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Luis Ibanez was recently awarded a People's Choice Award by our readers for his contributions to the site. It's no wonder he has so much to say and impart on open source projects—he works on them fulltime! In this Community Spotlight, Luis sheds light on what projects he contributes to, why he believes it is important we all give back at some point, and what open source tools he can't live without.

If there was a theme for Day One of the Linux Foundation's seventh annual Linux Collaboration Summit, taking place this week in San Francisco, it was that the Linux community has moved way, way past wondering whether the open source OS will be successful and competitive. "Today I wanted to talk about the state of Linux," Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, began his opening keynote on Monday. "I'm just going to save everybody 30 minutes. The state of Linux is freakishly awesome."

The flood of software patents has created an environment where companies are afraid that innovation leads to being hit by patent lawsuits. Every dollar spent fighting patent trolls and or waging patent wars is a dollar not spent researching, developing, and creating jobs. The situation is so bad that, in 2011, Apple and Google spent more on patent litigation and buying patents than they did on research. So it’s no surprise that some companies are looking for new ways to navigate the patent system while promoting openness and innovation.

Videos from the Linux Collaboration Summit’s day 1 keynote sessions, recorded on April 15, are now available for on-demand streaming. The videos include presentations by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Netflix, Yocto, OpenMAMA, Adapteva, and LWN’s Jon Corbet.

Red Hat logo Following its preview of an OpenStack distribution, Red Hat is now offering an updated version of the software as part of an "early adopter program". The company has also initiated the RDO community project, which offers up-to-date OpenStack versions for Linux distributions within the Red Hat ecosystem. The Linux distributor announced the news at the ongoing OpenStack Summit Portland 2013.

While compiling OSS Watch's list of Open Source Options for Education, I discovered Koha, an open source Integrated Library System (ILS). I discovered, with some confusion, that there seemed to be several ILS systems called Koha. Investigation into the reason for this uncovered a story which provides valuable lessons for open source project ownership, including branding, trademarks, and conflict resolution.

Copying and pasting something does not necessarily mean the user will get what they think they are getting. With a little bit of HTML magic, one can even trick unwitting web site visitors into executing shell commands without their knowledge. The trick is by no means new, but it is currently being demonstrated again on several web sites which means Linux users especially have to be careful what they copy and paste.

Adobe's director of engineering for the Web Platform, Vincent Hardy, has confirmed that the company is not taking sides in the WebKit/Blink web rendering engine fork and will be contributing to both WebKit and Blink as they are open source. In a blog posting, Hardy pointed out that "Adobe actively contribute to Web standards and browser implementations" – mostly WebKit and Chromium, but the company also has some Gecko contributions to its name.

Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, who was hired three years ago to be a project manager at the U.S. Department of Defense's research and development division known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has announced via Twitter that he's returning to the private sector with Google. In his new role at Google, The Security Ledger reports, Zatko will be working in an unspecified role with Motorola Mobility's Advanced Technology and Projects division, reporting to Regina Dugan. Dugan is also new to Google, hired last month away from her position as director of DARPA.

For the first time in three years, Debian has a new leader this week. Lucas Nussbaum was voted by Debian developers to be the new DPL this week. Nussbaum succeeds Stefano Zacchiroli, who decided not to run for re-election this time. In his DPL platform Nussbaum notes that he has been involved with the project since 2005. Among his contributions is an effort to help improve collaboration with Ubuntu

Few women have been historically applying for Google Summer of Code, a program in which Google provides stipends for students to work for three months on FOSS projects. Last year, after many efforts by both the Google team and the community to increase the diversity in the program, about 100 of 1200 participants or 8.3% were women, which was a highest level of participation by women yet.

The Fuduntu developers have decided that their current path of producing a GNOME 2 desktop with a Fedora based distribution as a rolling release is becoming technically problematic and have "voted to end-of-life Fuduntu Linux". Fuduntu originally appeared in 2010 as a fork of Fedora designed for netbooks with power management applets and various optimisations for running on portable devices.The most recent release, Fuduntu 2013.2, appeared on 8 April.

If you have followed my column during the past few years, you'll know that I am a big fan of having a portable Linux environment with me wherever I go. For years, this took the form of small laptops (like the Fujitsu P series) and most recently the Nokia N900, which took the form factor down to pocket size.

Coding is the language of the future, with the power to create and modify the computer programs and websites that increasingly shape our day-to-day lives. While millions of people in the United States spend hours each day engaged with interactive technologies, relatively few truly understand how they work; and fewer take an active role in developing software and websites.

CompuLab is shipping a Linux- and Android-ready COM built around the 1.2GHz Freescale i.MX6 processor, giving developers a choice of one, two, or four ARM Cortex-A9 cores. The CM-FX6 measures 75×65 mm, offers up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and uses dual 140-pin connectors to supply interfaces like I2C, CAN, SATA, and HDMI.

SPGT, short for Single Player Game Transmitter, is an open-source project that provides support for remote desktop transmission of games and other interactive 3D applications.

When you think of editing images and other digital graphics on Linux, your first thought may be of GIMP, which is an excellent all-around graphics program. But when it comes to doing quick image editing for my posts here at Make Tech Easier, my tool of choice is Gwenview, the default KDE image viewer. That’s right; it’s primarily a viewer but has some convenient editing functions. The following is a tutorial for using these functions.

KDE and openSUSE developer Will Stephenson is working on a slimmed down version of KDE that he calls KLyDE, short for K Lightweight Desktop Environment. In a blog entry about the project, Stephenson says that he thinks: "KDE is not intrinsically bloated", but that most distributions of the open source desktop environment would, by default, install almost all of the software developed within the project. In his opinion, this leads to an overwhelming number of applications, widgets and options being presented to users. With KLyDE, Stephenson wants to create a modular distribution of KDE that can be reduced to the bare bones of what is necessary for a desktop environment.

When earlier this week delivering Btrfs benchmarks with various mount options for tuning the next-generation Linux file-system, some Linux users were hoping to see other file-systems tossed into the test mix too for reference. Here's those numbers.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsWe are pleased to announce that KDE will take part in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) this year. OPW started in 2006 with an intention to reach talented women who are passionate about technology, but who may be uncertain about how to start contributing to free and open software projects. Since its beginning, OPW has included commercial and non-profit organizations that are leaders in free and open software.