Life

Coding for good: Highlights from the open source humanitarian movement

HFOSS, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software, is a movement inspired first by the December 2004 Asian tsunami, and then by other humanitarian needs in the health, civic, finance and academic sectors (especially for women and people of color).

Leslie Hawthorn, part of Red Hat's Community Action and Impact team, gives example after example of how HFOSS has improved and made possible disaster preparedness and relief programs, as well as empowered other projects: » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 28 Sep 2012 by Leslie Hawthorn (Red Hat)

Gamer contest hosted by Mozilla, Creative Commons, and others

The Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part gaming contest. The first part involved participants who submitted art for the games. The second part, discussed here, focuses on the games themselves. The contest is organized by Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation, OpenGameArt, and Mozilla.

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0 CommentsPosted 28 Sep 2012 by Juan Rodriguez

The elusive book publishing process: A little risk, a little reward

My favorite thing about the Internet is the way it makes so many of us into storytellers. It turns people on to sharing their own experiences, especially experiences they might be uncomfortable relating in person. My enthusiasm for the Internet’s encouragement of transparency extends beyond digital confessionals and group therapy and well into the mundane: instruction manuals; wikis packed with the sort of minutiae one used to have to wait to overhear at a cocktail party; and the open listserv a friend maintained as a shared journal, where my every entry addressed the lone lurker no one knew (but who seemed to be named Paul and kept showing up in the output of a REVIEW DIARY-L).

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5 CommentsPosted 26 Sep 2012 by Michael G. Williams

Poll: Which Linux board would you use to create your next project?

Recently, we compared Raspberry Pi, Allwinner and CuBox Linux hardware boards. » Read more

4 CommentsPosted 26 Sep 2012 by Jen Wike (Red Hat)

Community lessons from architecture and urban planning

Dave Neary manages open source standards at Red Hat, so he thinks a lot about what makes open source communities work and what makes them unique.

First, everything we are doing in open source is not brand new. People have gone before us; we should take notice of the lessons they learned and learn them ourselves. Then, two books, one about architecture and the other city planning, highlight key guidelines for design and process. » Read more

0 CommentsPosted 21 Sep 2012 by Dave Neary (Red Hat)

Open source music-making lab resonates in the Congo

In July this year, two UNC-Chapel Hill professors trained 16 motivated Congolese students in the art of beat making. They called their group The Congo Beat Making Lab and collaborated with Yole!Africa to strengthen a larger goal they all share: to connect people (including musicians) around the world.

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1 CommentPosted 20 Sep 2012 by Pierce Freelon

The automotive industry accelerates its Linux commitment

The automotive industry took a major step forward in its commitment to open source yesterday, as announced by the Linux Foundation. The Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL) is a new group that will facilitate industry collaboration for Linux development.

Major automotive companies like Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and Toyota are some of the first carmakers to participate in AGL. Other members include Aisin AW, DENSO Corporation, Feuerlabs, Fujitsu, HARMAN, Intel, NEC, NVIDIA, Reaktor, Renesas, Samsung, Symbio, Texas Instruments Incorporated, and Tieto. » Read more

2 CommentsPosted 20 Sep 2012 by Casey Brown

Time to grab Humble Indie Bundle Six's $86 worth of games

The clock is ticking on your 13 days to grab the six games in this edition of the Humble Indie Bundle, a pay-what-you-will collection of games with the benefits going to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play. Your loot this time around includes the DRM-free games and soundtracks for:

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2 CommentsPosted 19 Sep 2012 by Ruth Suehle (Red Hat)

Multiseat computing can feed a multitude

The ancient alchemists tried to turn iron into gold. While they didn't succeed, they did leave us with a wonderful metaphor. Last week I experienced something akin to alchemy when I installed Fedora 17 onto a donated Dell Dimension 3000 tower computer.

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1 CommentPosted 17 Sep 2012 by Phil Shapiro

Creative Commons applied to government, business, and journalism

For people wanting to learn about Creative Commons and its application in different sectors, there is a sea of materials available online. In particular, Creative Commons international affiliates create a huge number of educational resources that cross language and cultural boundaries.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my work sorting through some of these resources to identify some of the best, focusing on Creative Commons license use for public sector information, for publishing content on a variety of digital platforms, and for generating revenue. As promised, today I’ll highlight some of the resources I’ve discovered. » Read more

3 CommentsPosted 13 Sep 2012 by Natalya Berenshteyn