open source

IT Pro: "With job losses rising and belts being tightened across the country, now is the perfect time to look once again at the benefits of using open source software aside from the reported $60 billion a year savings on offer."

As increasing numbers of applications move online, the need for functional cross-browser testing continues to grow, which is good news for the open source Selenium project—a popular automated application testing tool with nearly 3 million downloads to date.Read more at Developer.com.

Paul Sherman has released Absolute Linux 13.0.5, an updated version of the Slackware-based distribution featuring the lightweight IceWM window manager.Read more at DistroWatch

The Mono Project developers have presented a first preview of the next major release of Moonlight 3.0, their open source implementation of Silverlight.

Is "community" a fading proposition?"If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. That popular aphorism never seemed truer than today when reading The Wall Street Journal's analysis of Wikipedia's declining volunteer base. Despite countless articles extolling the virtues and seeming omnipotence of 'community' over the past several years, the technology industry seems to be settling back into old habits:

How to balance work in open source...

Another success benchmark for open source..."The platform wars are over, and open source has won. It's not that open source has displaced Windows or the iPhone or anything else, but that every platform will necessarily include open source. It's simply too expensive and too difficult to go it alone anymore, whether you're an aspiring start-up or Microsoft.

One of the most enriching experiences of my career at Hewlett-Packard was serving as Global Lead for HP’s Open Source and Linux Profession (OSLP). The OSLP is HP’s company-wide community of practice for open source technologists, with thousands of members worldwide. Working to build the OSLP gave me insights into the value that an internal community can provide to its organization, to its members, and to external communities.

Getting started in open source development..."I’m sometimes asked by people how they can participate in open source projects. Alternatively, I’m asked for support money by people who have very specific open source projects they want to do, but that’s another blog entry.

Citing our own LF study on kernel value, the question is asked: what's the real value of open source?"Open-source software is big business. For example, most of what Oracle is getting for it $7.4-billion purchase of Sun is open-source software. Thanks to a Linux Foundation study, we know that creating the Fedora 9 Linux distribution would have cost $11.5-billion in conventional software costs. So, given all that, what do you think OSS (open-source software) as a whole is worth? How's about ... [more]