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We scoured the web for some of this week's most interesting open source-related news stories so you don't have to. Here's what we found..

Google is working on a webbified development to build the “next generation” of Chrome Apps. One of the search titan’s employees has revealed the existence of a Chrome App-based development environment codenamed Spark.

Close on the heels of the revelation that Samsung’s NX300M camera runs Tizen, this week saw an announcement by Nexcom of a developer-focused, Intel Atom-based automotive computer called the VTC 1010-IVI that supports the Tizen In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) stack, plus news of a Tizen-enabled Samsung smart refrigerator. Meanwhile, Samsung’s first Tizen phones are rumored to be under test at Korean mobile carriers.

How often have you thought of a way to improve a piece of software or hardware? How many times have you wondered why companies invest millions of dollars to produce a product that is obviously lacking from the moment it launches? Have you ever wished you were in a position, or had the skills, to change that? Chances are if you've typed 'open source' into your search engine then you've heard about SourceForge and OpenHatch. If you're not familiar with these sites, I'd absolutely recommend checking them out. They present an amazing platform where you can get involved with a variety of high-quality, open source projects.

Intermec unveiled a rugged, Android-ready handheld computer designed for field service applications. The CN51 is equipped with a 1.5GHz, dual-core TI OMAP4 SoC, a 4-inch, 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen, IP64-rated sealing, 12-hour plus battery, and options including 1D and 2D barcode scanners, keypads, GLONASS-ready GPS, cellular, and a 5-megapixel camera.

I've teased about Steam, speculated about Steam and even bragged about Steam finally coming to Linux. Heck, check out the screenshot for just a partial list of games already running natively under our beloved OS. Little did I know that the folks at Valve not only planned to support Linux, but they're also putting a big part of their future behind it as well!

Hackers have fired up a large army of remote-controlled computers to get around GitHub's login rate-limiting policies, designed to thwart attempts to brute-force guess the passwords for its users' accounts. The bots, most likely unwitting PCs compromised by malware, have attacked the online source-code repository from "nearly 40,000 unique IP addresses", each trying to crack programmers' passwords, the company said this week.

All Things Open began with interesting and controversial keynotes; both centered on a call to action for the open source community. This part one of a two part series: first, a recap of Andy Hunt’s keynote, second and published next, a reacp of Whurley’s keynote.

After more than three years of development, Red Hat has released version 1.0.0 of Ceylon, its homebrewed, open-source programming language that's designed to be a replacement for Java. In its current form, King describes Ceylon as a "cross-platform" language. The 1.0.0 release, announced at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium on Tuesday, includes compilers that can output either Java bytecode or JavaScript.

Information is coming in fast and furiously (I adverbialized for all the English majors!) from the Open Stack summit that recently took place in Hong Kong. Among other tidbits came the results of a user study that offered some surprising news; namely that adoption and deployment of Open Stack is being driven by smaller companies right now rather than global behemoths as one may have surmised. While 21% of OpenStack installations are in companies with more than 10,000 employees, fully 42% of installations are in companies with fewer than 100 employees.

A startup called the Citizen Web Project has raised over $23,000 in crowdsourcing funds for an alpha-stage fork of Arch Linux intended for hosting easily-administered web services on low-end hardware. Initially available for the Raspberry Pi, ArkOS is designed for securely self-hosting websites, email, social networking accounts, and cloud services via an open source “Genesis” server gateway application.

There's been comments early on out of AMD that they would like to see the Mantle API supported on other platforms and it was reiterated this week during AMD's APU13 Developer Summit. AMD would like Mantle on Linux and Apple OS X as it would be significantly easier to do an efficient renderer with Mantle than OpenGL, according to AMD. Mantle also has uses beyond game-engines, reportedly in workstations and R&D too. One of the slides shared during the APU13 summit stated "Mantle + SteamOS = powerful combination!"

MariaDB has capped off a dazzling year with the release of a beta of Version 10 of the free MySQL replacement. The beta of the database was announced on Thursday and sees the technology gain some features that can't be found in the MySQL database upon which it is based, further driving a wedge between it and the Oracle-backed technology it was created to displace.

Who wants to tackle the complex problem of helping educators create learning service agreements? I don’t see too many hands. How about you there, reading this article? Wait, you weren’t aware that this is an issue that impacts the education system? Well, here's an open source project that solves this problem and needs more collaborators.

"We've done our best to bring the latest technology to Slackware while still maintaining the stability and security that you have come to expect," Slackware founder Pat Volkerding wrote. "Slackware is well known for its simplicity and the fact that we try to bring software to you in the condition that the authors intended."

The Linux kernel is one of the largest and most successful open source projects today. A report from the Linux Foundation addressing Who Writes Linux (2013) shows that recent releases of the Linux kernel, that happen now at 70-days intervals, include over 10,000 patches, made by more than 1,100 developers, representing over 225 corporations.

Having put out some new and updated OpenCL benchmarks this week (details in the aforelinked article) along with the release of Phoronix Test Suite 4.8.4, this week when running some GPU comparisons for a forthcoming Linux graphics card review, I also took the time to do some new reference OpenCL benchmarks.

Chris Mason changed the default meta-data block size on Friday with this Git commit. The meta-data block size was changed to 16KB by default (or the page-size if it happens to be bigger than 16KB) rather than just defaulting to the page size. Chris Mason's commit message explains that a 16KB meta-data block size for Btrfs yields faster performance and less meta-data fragmentation for almost all workloads. The downside to the change is a slight increase in lock contention on root nodes for some workloads, but that can be worked around.

Presto is a distributed SQL query engine developed in-house at Facebook that they use for scouring their 300+ petabytes of data at the social network company. Facebook uses Hadoop clusters but Hive and other existing open-source tools didn't provide the low-latency results the company wanted, so a team set to develop Presto.

Axiomtek and Nexcom each announced Linux-friendly 3.5-inch single board computers built with dual- or quad-core Intel Atom E3800 (Bay Trail-I) system-on-chips. The Nexcom EBC 355 and Axiomtek CAPA841 SBCs each feature dual gigabit Ethernet ports, dual Mini-PCI Express slots, and dual display capabilities with HDMI, VGA, and LVDS interfaces, plus support for extended temperature operation.