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Next week, Opensource.com will begin publishing a series on Beginners to Open Source. This collection of articles will live as a resource that anyone can access anytime to learn more about what it's like to get started in open source, in any position and for any type of open source project.

Erle Robotics, a Spanish company that creates all sorts of Linux-powered robots, such as Erle-brain, an open hardware Linux kernel-based autopilot for drones, Erle-plane, a Linux-based plane, and Erle-rover, a Linux-based rover, has announced Erle-copter, the world’s first Ubuntu-powered drone, which can be used to capture amazing scenes (if you have a great camera).

The sale of the first ever Ubuntu phone through a European flash sale was evidently a success. Of course, we wouldn’t know as the phone isn’t available yet to those of us who live on this side of the pond, so it hasn’t been getting much press over here. However, EU sites are all atwitter with headlines like “Ubuntu Sells Out!”

As noted, I had no idea that this happened, because I don't own an iPhone. There is one slight functional reason for this: users may have to pay for SMS messages, but not for iMessages, and thus it could have an impact on a bill. But here's the more interesting tidbit, which is the crux of Ford's article: lots of people absolutely hate those green bubbles...

Ford, then goes into a really interesting discussion on the nature of product management and design choices -- the kind of thing that Apple doesn't do on a whim -- to get to the real point: Apple is likely choosing harsh, ugly green bubbles on purpose. As a petty way to put down Android users:

In today's open source roundup: Download the top one hundred free Android apps from Amazon. Plus: Android 5.0 Lollipop crashes less than iOS 8, and is the Ubuntu Phone's hardware underpowered?

Aaeon’s “EPIC-BDU7? SBC uses Intel’s 5th Gen Core processors, and offers multiple graphics, GbE, USB, and SATA ports, plus mini-PCIe and PCI-104 expansion. Aaeon’s EPIC-BDU7 single board computer uses the same old-school EPIC form factor adopted by its Atom-based EPC-CV1 board, but instead loads up with Intel’s brand new 5th Generation Core processors using the 14nm “Broadwell” architecture. Aaeon typically supports Linux on its SBCs, and although no OS support was listed, Linux should run on this board with no problem.

Hitachi plans to acquire data analytics and business intelligence vendor Pentaho for at least $500M, the largest big data acquistion to date. What's big data analytics worth in monetary terms? Hitachi gave a clue this week with news that it intends to acquire business intelligence company Pentaho for a sum rumored to range between $500 million and $600 million.

The clearest example of what a joke the 301 process is came two years ago, when CCIA tried to use the "process" behind the list to get Germany put on the list for attacking fair use. That actually seemed like a perfectly good use of the list, as Germany was trying to force search engines (mainly Google) to pay up for posting snippets of news and linking to them (a plan that it has continued to push). Here was a clear case of abusing copyright law to harm an American company. And the USTR totally ignored it. Because the Special 301 process is not about saner intellectual property laws. It's about making intellectual property maximalists happy. That's why some of those maximalists have even used the process to get countries declared naughty for merely using open source software.

Benchmarking is the process of running some of the standard programs to evaluate the speed achieved by a system. There are a number of standard bechmarking programs and in this tutorial we benchmark the Linux system using a well known program called the HPL, also known as High Performance Linpack.

This week, we look at Gartner dissing private clouds, Microsoft trying to buy some Silicon Valley startup love and Hadoop in the cloud.

Data storage, data centers, and networking are changing enterprise architecture as we know it. The best way to stay current is to connect with technologists who know what they’re talking about.

While Fedora 21 has been officially released on December 9, 2014, and users worldwide still enjoy the powerful operating system on their desktop or server computers, the time has come to look at the future and see what the forthcoming Fedora 22 release has prepared for its dedicated users.

Most discussions of free software licenses bore listeners. In fact, licenses are usually of such little interest that 85%of the projects on Github fail to have one.

Sisense and Simba have partnered to integrate MongoDB, the open source, NoSQL database platform, into Sisense's business intelligence and data analytics suite. Hadoop has made lots of big data headlines by now. But in a reminder that it is only part of the open source big data story, Sisense and Simba partnered this week to deliver data analytics via MongoDB, the open source NoSQL platform, which is increasingly importance in production big data use.

Samsung has been doing a great job this week illustrating why consumers should want their televisions to be as dumb as technologically possible.

As of today my ePad source is nearing a 1.0.0 release and the goal of this post is to let folks outside of Bodhi know it exists and that it is ready for them to give it a try. ePad in its current form supports most all of the features you would expect from a text editor: Cut, Copy, Paste, Undo, Redo, Find, Replace, and displaying Line Numbers. On top of these it also supports opening multiple files in the same application window.

Who would’ve thought it possible that digital rights management (DRM) would come to the coffee business? Well, it has. Believe it or not, Keurig now includes DRM on their coffee makers. Why? To keep users from using anything but Keurig coffee pods on their machines, of course. You know, just like the DRM used by some printer manufacturers to keep you coming back (and coming back) for their branded replacement ink cartridges instead of opting for the much cheaper store brand.

After finding plenty of top 5 to top 50 distro lists, one name really stuck out. Just the name.

On Kickstarter, Zyro is pitching a “DroneBall” quadcopter that runs Linux on Gumstix COMs and acts like a smart aerial ball for multi-player games. The Zyro DroneBall doesn’t look like a ball — nor does it act like any ball you’ve ever seen that isn’t made of Flubber. The quadcopter can hover, zig, and zag within a virtual aerial arena, mimicking a hockey puck, soccer ball, or an Ultimate Frisbee disc, says Zyro. It can even take the role of an extra player on the field interacting with another DroneBall.

If you are the type of person who uses several devices to work online, I'm sure you must be using, or at least wishing to use, a method for syncing files and directories among those devices. BitTorrent Sync, also known as btsync for short, is a cross-platform sync tool (freeware) which is powered by BitTorrent, the famous protocol for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Unlike classic BitTorrent clients, however, btsync encrypts traffic and grants access to shared files based on auto-generated keys across different operating system and device types.