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The NoSQL database that powers Facebook's popular FarmVille and Café World games is being released as a public open-source project. Zynga (the games' creator), NoSQL start-up NorthScale, and Korean games portal NHN have announced the membase open-source project at Membase.org, under an Apache 2.0 license. All three have contributed code.

Mozilla on Tuesday patched nine vulnerabilities, six of them critical, in Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 3.5. But rather than highlighting the security fixes in Firefox 3.6.4, the company instead emphasized the addition of crash protection, a move meant to keep the browser alive when popular plug-ins drop dead.

To critics like Florian Mueller of FossPatents, all this sounds more like Skull & Bones than Semper Fi. “Canonical is known for being a strategic partner of IBM, and since IBM is the most influential force behind the OIN, that’s probably the reason why its membership status was upgraded,” he wrote me. While Bergelt said the group’s definition of the Linux System is clearly listed on the group’s Web site, Mueller called those definitions arbitrary. “It seems to me that the OIN is basically a strategic patent troll, a non-practicing entity owned by a small group of companies that can use it for its purposes against their competitors whenever they elect to do so, and the protection of Linux is just a pretext,” he wrote. Most open source advocates disagree with Mueller. Pamela Jones of Groklaw believes it is Mueller who is engaged in FUD:

Xnoise is basically an music player but it can also play videos too and unlike other Linux music players, it uses a tracklist centric design. I didn't call it a "media player" because even though it can play both audio and video files, it seems to be designed more towards playing music. Xnoise can in fact play any audio / video format supported by Gstreamer and what I like about it is that in the hierarchy view you have both music and videos - so if you have some videos along with your music, you can play the videos too, something I've always been looking for in a music player (using VLC for playing music just doesn't feels right for me).

Over the night on Phoronix an article was published entitled Is LGP Going The Way Of Loki Software? Linux Game Publishing has been around since 2001 when Loki Software had collapsed, but in recent months LGP has been eerily quiet, has stopped responding to inquiries from customers and other Linux gamers, and their only announced game ports are titles they began working on back in 2002 and 2003. This had led many to worry and wonder whether LGP is dead.

Canon's digital cameras, like all digital cameras, are really little computers. Certain features are enabled or disabled to justify different price points. It's all done in software, so the wizards of CHDK have created firmware to add new features (such as RAW support), and to do it safely without bricking your camera. Akkana Peck tells how in part one of this series.

SkypeKit gives Linux developers access to core functionality, allowing Linux developers to add video, calling and instant messaging features to desktop applications. The SDK also comes with the freshly royalty-free SILK codec for high-end audio. Skype is hoping that the inclusion of SILK will popularize the codec, extending its reach. Currently, the SkypeKit beta is only available for Linux on an invite-only basis, with Windows and Mac versions planned in coming weeks. The SDK does not cover Android or Mac, an odd choice considering the announcement of SkypeKit championed itself for extending the functionality of Skype to multiple platforms and devices. Including smartphones in the SDK seems like an obvious move.

Clearly Ubuntu is among the most popular Linux distributions, but which other versions of this operating system are proving popular with users? Looking at a number of online lists, including the popular Distrowatch site, a general idea of which Linux versions are most popular emerges.

Born out of the demise of Loki Software in 2001 was Linux Game Publishing, but now a decade later the fate of LGP is not looking good for the company that has ported about two dozen game titles to Linux.

With hundreds of online radio stations to choose from, Shoutcast is one the best ways to get music onto your PC. In this article we will take a look at how you can get access to Shoutcast in Ubuntu 10.04.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says open source can succeed without cloud computing, but cloud computing can’t succeed without open source. Whitehurst shared that nugget — and about a dozen other thoughts — during an interview with The VAR Guy at Red Hat Partner Summit in Boston. Whitehurst also touched on rising competition with VMware plus Red Hat's desktop Linux strategy. Here are the details.

After having a thread go nowhere useful for a day and a half on the Mint forums, I decided to put my python background to use. The following steps are what I have done to install a working Software Center in Mint 9.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, I'm supposed to have matured and become serious about things. And so it is with Linux. It all started out in fun. I know. I've got Linus Torvalds' "Just for Fun" here on my bookshelf. Says so right there on the front cover. Fun. And it was fun. But as with anyone approaching adulthood, Linux was apparently not taking itself seriously enough. If Linux was to conquer the server room, the desktop, the mobile market, the real time processing world, etc, etc, then it had better clean up its act. Add a little polish. Get serious about business. And it did.

By 11 AM, two dozen or so local geeks assembled in front of Union Park on West Sixth street, the bar that we were soon to turn into a large computer testing and repair shop. By 11:30 we had close to 50 volunteers pitching in. People took turns parking their cars and trucks out front to unload things they had brought and within 30 minutes, we had set up shop.

Like you already know, VLC 1.1.0 (final) has been released yesterday. The C-Korn PPA has been updated with the final VLC 1.1.0 version so Ubuntu users can use it to upgrade to the latest stable VLC.

Having file systems in the kernel has its pros and cons. Being able to write file systems in user-space also has some pros and cons, but FUSE (File System in Userspace) allows you to create some pretty amazing results. This article takes a very brief look at user-space file systems and FUSE.

Red Hat is not as precisely coupled to the economy as many other IT players. Throughout the Great Recession, Red Hat got its brim a little wet, but it never blew off Wall Street's head and got trampled in the mud like so many other companies. And as the economy recovers, the commercial Linux operating system and JBoss middleware distributor is growing at more or less the same rate – like nothing ever happened.

Last weekend a team of KDE volunteers (wo)manned a booth at LinuxTag. As hopefully many of you have already read about (and maybe already joined) on Wednesday the new Supporting Membership program was launched. There is some more content upcoming, but for now we'd like to give you all a quick taste of what those four days were like. On Tuesday afternoon, Eckhart Woerner and Frederik Gladhorn arrived at the KDE e.V. office in Berlin, not only to say hello and have quick look at the office but also to equip the boothbox. Then everybody took off to the fairground venue in order to set up the booth.

Google Chrome is fast becoming the browser of choice for many. With its ever increasing user base, the safety concerns related to this comparatively new browser is also increasing. Here, we enlist the 6 most useful extensions/plugins for a much safer browsing experience with Google Chrome.

The Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) was a leading 16-bit video game console system. The console was developed by Sega Corporation in 1988. By current console standards, the Mega Drive's specification seem positively pedestrian. However, at its launch the console's specifications surpassed competitors in many respects. Demand for the Mega Drive took off with the release of the classic game, Sonic the Hedgehog.