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On January 26th of 2013 cellphone locking in the United States effectively became illegal, at least without permission from your existing carrier. Although most carriers will unlock your device for a fee, there’s still a lot of confusion on the matter.

In the case of openSUSE, the community distribution set up by the SUSE Linux company, one feature is indeed unique: the Open Build Service (OBS) that allows anyone to build packages for any distribution, any supported architecture, yielding binaries and even installation media.

One of the most hotly debated ideas for patent reform is to expand what's known as the Covered Business Methods program, which creates a streamlined process for challenging patents. Advocates argue that expanding the CBM program would help to invalidate low-quality patents that are the weapon of choice for patent trolls.

But not everyone in the technology sector is enthusiastic about the idea. The BSA, an industry group that used to call itself the Business Software Alliance, counts patent-rich software companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and Apple among its members. And in recent weeks it has been a leading voice opposing the expansion of the CBM program...

All Things Open began with interesting and controversial keynotes; both centered on a call to action for the open source community. This part one of a two part series: first, a recap of Andy Hunt’s keynote, second and published next, a reacp of Whurley’s keynote.

A group of Linux journalists have quit their day jobs and are trying to start a new magazine that will give back to the open source community. They have pledged 50% of their profits to good causes with the FLOSS world, and will make all their content freely available after nine months.

Last year, Strategy Analytics made the prediction that we may have approached “peak Android” for how big a market share the operating system may be able to attain in the U.S. market. Fast forward to today, and it’s clear that Android is continuing to grow worldwide — although its biggest OEM, Samsung, may be the one that has reached a ceiling of sorts. Figures out today from Gartner indicate that in Q3, Android accounted for nearly 82% of all smartphone sales in the period, and while Samsung has continued to remain in the lead, it is doing so with a flat marketshare of 32%.

If you have a program you use regularly on Linux desktop, you may want to create a "desktop shortcut", so you can launch the program by simply clicking on the shortcut. While most GUI programs automatically create their desktop shortcut during installation, some GUI programs or terminal applications may require you to set up associated shortcuts manually. In this tutorial, I will describe how to create a desktop shortcut or launcher on various Linux desktops.

Last week Canonical sent a cease and desist letter to EFF staffer Micah F Lee asking him to remove the word Ubuntu from the URL as well as removed the Ubuntu logo from the site. Lee responded through an attorney who said that Canonical’s “request were not supported by trademark laws and interferes with protected speech.”

After three Jelly Bean releases in a row, Google has unleashed a major revision to the world's most widely used operating system. With the Nexus 5 comes Android 4.4 "KitKat." KitKat brings a ton of enhancements: support for hidden system and status bars, printer support, and lower memory usage. It also has a number of user-level improvements, including a new dialer, a Google-infused home screen, and a whole pile of UI refinements.

SLE version 11 and up will come with 10 years of general support instead of the seven, matching services from competitors.

You probably know that Emmabuntüs community prepares the next release of their operating system: Emmabuntüs 2. This is the reason why I am happy to announce today a joint contest from Linux notes from DarkDuck and Emmabuntüs community.

The leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project, Lucas Nussbaum, has announced that the question of which init system will be the default in the next release, Jessie, will be decided by the project's technical committee.

So, help me out here. Know of any complete blogging application that can replace WordPress? Drop a comment. Note that when I say “complete,” I mean fully-featured, not something designed solely for developers. I don’t want to write a script just to do basic stuff and I’m certainly not looking for a simple application that’s only designed to generate static pages.

After more than three years of development, Red Hat has released version 1.0.0 of Ceylon, its homebrewed, open-source programming language that's designed to be a replacement for Java. In its current form, King describes Ceylon as a "cross-platform" language. The 1.0.0 release, announced at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium on Tuesday, includes compilers that can output either Java bytecode or JavaScript.

An eight-person jury was picked yesterday, and today the Apple v. Samsung damages re-trial swung into full steam, moving through opening statements and speeding through four witnesses.

Wikileaks has published a draft document of a chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement–the year’s most controversial secret treaty. The secretive multinational free-trade treaty is currently being negotiated by 11 Pacific Rim nations.

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux community distribution has released a beta of its next-generation Fedora 20 release, code-named the Heisenbug. Ironically, the name “Heisenbug” refers to a type of computer bug that is difficult to detect or fix — a type of flaw no programmer ever wants to have.

Information is coming in fast and furiously (I adverbialized for all the English majors!) from the Open Stack summit that recently took place in Hong Kong. Among other tidbits came the results of a user study that offered some surprising news; namely that adoption and deployment of Open Stack is being driven by smaller companies right now rather than global behemoths as one may have surmised. While 21% of OpenStack installations are in companies with more than 10,000 employees, fully 42% of installations are in companies with fewer than 100 employees.

Today in Open Source: Android market share hits 80%. Plus: Fedora 20 beta screenshot tour, and is it hard to switch to Linux?

RDO is a community of people using and deploying OpenStack on Red Hat and Red Hat-based platforms. We have documentation to help get started, forums where you can connect with other users, and community-supported packages of the most up-to-date OpenStack releases available for download.