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Having a built-in navigation system in your new car is pretty common place now (that is, if you want to pay for it). These days many new car owners can just type in the address of where they want to go in to their in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system and a 2D map will pop up with some simple graphics showing them how to get there, or possibly a 3D map if you have a luxury vehicle that offers it.But how is that 3D mapping data collected and updated? And who can access it? Marek Strassenburg-Kleciak is one of the key people behind collected 3D mapping data for OpenStreetMap (OSM), which has been billed as the Wikipedia of maps. As the senior manager for new business development at Elektrobit Automotive, one of the things he loves most about his work is putting technology visions into practice.

For nearly as long as the three of us have known each other, we have talked about the things we would make when we had our own company. The seriousness of that statement grew and waned over time. But early this year, a friend who was just getting into working with the Arduino microcontroller platform built an 8-bit binary counter and an idea was born: Why not make a bigger counter? Why not make it a clock? This idea became the start of Maniacal Labs, a company that we plan to run by following the ideals of open source software and hardware.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC The Eclipse Foundation supports a vibrant an open source community. Those who work on their projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools, and runtimes for building, deploying, and managing software across the lifecycle. Started in 2004, the Eclipse Foundation has an interesting history ( about it here), beginning with The Eclipse Project at IBM in 2001. Currently, Mike Milinkovich is the Executive Director at the Eclipse Foundation, and I caught a moment of his time for a few questions. His talk at the All Things Open conference this week will be about how foundations can stay relevant along with their open source communities. Get to know Mike and the Eclipse community better in this interview.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC It's official: Twitter is a global phenomenon, and it's hard to argue against the numbers supporting that statement. What started as a small, quasi-micro-blogging company in 2006, gained steam in 2007 with the service generating around 400,000 tweets per quarter, or roughly 1100 tweets per day, and exploded to worldwide service with a staggering 400 million tweets per day by 2013.

An interview with The Yocto Project community manager Jeff Osier-Mixon is a community manager at Intel for The Yocto Project, an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture. Basically: The Yocto Project allows development to happen without the worries of what hardware the code will run on. He will be ensuring the success of The Yocto Project Developer Day on October 23. There will be two tracks, so both new and experienced users are welcome. And then, Jefro will be speaking on Friday, October 25 at Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Note: LinuxCon Europe is from October 21- 23.) We learned more about Jeff and his job with Intel in this interview. His Twitter profile says he's an anatidaephilic and an enchiridionophile—so, of course, we asked: Which one is worse?

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC Jason Hibbets wears many hats. One is red—he's a project manager for the open source leader, Red Hat. And, the rest are for newly defined roles in open source—including local government open source advocate and contributor. But, one of the biggest ways that Jason takes open source beyond technology is by highlighting the ways using open source software, hardware, and methodologies is changing business, education, government, law, and many more areas of our lives on Opensource.com.

Open source news this week: October 14 - October 18, 2013 What other open source-related news stories did you read about this week? Share them with us in the comments section. Follow us on Twitter where we share these stories in real time.

At the most recent LinxuCon, IBM announced it will invest $1B in Linux and related open source technologies over the next five years. This is not the first time IBM has made such a significant commitment to Linux. Back in 2000, IBM invested $1B and dedicated about 1,500 engineers to work on Linux. That investment paid off handsomely: by 2003 IBM was already getting returns of about $2B per year by revitalizing its mainframe business. Deploying Linux on IBM servers had made the offering a lot more attractive for organizations interested in keeping control of their data centers. By 2003, IBM's revenue from Linux related services grew to be twice as much the revenue of patents licensing: a hint for the business models that make the most sense in a knowledge economy.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC Angie Byron is an advocate for Drupal. Commonly known online as webchick, she is a Drupal core co-maintainer. She has her finger on the pulse of the community, helping to manage over 1,600 contributors from all over the world. In this interview, Angie shares the top five things she loves about the Drupal community, how she got started in open source, her passion for getting more newbies and women involved in open source, as well as her best tips for community management. Plus, she's speaking at the upcoming All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC and gives us a sneak preview to her keynote and session talk.

The dates of October 23-24 have been circled on my calendar for a while. Why? Because All Things Open is coming to Raleigh, NC. It’s the first open source-focused conference of it’s kind to come to the capital of North Carolina. I’m also excited because having the conference come to Raleigh fulfills one of the five pillars in my definition of an open source city.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC Leading communities as individually unique as those found in open source software is not a job that many people would want to take on. Yet, Greg DeKoenigsberg has done just that for not just one community but several major projects and organizations, for over a decade. Seasoned through the early, gnarly years of the Fedora Project as the first Chairman of the Board as well as community leadership roles within Red Hat itself, Greg has embarked on a new adventure into the cloud with Eucalyptus as the Vice President of Community.

I am embarrassed to admit that I have never in my life considered the struggle of blind musicians to find Braille music scores.

A new Snowden document shows that the NSA is harvesting contact lists -- e-mail address books, IM buddy lists, etc. -- from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and others.

If you’re a Linux fan and a car enthusiast, then you might be a little jealous of Rudolf Streif’s job. As the director of embedded solutions for The Linux Foundation, Streif is in charge of helping to foster the adoption of Linux and open source in the automotive industry.

The next version of Ubuntu, Saucy Salamander, is more than just a great Linux desktop, it will also put Ubuntu into lockstep with the latest OpenStack cloud, Havana.

Serendipity was once described to me as looking for a needle in the haystack and finding the farmer's daughter. In the case of the Open Well-Tempered Clavier, it was rather trying to make an open source version of Bach's music and finding out that blind musicians face a critical shortage in the number of braille scores they have available to study. And, unlike every other time someone has come to this realization in the past 200 years, there is now actually something that can be done about it, using open source software.

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC Andy Hunt is a successful author and publisher, programmer, and founder of the Agile Alliance. In this interview, he shares with us what drove him to open source and what it is that drives it in enterprise business today. "The old, proprietary operating system companies all died. Closed source programming languages are mostly dead," he says. "Open source isn't a novelty anymore, it's just a big part of how software is."  Andy also runs a publishing company with fellow open source development author, Dave Thomas. The Pragmatic Bookshelf has published close to 200 software development titles over the past ten years—all hand-picked with the thought that if they'd want to read it, you'd want to read it.

Mozilla released version 1.1 of its Linux-based Firefox OS operating system, adding MMS support, push notifications, and performance improvements. Meanwhile, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, and Telenor announced plans for launching Firefox OS phones in South America and Europe, following “very successful” early sales. Mozilla has released the first major update to its Linux-fueled, HTML5-focused Firefox OS […]

International Day of the Girl is today and a reminder how an open education is critical to the empowerment of women worldwide. In the western world, we often take universal public education for granted. In many parts of the world, however, millions of girls do not attend school and are denied an education.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced it has sold 1.75 million of its Linux-ready, open platform Raspberry Pi single board computers (SBCs) to date, with one million of them manufactured in the U.K. In other Pi news, the foundation announced a deal in which the $25 Pi Model A and the $30 Pi Camera Board are […]