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This week is the fourth annual Open Access Week, and starting yesterday Oct 18, the official kick-off date, the CC community has been participating in various open access events around the globe. “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” Taking place the same week everywhere, Open Access Week brings together people from all ends of the academic and research communities at various worldwide conferences, workshops, and other events to “continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.” Below is a (not exhaustive) list of what CC jurisdiction leads, open culture and open education advocates, and the Creative Commons staff are doing to inspire open access.

While last month several OpenOffice.org members had left the free software office suite project to form LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, there's no signs that OpenOffice.org is going away anytime soon; Oracle has just announced the first release candidate for the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.3.0.

A quick look at Xubuntu 10.10, including a full gallery of screenshots. Last week I reviewed Kubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 10.10 over on Desktop Linux Reviews. This week I wanted to look at Xubuntu 10.10. I decided to do a quick look rather than a full-blown DLR review because less has changed in Xubuntu than in the other two distro releases.

Recently there has been a transition from physical products being the most critical aspect of many company’s businesses to data being the key driver. This transformation started some time ago and has steadily progressed over time. While one can argue over the subtleties of whether a company actually makes a physical product or not, it is fairly clear that to almost all companies data has become if not the key to their success, then very close to it.

The Free/Open Source software world is cram-full of excellent networking utilities, some free of cost, some costing money, and all excellent. Cynthia Harvey rounds up a herd of 55 of them just for us.

I just recently did a post detailing why you should give the E17 desktop a try. If you made the plunge and are now using E17 on your unix based system you might be slightly at a loss on exactly how it all works. The following are some helpful tips and tricks for when you are first getting started with E17.

The EFF have announced their 2010 Pioneer Awards: transparency activist Stephen Aftergood; public domain scholar James Boyle; legal blogger Pamela Jones and the website Groklaw; and e-voting researcher Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru, who was recently released on bail after being imprisoned for his security work in India. "These winners have all worked tirelessly to give critical insight and context to the tough questions that arise in our evolving digital world," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "We need strong advocates, educators, and researchers like these to protect our digital rights, and we're proud to honor these four Pioneer Award winners for their important contributions." Press release here; PJ's comments here.

Today, the Debian Project has overwhelmingly decided in a General Resolution to formally acknowlege the contribution made by many people who help Debian in ways other than maintaining packages - by opening up the process of becoming an officially recognised Debian Developer.

Google Android chief Andy Rubin has responded to Steve Jobs's extended rant against Google's mobile OS, unloading a cagey tweet meant to defend claims of Android "openness." On Monday afternoon, during a surprise appearance on Apple's quarterly earnings call, Jobs took aim at Mountain View's repeated claims that Google is "open" while Apple is "closed." The Apple cult leader dubbed such Google talk "disingenuous" and a "smokescreen" meant to hide the "real" differences between two companies' mobile OSes: Android and iOS.

Wallpaper Clocks have always been of great fascination for me. Unlike many other desktop eyecandy that we have discussed before, Wallpaper Clocks are quite unique and will work almost like your ordinary wallpaper in terms of memory usage. If Ubuntu 10.10 customization tips are not good enough you, try wallpaper clocks. A big surprise is assured.

In a recent IRC meeting of the OpenOffice.org Community Council members of The Document Foundation(TDF) were asked to resign their roles on the council. The Document Foundation is the organisation recently launched by OpenOffice community members to manage and develop the LibreOffice fork of the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications.

What is at the heart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments? It should not surprise you that open-source software is one of the things that powers the most complex scientific human endeavor ever attempted. I hope to give you a glimpse into how scientific computing embraces open-source software and the open-source philosophy in one of the LHC experiments.

Having used Nautilus (the default file manager in Ubuntu) for several years, I have really no complaints about it. It does its jobs well and you can also install scripts and actions to increase its functionality. However, after installing Nautilus Elementary, I am surprised by the simplicity and the enhancements that it adds to the file manager, which makes Nautilus even more user-friendly and useful. If you haven’t install Nautilus Elementary yet, you got to give it a try.

Using GNU Screen can make life much easier, but how often do you start a job and then realize "I wish I'd started screen first"? I used to do it all the time, then I configured things so screen starts by default when I log into my server. Why do I want screen to start automatically when I log in? Like many folks, I work from more than one computer. I like to be able to SSH into a machine and pick up where I left off from another system. Many admins and other users like to run their IRC sessions with a combination of GNU Screen and irrsi, just so they can have a persistent session.

The main tunable settings for PostgreSQL are in a plain text file named postgresql.conf that's located at the base of the database directory structure. This will often be where $PGDATA is set to on UNIX-like systems, making the file $PGDATA/postgresql.conf on those platforms. This article by Gregory Smith, author of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance, mirrors the general format of the official documentation's look at these parameters at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/runtime-config... However, it is more focused on guidelines for setting the most important values, from the perspective of someone interested in performance tuning, rather than describing the meaning of every parameter. This should be considered a supplement to rather than a complete replacement for the extensive material in the manual.

I have just put online a 3-parts tutorial explaining how to generate one print-ready PDF out of a set of plain ASCII files written using the txt2tags markup syntax. Part 1 explains the advantages of working in this way on large texts, Part 2 describes the general flow and Part 3 the central script.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.10 for OpenIndiana today. Bordeaux 2.0.10 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have bundled Wine 1.2.1, updated firefox to 3.6.8, Added support for Apples Safari 5.0 Web Browser, Updated to the latest winetricks release and fixed desktop shortcuts.

Bradley M Kuhn published an interest blog post at the weekend explaining why he believes Canonical is about to go down the open core licensing route and heavily criticising the company for doing so. My take on the post is that it is the worst kind of Daily Mail-esque fear mongering and innuendo. Not only does Bradley lack any evidence for his claim, the evidence he presents completely undermines his argument and distracts attention from what could be a very important point about copyright assignment. The premise? Mark Shuttleworth has admitted that he plans to follow the open core licensing strategy with Canonical.

Simon Brew ponders one of the finest television programmes in recent memory, and wonders if its advocates share parallels with some in the open source community…

Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu Linux operating system is quickly moving from being a niche player in the market to an environment which caters for a broad range of users.