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Just a few days after the one year anniversary of the release of the first version of OpenOffice from the Apache Foundation (Apache OpenOffice 3.4) on 8 May 2012, the project can now boast 50 million downloads of the open source office suite. More than 80% of these downloads have come from Windows users, with the rest of the downloads spread between Mac OS X and Linux. Over time, the percentage of Windows users has slightly increased at the expense of Mac OS X, with Linux usage hovering steady under 5%.

When I first started to learn how to code and program, as a student and during the pre-internet era, it was common practice to share your source code as you were creating it. My classmates and I assumed that was the best way for us to learn—from each other.

For more than two years, the Linux operating system has contained a high-severity vulnerability that gives untrusted users with restricted accounts nearly unfettered "root" access over machines, including servers running in shared Web hosting facilities and other sensitive environments. Surprisingly, most users remain wide open even now, more than a month after maintainers of the open-source OS quietly released an update that patched the gaping hole.

In an effort to make Enlightenment E17 available through the openSUSE installer and DVD, the lightweight LXDE desktop environment may be pushed away...

On April 19th the United States Patent and Trademark Office finally rejected an application for the trademark open source hardware. The grounds for the rejection were that the term was "merely descriptive." Trademarks are intended to identify a specific source of goods or services, protecting that source from confusion in the minds of consumers with other sources. Naturally then, if you try to obtain a trademark which is just a description of a type of product or service, it is proper that you should be refused; it would not be distinctive and it would distort the market by allowing one source to control the generic term. If I market a car for a hamster, I should not be able to get a trademark for the name hamster car, as that would improperly restrain competitors from bringing their own hamster cars to market. So, should we be pleased that the application was rejected?

At Google I/O today, Google released an early access preview version of an Android integrated development environment (IDE) based on IntelliJ IDEA. To its IntelliJ foundation, Android Studio adds an enhanced drag-and-drop GUI layout editor, Gradle-based build system, Lint tools, Android-focused wizards, and the ability to preview how apps look on different screen sizes. Like [...]

Which repository is your primary choice? SourceForge GitHub Google Code Gitorious Bitbucket Codeplex Other From James Bowes' article, A code hosting comparison for open source projects:

Antergos is a new name for Cinnarch, a project that used to combine the Cinnamon desktop and Arch Linux into a complete desktop Linux distribution. After a month since our last release under the name 'Cinnarch', we're glad to announce the new name of our project and our first release being out of beta. We're stable enough to make this step. We've chosen 'Antergos', a Galician word to link the past with the present. Moving forward, all our services are now working with the new name.

For open-source graphics drivers materializing last year and earlier in the year was the PRIME support in conjunction with DMA-BUF for buffer sharing between drivers/hardware. Released last month was then a new NVIDIA binary Linux graphics driver that supports NVIDIA Optimus and RandR 1.4 at long last. On the AMD side for hybrid graphics, the Catalyst driver has its own way of handling Intel+AMD mixed configurations.

Seemingly borrowing a page from the old, line-numbered BASIC programs of the 1980s, Oracle has adopted a new version numbering strategy for the Java Development Kit (JDK) – one that skips numbers, in case Oracle has to go back and plunk in new code later. Traditionally, Oracle has issued new patches for the JDK on a predictable, regular basis, shipping Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) three times a year on an advertised schedule. That practice was designed to suit the needs of enterprise IT admins, who typically need lots of time to test new patches before they apply them.

chattr is a command in the Linux operating system that allows a user to set certain attributes on a file residing on an ext2/ext3/ext4 based filesystem

True, VARs have traditionally chosen to go the proprietary route, which they’ve considered better paved and better marked, but they’ve not been unwilling to take a chance and go down the unmarked gravel road of open source. Mainly, VARs just want to make money, which makes them a pretty agnostic lot. They’ll worship at the cathedral or the bazaar–or anywhere else where the cash register is liable to go ka-ching.

Last year it was pretty darn good, and it has essentially only gotten even better since then.

On the heels of Katherine Noyes' story "Linux Community: No Rational Discourse Allowed", Linux Advocate Dietrich Schmitz gives his sentiments on the subject.

Everyone planning and building Web solutions with Drupal benefits from understanding what a "hook" is—and why Drupal is not a CMS.

Nexcom announced a network security appliance with Unified Threat Management (UTM) services based on Freescale’s new 12-core, 1.8GHz QorIQ T4240 system-on-chip (SOC). The NSA 5640 is equipped with up to 6GB of DDR3 RAM, 2GB NAND flash, mini-PCI Express expansion, eight gigabit Ethernet ports, optional 4-port 10GbE connectivity, and PowerPC Linux support. The NSA 5640 [...]

Arch Linux replaced MySQL with MariaDB, openSUSE gutted MySQL, Fedora replaced MySQL, and now Ubuntu Linux is looking to continue the trend...

Released today (yes an actual release news!) is Anomaly 2 the tower defence game on Steam supporting cross platform multiplayer!

Google I/O 2013 Kicks off today. Linux Advocate Dietrich Schmitz gives the details.

Aaron Swartz is no longer with us, but his last major project, the open-source DeadDrop/Strongbox, is bringing privacy to Internet users.