FOSS - Page number 4

If you haven't heard a keynote about the wonders of the cloud, you haven't been to an open source conference lately. But Mårten Mickos' LinuxCon cloud keynote was more than that--it was really a freedom keynote.

"FOSS has an 'F' as in freedom, and in fun, and the future," Mickos said. "Many of us do it because of 'F' as in fun. But we have a duty to civilization to protect freedom--to protect that what we open, others don't close." » Read more

During our Free vs. Paid Business Models webcast, we had a lot of questions from the audience—more than our guests had time to answer. Nicolas Pujol generously took a few more minutes of his time to answer these followups. » Read more

A new book for software developers takes a lesson from architecture. Not the structures themselves, though--the learning process for the designers. The Architecture of Open Source Applications by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson takes developers on a tour of 25 open source applications, explains how each is structured, and--most importantly--why. » Read more

Tell me, what's the difference between open source and commercial software? If you'd have asked me not long ago, I'd say that there was a world of difference between the two, and that they both sat at opposite ends of the software spectrum. "Isn't it bad," I thought, "to pay for software?"
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Two weeks ago, 16 Girl Scouts and their troops' leaders went to RIT for a Scratch-fueled, day-long workshop in game design and development in pursuit of their "Games for Life" interest project. The workshop was the fifth sponsored by RIT's School of Interactive Games and Media, Rochester Women in Computing, and Digital Rochester. » Read more

Let's be up front about things: I'm angry about the rhetoric I hear of late surrounding education. Teachers (and their unions) are being vilified, legislators and parents are demanding "accountability," and at the same time, the financial support necessary to educate a society is being slashed drastically. Regarding education, everyone has an opinion---and they feel their opinion is "informed" in some way simply because they went to school. » Read more

Over the last eight years, Pamela Jones, known as "PJ," wrote volumes at Groklaw—first as a blog about the holes in SCO's claims, then increasingly as a place for wider commentary on the legal issues facing Linux and open source. To summarize the site's mission statement, Groklaw was a full legal news resource, "acknowledged and used by all the parties, including SCO." But it was also a community—a place for open source believers to gather, learn, and share.

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Experiential learning using open source is fraught with opportunities for disaster.

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It was my great pleasure to attend POSSCON 2011 this year. I had the opportunity to do a keynote, a panel discussion, and a technical talk, wearing the hats of both developer as well as "FOSS expert." And that dual-hat nature defines the conference itself quite well. Imagine if OSCON and OSBC had a baby: its name would be POSSCON. » Read more

Adam Drew is a technical support engineer for Red Hat's Global Support Services specializing in clustering, storage, and file systems. When he’s not working on enterprise storage, Adam can be found writing and recording music, writing for his blog, maintaining his FOSS Audio KBase, programming, and experimenting with graphic design and digital painting, all on free and open source software (FOSS). » Read more