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The suicide of American online activist Aaron Swartz has ignited a debate about the cost of academic journals and access to information. Swartz, 26, known for his work on RSS and co-founding social news website Reddit, took his life over the weekend. He was facing charges for allegedly downloading millions of academic journal articles from the subscription-only academic database JSTOR, using a laptop hidden in the basement of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A protest over his prosecution was held on Sunday afternoon (local time) at MIT in Massachusetts.

Critical problems with XML processed parameters and another with JSON parameter handling have been discovered and updates for Ruby on Rails have been released, though one fix is already causing problems for some users

A good year starts off with good ideas. But, how do you remember them all, along with the related information that is helpful for making them into realities? There are a multitude of options, from simple notepads to more robust filing systems, and we all search for the one that's just right. So, beyond finding a tool that you can easily access from your smartphone, laptop, or tablet: What do you look for in the perfect note-taking app?

The year is starting out with what may turn out to be significant changes in the mobile operating system market, with open source software playing a significant role just as it has in enterprise software, virtualization and cloud computing. With fading heavyweights and interesting new challengers, there are changes afoot in the mobile OS market.

Mozilla Firefox 18.0 is now available. The main feature of this open-source web-browser update is the introduction of IonMonkey, a faster JavaScript compiler...

Blizzard Entertainment, the game studio behind wildly-popular games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, and StarCraft, is planning for a Linux game announcement in 2013...

NTT DoCoMo is preparing launch of a Samsung smartphone based on the open-source Linux-based Tizen OS in early 2013. Tizen OS is being jointly developed by the Linux Foundation, Intel, Samsung and others.

People love a good debate. We asked (with tongues in our cheeks) whether Linux was best understood as being Marxist or capitalist.

Over this weekend a new DRM pull request was submitted by David Airlie for the Linux 3.8 kernel...

Since publishing LLVM/Clang 3.2 benchmarks a few days ago that showed the Clang C/C++ compiler competing with -- and in some cases outperforming -- the GCC compiler on Intel x86_64, several Phoronix readers have been asking how things compare on the ARM side...

While at the start of every year there's always individuals making predictions about "the year of the Linux desktop", for 2013 at least it looks like it will actually be the year of gaming on Linux. Everything is coming together quite nicely to make 2013 the most exciting year ever for Linux gaming...

FreeDOS, the open-source DOS operating system, is still alive and seeing activity around the GPL-licensed project though the FreeDOS SVN code repository hasn't seen any activity in nearly one year...

The Free Software Foundation is now soliciting donations and signatures for a pledge in hopes that it can stop UEFI SecureBoot and other "restricted boot" systems from becoming too common...

This week's KDE Commit-Digest starts with two stories: insights about Google Code-In work on KDE-PIM and interesting recent events in the spotlight. Of course, there is also a summary of development effort:

Automake 1.13 was released on Friday with a number of major changes to this component of the GNU build system. With Automake 1.14, there's already a number of additional changes being considered...

For those of you curious about the state of available Linux distributions that can handle UEFI SecureBoot on modern PCs certified for Microsoft Windows 8, here's a run-down of the most common Linux environments and their SecureBoot friendliness...

The latest version of the browser page embeddable editor for code adds the ability to use arbitrary fonts, right-to-left scripts and support for multiple gutters alongside internal enhancements to make add-ons and extensions richer and more flexible

The top story in business this year on opensource.com was the news that Red Hat reached one billion dollars in annual revenue. This is a major win for the open source software industry and the open source movement. "It is a victory for open source advocates everywhere," said CEO Jim Whitehurst. "No billion dollar milestone would be complete without honoring the open source community." And donations were made to several organizations that support the open source movement.

Open source in healthcare remains in its infancy. This year saw some great activity with open source in health. Our community covered medical devices with available source code, electronic patient records, open product design and 3D printing, crowdfunding, and big data. These big ideas and innovations, but I predict that as more people take personal responsibility for their health in 2013, the greater the demand will be for faster, more affordable solutions... read: open source.

Cilk Plus is one of the Intel initiatives to advance multi-threaded parallel programming by providing a set of C/C++ programming language extensions similar in nature to OpenMP. While Intel has had open-source Cilk Plus code for months, the compiler support has yet to be picked up by GCC...