions, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said on Friday afternoon.

Last month when NVIDIA had published their first official 190.xx driver beta, it was discovered that there was early OpenGL 3.2 support. There was no OpenGL 3.2 specification out in the hands of public developers, but with NVIDIA working closely with the Khronos Group, it wasn't too surprising...

Think of the annual Pwnie Awards delivered at the Black Hat conference as a geek version of the Oscars -- if they were combined with the tongue-in-cheek Razzies that celebrate the worst of Hollywood.

Dr Eric Schmidt, CEO at Google, has been a Director of Apple for almost exactly three years - until today. As he steps down iTWire asks if this means that Apple and Google are now officially at war? More importantly, is it a war that Apple can possibly win?

For some, databases can be pretty intimidating. I remember some of the convoluted code I wrote years ago in order to avoid having to learn how to access a database from my programs. But it's actually not that hard to access a database, even in C/C++.

Open source and education are natural fits-- open source encourages experimentation and exploration, and the opportunity to learn computing, rather just how to be a little cog in a giant data-processing machine. Cynthia Harvey gives us a taste of the possibilities with this list of 55 open source educational applications.

FOSS coders are a strange breed. Many devote years of their lives and unquantifiable amounts of their passion to a job that may return nothing in the way of concrete rewards. It can, in fact, be thankless -- FOSS coders may get ridicule and criticism instead of riches. Why do they do it? "[Humans] need a purpose in life," says blogger Robert Pogson, "and for some, that purpose includes coding."

A new Google project, Simple, aims to be as BASIC as possible. Simple is very much a work in progress, but currently consists of a compiler and runtime for the Simple language, which is a dialect of BASIC specifically for developing Android Applications. Simple programmers can define static or dynamic forms and manipulate them with BASIC like commands. The hope is that a simple programming language, based on BASIC, will open up programming Android devices to a wider audience.

You may have noticed the odd bit of celebration around the magic billion downloads milestone for Firefox. Of course, as Mozillans themselves point out, that figure doesn't tell us very much; more useful, perhaps, are stats like 300 million users, but that too is only an estimate. And in any case, I think looking backwards is precisely the wrong thing to do at this point: what we need to ask is how do we get the *next* billion downloads – and why do we want them?

At a time when Cisco Systems has aggressively reduced its face-to-face event spending and travel budget, the networking giant will occupy center stage at Red Hat Summit this September.

A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons - everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.

Recently, five college professors spent an intense five days with Red Hat employees and other members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Red Hat called the experience POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience). The goal of the week was to show how FOSS could be used in post-secondary education, and to create a community to further the goal.

Two separate WorksWithU reader polls reveal an interesting look at competition and cooperation between Ubuntu and Google.

Microsoft is at it again: trying to redefine what "open" means. This time they want open standards to be "balanced" - for them to include patent-encumbered technologies. Which just happens to be incompatible with free software licensed under the GNU GPL.

Well, I am here to tell you, but before we launch into an explanation of what Linux is, we need to cover a few basics. First, I want to tell you a little about computer hardware, and then a little about how an operating system is structured.

In this article series by Reynante Martinez, we will learn how to go about creating really convincing still images in Blender with the help of Blender Internal Renderer.

Drizzle is a Free Software/Open Source database management system (DBMS) that was forked from version 6.0 of the MySQL DBMS. Like MySQL, Drizzle has a client/server architecture and uses SQL as its primary command language. Drizzle is distributed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

So hats off to Red Hat, whose chairman Matthew Szulik is the subject of this week’s Global Business. Red Hat is built on the computer operating system software system Linux, devised 19 years ago by the Finnish developer Linus Torvalds, and then worked on by thousands of collaborators all over the world, to become a plausible free-to-use option instead of the big brands of proprietary software. Red Hat has found a way of making money out of selling free software, as the company puts it. It attaches paid-for support or structuring services to the Linux operating system, bringing confidence to business users of software which they would otherwise be nervous of replying on.