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I would just like to say thank you to the open source community. Your continued support has allowed us to become one of the longest lived Linux distributions that features the beautiful Enlightenment desktop by default.

To say thanks, we are going to give something back to some of the folks who donate to us in the first quarter of 2014.

The strength of the Linux and FOSS ecosystem is its breadth and depth, and ability to fill important niches large and small without worrying about profitability. My top 7 picks for 2014 are nowhere near comprehensive, but they highlight important work. As always you are invited to share your own picks in the comments.

I can see the brightness of curiosity in my 6 years old niece Shuchi's eyes when she explores a mobile phone or manipulates the idiot box with its remote control or becomes creatively destructive with any other electronic device. She, like a lot of kids her age, love experimenting. This curiosity reaches its peak when she sits in front of my laptop or her father's laptop. A lot of times, however, I observe that she is lost in complicated applications that are suitable only to adults. An operating system that an adult uses and the system running it can look like a beast to a lot of kids. These  applications are beyond the comprehension of very young kids and do not provide an ideal (and playful) introduction to computers. Futher, adults' laptops and tablets do not serve as a good learning environment for any kid (younger or older) who is just onboarding into the world of computing. Besides, letting a kid run wild on a computer with an online connection can be daunting for the parents.

Day 1: Transparency

Copyright policy must be set through a participatory, democratic and transparent process. It should not be decided through back room deals or secret international agreements.

Dear Fedora fans, we are very sorry to announced today, January 14, 2014, that the Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) Linux operating system has reached end of life (EOL).

Ivee has begun shipping a $200, Linux-based “Ivee Sleek” home automation hub, offering voice control of WiFi-enabled devices and a Siri-like voice assistant. Linux-based home automation hubs were everywhere at CES, including Belkin’s updated WeMo devices. Ivee has an interesting twist, however. Like most of these systems, it offers smartphone access to adjusting selected WiFi-enabled […]

A few months ago, the US Supreme Court said it would take up a controversial and divided case regarding software patents. Now, the high court has agreed to take up two more patent cases—both of which could potentially overturn current rules that many in the tech sector see as too lenient for patent owners.

In Zen Buddhism the concept of Shoshin, or "Beginner’s Mind," teaches us to approach learning with openness and a lack of preconceptions. Zen Monk and teacher, Shunryu Suzuki famously wrote: "In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few." When we cast aside that which we think we know, or that which we believe to be true, we can embrace new insights and ideas. As we climb to levels of expertise in our careers and work, we sometimes disconnect from the intense experiences of unknowing and the creative discovery inherent in being a novice. Children wholly embody a beginner’s mind and naturally exhibit an inquisitiveness and passion to explore the world around them.

Last week, we wrote about the MPAA joining the W3C almost certainly as part of its ongoing effort to push for DRM to be built into HTML5. Cory Doctorow has a beautifully titled blog post about all of this, saying that "we are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell." It's a great way to think about it, and Cory's quite pessimistic about the outcome:

For the benefit of those class of users, this very brief article summarizes the key difference between these two desktop environments. Nothing technical, just basic stuff that will help those users to better understand what their options are.

New support in libvirt for Xen Project's xl (xenlight) toolstack

The Linux Foundation has made a name for itself, not just as the home of Linus Torvalds and Linux development, but as the premier organizer for open-source collaboration. It's a fact that the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has also realized and after 14 years of producing their own ApacheCon conferences, the ASF is leaning on the Linux Foundation to product the next one.

Thanks to the help of a few, proud Fedora users, I was able to install the AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta (version 9.95 to be exact) driver on my Xfce-running Fedora 20 system.bAnd thus the long local (as opposed to national) nightmare of poor video performance and a CPU running 30 to 40 degrees hotter is over.

Canonical's UK-based operations earned $65.7 million in revenue during fiscal 2013, a significant boost over the previous year's revenue of $56.8 million.

Back in the mid-1990s, a college friend (hi Russ!) and I would put our old 8088 computers to work rendering ray-traced images for days - literally. The end result would be, by today's standards, incredibly low resolution and not terribly interesting. Still, the thought of a computer system creating realistic photos from nothing more than math equations was fascinating.

Fernando Russ from Groundworks Technologies reported a buffer overflow flaw in srtp, Cisco's reference implementation of the Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP), in how the crypto_policy_set_from_profile_for_rtp() function applies applies cryptographic profiles to an srtp_policy. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to crash an application linked against libsrtp, resulting in a denial of service.

Linux Educacional 5.0 is available. Linux Educational is a government-sponsored project based in Brazil. The distribution comes with educational tools and is designed for use in schools.

Multiple Denial of Service vulnerabilities have been found in libxslt.

In 2014, Fedora could be in store for its biggest evolution since the project's creation, with fewer releases and even a new naming strategy.

Typically, the Fedora project has had two releases in any given year: one in the early spring, the other early winter. For 2014, that likely won't be the case.

Not really one for gamers, but this is important for developers to know that changes are heading your way.