Community

It's the bane of anyone who uses the Internet: remembering different user IDs, passwords and registration information for sites you use regularly. Soon, you may not have to. Some of the Internet's biggest players -- Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign -- are working on a new single sign-on th...

HP announced Thursday a three-part software governance initiative to help companies address the legal, financial and security demands associated with using free and open source software. The company is donating its intellectual property for monitoring open source products to a new open source commun...

The career path to the software industry used to be cut and dry. Coders had a choice of either developing projects as part of a remotely dispersed community or punching a clock as a slave to a commercial software house. The former usually meant being considered a player in the software bush league.

It's 2008, and that means the year of Linux on the desktop is finally here! According to some, that is. As 2007 drew to a close and the new year dawned, the mood has waxed somewhat more philosophical and contemplative than usual on the Linux blogs. Discussion was understandably more subdued over the...

Certifying Linux technicians is a developing trend. The Linux OS is growing up. This is pushing many computer engineers and IT professionals to prove their skills as programmers and systems administrators. While not quite a common job requirement yet, some employers and high-level software developer...

Linux fans love to debate the pros and cons of myriad technologies, but none more than operating systems -- and you can bet the usual winner isn't based in Redmond or Cupertino. This week the question was raised once again on Slashdot, spurred by a Linux Magazine comparison of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon an...

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday made good on its promise to deliver its OpenSPARC T2 register transfer level processor design to the free and open source community using the GNU General Public License. The OpenSPARC T2 is the open version of Sun's UltraSPARC T2, a processor that features eight cores and...

It's not too often the public schools figure prominently in the Linux blogs, but sure enough, this week they drew a surprising amount of discussion on a few different sites. Specifically, news broke on Tuesday that the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., has signed a purchase agreement for 15,000 laptops fro...

With all the buzz about Android starting to settle down, and the respite from it all afforded by Thanksgiving, the last few weeks have felt a little more mellow in the Linux blogs. One topic that did generate some passionate attention, however, was the question of whether Asus' new eeePC subnotebook...

The open source KDE Community has turned loose the first release candidate for KDE 4.0 Desktop, the next generation of the KDE Linux/Unix desktop application. The release candidate comes after four betas, one more than the community originally intended, but it means that the majority of the componen...

Given that Google and the Open Handset Alliance released the Android software development kit this week, you might think that would have been the hottest topic of conversation on the Linux blogs in the ensuing days. There was a great deal of discussion about it, to be sure -- but it was still oversh...

With Google's Android rollout this week, hand in hand with the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, the Linux community has had plenty to discuss regarding the platform, its openness and what it would all mean for wireless users. There was considerable debate on Slashdot, focusing on what part of ...

The OpenDocument Foundation, after five years of promoting the OpenDocument Format for office applications, is switching direction and embracing a different format. ODF, which is overseen by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, has been accepted as an ISO standar...

It's been a contentious few weeks on the Linux blogs, what with the big Microsoft news on Monday as well as a few key product happenings and subsequent evaluation. The release of Canonical's Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on Oct. 18 has been a particularly hot topic. Included in the release, which replace...

The worldwide open source community shares a common overall goal: better software through collaboration and peer review. It's difficult enough to achieve this task even when most of the participants share a common language. Building bridges between different parts of the world -- especially between ...