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The Defense Advance Reseach Project Agency (DARPA) is one of the government-sponsored research agencies that most boldly explores the future of science and technology. Given that many of its research projects have military applications, it has been traditional for the agency to be secretive about them. In recent years, however, DARPA has been embracing the benefits of open source, particularly for promoting rapid innovation. Last week, the agency opened to the public a new portal featuring a catalog all its open source projects.

Last year was the last time we had a chance to talk about Wine on Android for running Windows programs on Google's mobile operating system. While it's not quite mainline yet, Wine on Android has been making much progress and can now run Windows' Solitaire game on your Android device...

The latest release of the FSF-sponsored gNewSense Linux distribution is now available for those that can get by without needing any binary blobs for their hardware drivers or non-free software...

Rise and shine, Ruby devs, it's patching time! Ruby on Rails developers using the Paperclip uploader to receive files need to update to a new version, after a developer turned up an XSS bug in the software that could possibly be extended to remote code execution.…

Open source news for your reading pleasure. February 3-7 2014 In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we have great news for Nvidia fans wanting better driver support in Linux, lots of exciting developments from inside the data center, and more.

Smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous -- and so convenient that we often download apps and approve permissions without giving them much thought. Such behavior exposes the data we store on our prized devices to increasing risk. That blind trust is just what app makers count on. Android users, especially, are complacent about synchronizing apps on multiple devices.

There are rapidly growing feature set, high commit rates, and code contributions happening across the globe to Apache Hadoop and related Apache Software Foundation projects. However, the number of woman developers, committers, and Project Management Committee (PMC) members in this vast and diversified ecosystem are really diminutive. For the Hadoop project alone, only 5% out of 84 committers are women; and this has been the case for over the past 2 years.

Openness is changing the world, as a very wise writer pointed out not so very long ago, and what better example than the parade of government-spying revelations we've seen in recent months? It's clearly a different world since Edward Snowden appeared on the scene -- though not everyone agrees on whether it's a better one or not. In the eyes of some, he deserves a peace prize.

One year ago the Puerto Rico Python Interest Group (prPIG) was founded on one purpose; to create a sustainable user community based on software development in Puerto Rico. On February 20, 2014 we will celebrate our first anniversary with an open format meeting with lightning talks from the community.

A recent post on the top events ahead in 2014 for reforming abusive patent litigation focused on efforts by State Attorneys General, the Federal Trade Commission, and US Congress. Let’s now take a look to another field involved in the multi-prong strategy to address patent abuse: the Supreme Court, which is considering a number of important cases.

Starting this past December, the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW) welcomed a new crop of promising young female contributors to several open source projects. These women are currently halfway through their internships, working to improve open source projects across a number of disciplines including code development, visual and UX design, internationalization, documentation, and community-building.

Although GNU/Linux® has the reputation of being a much more secure operating system than Windows,® you still need to secure the Linux desktop. This article steps you through installing antivirus software, creating a backup and restore plan, and using a firewall so you can harden your Linux desktop against most attacks and prevent unauthorized access to your computer.

December 2013's EOF, titled "Mars Needs Women", visited an interesting fact: that the male/female ratio among Linux Journal readers, and Linux kernel developers, is so lopsided (male high, female low) that graphing it would produce a near-vertical line.

At the Open Technology Institute (OTI), we've been working on opening our user feedback process as a way to improve our internal processes and collaboration, engage our user community more, promote non-developer contributions, and think more broadly about how open source process plays a role in the Commotion Wireless project, a free and open-source communication tool that uses mobile phones, computers, and other wireless devices to create decentralized mesh networks.

Google released a Google Cast SDK for its Chromecast media player dongle to let Android, iOS, and Chrome developers build compatible apps and websites. Since Google began shipping its $35 HDMI stick-style Chromecast last July, it’s been a hot seller, especially compared to the struggling Google TV devices. The device is not a full-fledged media […]

Earlier today I was looking at a source file for the OpenStack Ceilometer docs and noticed that there's a copyright statement at the top. Now, in no way do I want to pick on Nicholas. There are hundreds of such copyright statements in the OpenStack docs and code, and this is just the example I happened to be looking at. (Note that my employer has its share of copyright statements in the OpenStack code. Pretty much every company participating in OpenStack does this. I think we need to stop.)

When it comes to Linux-friendly hardware vendors one of my favorite companies to deal with at Phoronix is CompuLab. The Israeli PC vendor isn't just rebadging some OEM systems and slapping on a Tux sticker nor are they assembling some x86 systems that individuals could easily build at a lower cost. We have reviewed several interesting low-power Linux PCs from them in the past and today may be one of their most interesting products yet, the Freescale i.MX6-based Utilite. In this review is a look at the Utilite Pro, which is my new favorite pre-assembled ARM Linux desktop.

In the open source world, a women-only event seems counter-intuitive. Yet I am finding reasons for such events the more I attend them. At the OpenStack Summit, a twice-a-year event where OpenStack contributors get together to plan the next release, the Women of OpenStack group has set up events where we invite the women first. Men aren't excluded, but our hope is to get more OpenStack women together. I can hardly capture the value of getting together with other women in OpenStack at the Summit, but here goes.

You know how on TV, NFL analysts will pit one football team against another and say what areas they need to execute well in order to win the game? Here is my take on the most popular desktop Linux distros: Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Chrome OS. Let's not mince words here: Windows is still the undisputed king of the desktop with OS X a distant second. In the meantime, Linux does not even show up on the radar, especially where it counts: in retail outlets and the average consumer's mind.

Until I started graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I had never heard of open source. However, every computer science department of any age and stature uses open source software to support their infrastructure. One or another variant of Linux was always being installed on our desktops by the departmental systems administrators, and many academic programs are open source. I accepted the whole situation more or less as I found it.