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The city of Limerick, Ireland, is known for a lot of things: the infamous “broken treaty” of 1691, Gaelic sports and the eponymous form of poetry. Now, the town is also aspiring to become a model for deploying open source in government. It completed the latest move in that process this week with the adoption of the Zentyal Small Business Server and Zarafa groupware suite.

The RTS game Cultures : Northland is now available on Desura for Linux

Desktops are over, tablets and Smart TVs are in Windows might still be the dominant desktop computing OS by a large margin, but Microsoft is in danger of becoming a small player in today's global computing market, according to a new report from financial bigwigs Goldman Sachs.…

The first milestone of Orion 2.0 gives developers a taste of a Node.js future with a prototype build of the web-based IDE, while the main project gets new themes, new features and lots of fixes

Today, the software company CodeWeavers has released a new version of the Windows emulation software CrossOver for Linux and Mac OS X. The new version is based on Wine 1.5.15 and now has a better integration with the desktop systems Unity and Gnome 3 and has a better support for transparent windows with an activated compositing manager. Also the list of officially supported applications has been extended with new applications.

A new Firefox feature is being added to the Nightly Builds, with oft requested private browsing mode used by many other browsers to eventually reach the release version

Desktop Linux for brand new computers has come a long way. Not too many years ago, consumers had fairly limited options in this space, but today we have more options than I could have ever imagined. One company offering desktop Linux on new systems is Dell. After seeing mixed success with its first line of Ubuntu PCs, Dell dumped Ubuntu almost entirely. But now Ubuntu is back with Dell's new ultrabook offering.

Perhaps someone is old enough to remember the original Lemmings game, a puzzle-platformer video game developed by DMA Design and published by Psygnosis in 1991. Originally developed for the Amiga, Lemmings was one of the most popular video games of its era, the basic objective of the game is to guide a group of humanoid lemmings through a number of obstacles to a designated exit. In order to save the required number of lemmings to win, one must determine how to assign a limited number of eight different skills to specific lemmings that allow the selected lemming to alter the landscape, to affect the behavior of other lemmings, or to clear obstacles in order to create a safe passage for the rest of the lemmings.

Program for 25th edition of official conference series of The Apache Software Foundation showcases dozens of key Apache projects across Big Data, Cloud Computing, Infrastructure, Messaging, Scientific Applications, and more.

The latest benchmarking adventures at Phoronix.com have been exploring the performance of Debian GNU/Linux versus Debian GNU/kFreeBSD when using the latest Debian 6.0.6 "Squeeze" images as well as the latest Debian "Wheezy" testing images.

Magnolia, creator of the open source content management system (CMS) has announced its first ever ‘Magnolia Amplify’ active learning event to be held March 6th-8th at the Mondrian South Beach Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.

The latest talk in education circles is moving from a STEM-based method of teaching (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) to a STEAM-based one (science, technology, art, and mathematics). This involves using an inquiry-based approach or a project-based approach to learning through the immersion in the arts. How this helps open source and women in particular is a bone of contention for some. One would think that a focus on art would help propel female art students into pioneering territory with a focus on STEAM, however, the results seem mixed for women.

The next big case to pay attention to concerning software patents appears to be the CLS Bank v. Alice Corp. case, which is being reheard "en banc" (by the full slate of judges) at the federal circuit court of appeals (CAFC). The short version of the case is that it involves a patent over the idea of software that conducts a "shadow transaction" to make sure that there are enough funds to complete a real transaction, before allowing the real transaction to go through, thus minimizing "settlement risk" (the risk of the deal not actually being completed). Should that be patentable? Well, that's part of the argument. The district court tossed out the patent as being simply about an "abstract idea," which is not patentable, as abstract ideas are excluded from section 101 of the patent act, which lists out patentable subject matter. On appeal, a divided three judge panel overturned the lower court, and said that when you looked at the invention as a whole, it was patentable subject matter under section 101. The full CAFC has agreed to rehear the case, and the amicus briefs are flowing in, as people realize that this case is the next key battleground over software patents.

According to a Goldman Sachs' private report , Microsoft's share of the computing device operating system market has declined to a mere 29%. Above it? Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Windows could make a comeback but faces "an uphill battle."

About a year ago we wrote about lawyer who was spreading Android FUD after he had removed evidence (from his CV) of former Microsoft employment. He just sort of airbrushed it out of his career history, and just in time for an attack on Android. He then collaborated with a Microsoft lobbyist (who routinely pushes journalists to publish Android/Linux horror stories) in spreading his FUD. This is not a coincidence. It’s a pattern we learned to recognise.

If there is one thing we can all count on in the open source blogosphere, it’s Linus Torvalds no bullshit approach to communicating with the world. That same no bullshit approach was not absent today when Linus moved to officially axe “ancient 386 support” from Linux. Ancient? You bet. Support for the 386 architecture has been lingering along within the Linux Kernel since day one, 1991. Well now it seems that it is ready to jump into a binary casket, finally, long after it’s relevance and usefulness have passed.

Imagine the Web as an open gaming platform for the world. Where game players seamlessly become game creators. Where your favorite games work on any device, anytime, anywhere. And where your own personal web-based creations earn you internet fame, fortune and the adulation of gamers around the world.

It has been a long long long journey but we have made progress. The task to improve already good quality does not mean stop when it's good enough, it simply means make it better and with the release of LuninuX OS 12.10 'Quite Quail', you will see how much better it has been made. Some of the major changes are Opera as the default web browser with privacy plugins, boxes for virtual machines, OpenJDK and many more. You can download the release on the download page and as an option to purchase a USB/DVD media that will be mailed to you.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the program and dates for its annual ApacheCon North America conference. The main conference will take place between 26 and 28 February 2013 in Portland, Oregon under the general theme of "Open Source Community Leadership Drives Enterprise-Grade Innovation". The two days before the start of the main conference will be filled with training as well as barcamp and hackathon style events, beginning on 24 February. After the main conference, sprints and workshops will be held until 2 March when the event officially concludes.

Governments certainly have more than enough to concern themselves with these days—financial crises, natural disasters and terrorism, to name just a few. Given that’s the case, it’s surprising that so many are finding the time to worry about what kind of standards the products and services they purchase comply with. But they are.