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In proprietary software, the company contributes 100% of the code. If you think about a traditional proprietary software product, it has a development community of one: the software company itself. The company’s ability to support that product, to influence the features that come in future versions, and to integrate that product with other products in its ecosystem flows directly from its direct control over the source code and its development. In open source, it is rare that any one company controls anything close to 100% of the source code; in fact, it is often a sign of a weak open source community if one company dominates a project. The power and the value of the open source development model come from many individual and corporate contributors coming together. Using this thinking, we can look at the collaborative corporate contributions to OpenStack.

In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit's SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit's users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit's users.

Plex is one of those applications I tend to write about a lot. It's not because I get any sort of kickback or even a discount, but rather it's just an incredible system that keeps getting better.

Arch Linux is highly respected throughout the Linux community as a cutting edge, well designed, rolling-release Linux distro with superb documentation. But at the same time, it is also discarded as a non-option by many Linux users, including experienced ones, for being time consuming to install and configure. I fall into this latter group. So, what’s a self-respecting Linux user supposed to do if (s)he wants to run Arch Linux but doesn’t want to a dedicate a whole weekend to it? Enter Manjaro, a Linux distro based on Arch. It is important to note that Manjaro is not just a re-branded Arch spin. In fact, it’s not truly an Arch system, and it does not use the Arch binary package repositories. But it’s dependent on Arch and it supposedly maintains all of the desirable features of Arch, while at the same time trying to mitigate or solve some of Arch’s less than desirable traits. We will now proceed to examine Manjaro from quite a few different angles to see if it reaches its goal.

With our decision to move Reglue to KDE, I looked the landscape over and decided that the Mint KDE LTS version would be best suited for our needs. Friend and Google Plus buddy Randy Noseworthy took the contract for putting together our new LTS release for Reglue. It wasn’t long until Randy contacted me via email and gave me some bad news.

“mintConstructor has been pulled from the repos.”

Whether the big media producers like it or not, digital technologies have made it easier than ever for popular culture fans to create remixes or derivative works from their favorite movies, TV shows, books, and other media. And the participatory nature of the Internet has arguably helped broaden the popular definition of a "fan community" from something exclusive to comic and sci-fi fans to being inclusive of many genres and people. This includes giving wider exposure to a vast and yet often overlooked demographic in pop fandom—women—and their influence on mainstream media stories.

Intel released more information about its Quark-based Jarvis headset reference design, claiming that it offers local voice processing for faster responses. At CES, Intel demo’d its upcoming Jarvis headset, along with other products that run on its new dual-core, Linux-oriented Quark processor, such as a smartwatch and a baby monitor. In a Jan. 27 interview […]

Zorin OS is one of the Ubuntu derivatives that aims the fresh Linux converts. It allows you to start using Linux in the interface similar to Windows.

Zorin OS 8 was released on the 27th of January 2014. Let's have a quick screenshot tour on the features of Zorin OS 8 Core.

We are huge fans of Jeff Hoogland’s work as a Software Developer and his efforts with Bodhi Linux. So we invited Jeff for a quick chat with Unixmen Australia. We were privileged when Jeff accepted our invitation. Here is what he had to say.

Vringo is a tiny company that purchased some patents from Lycos, an old search engine, in 2011 and then used those patents to sue Google. In December 2012, Vringo won $30 million in a jury trial, but that was far less than the hundreds of millions it was seeking.

Today, Vringo got the payout it was looking for: a 1.36 percent running royalty on US-based revenue from AdWords, Google's flagship program.

Multi-platform threat exploits old Java flaw, gains persistence.

This tutorial presents a step-by-step guide on how to configure full disk encryption manually on Ubuntu 13.10 and Linux Mint 16. It will also work for any other Ubuntu-based distribution, like Linux Deepin.

A basic tenant of open-source software security has long been the idea that since the code is open, anyone can look inside to see if there is something that shouldn't be there. It's a truth that does work and many of us who use open-source software daily, accept it as such. That's why some recent news about a Trojan in a popular File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program is a potential cause for concern.

Canonical was thrilled to announce earlier today, January 28, that its Juju service orchestration tool has been awarded at the 2013-2014 Cloud Awards contest as the Best Cloud Automation Solution.

The Debian init system debate by Debian technical committee members that is largely a fight between systemd and Upstart remains unresolved.

By year's end I expect Android-based PCs and Chromebooks to have disrupted the Windows PC market.Oh, and does does AMD, Intel, HP, and Lenovo. Here's why.

Just how popular is enterprise open source software? Popular enough, it seems, to power web servers in locations as unlikely as North Korea. That's where Red Hat (RHT) Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and derivatives of it, are running the few public web servers that exist in the country. Who knew?

The latest benchmarks to share with you all are some tests done of all major Linux kernel releases from Linux 3.8 through Linux 3.13 and including the latest drm-next code that will land in the Linux 3.14 kernel. Here's a look at whether Intel Haswell HD Graphics users can expect any more performance improvements out of Linux 3.14 on the graphics front.

Dell and Cumulus Networks have announced a reseller partnership to deliver the open source Cumulus Linux operating system on Dell network switches.

With FreeBSD 10.0 having been released and the final release of the PC-BSD 10.0 coming this week, I decided to try out the PC-BSD 10.0-RC5 ahead of the final release.