Developers

Open source software -- think Linux, Firefox, Wikipedia, Apache, Ajax and a host of other projects -- has introduced a radically different development model -- and mindset -- to the stream of high-tech innovation. It is one that is having repercussions in the corporate world that go beyond how softw...

Cepstral, a speech technology company, has decided to open its Media Resource Control Protocol library to the developer community. The move is designed to free telephony application developers from the protocol grindstone and lead to greater inroads in software innovation, Cepstral's CEO said. The m...

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, asserted there has to be some decisive Ubuntu community action to make sure it doesn't suffer another outage. Canonical had to shut down five of eight servers in order to avert potential hacker attacks earlier this month. "Either th...

Open source security products do not generally carry the same following as their business suite and operating system brethren. However, the same reasons for supporting open source products in general also apply to open source security applications. Open source security applications are free, or at l...

Anonymous Wikipedia editors who seek to alter articles there for less-than-honorable purposes can no longer hide behind their cloak of anonymity: A new scanner tool now makes it relatively easy to figure out where they came from. WikiScanner, developed by California Institute of Technology graduate ...

Companies that want to take advantage of virtual worlds should think twice about Linden Lab's Second Life and consider better-controlled online worlds, said tech consultancy Gartner. "Media hype and enthusiasm for virtual worlds must be tempered with a realistic assessment of the security and risk-m...

Open source started as a small community with a set of ideals about software development, believing that developers should make their products more expedient and user-friendly by making the underlying code accessible to everyone. As the open source software movement has grown, the fundamental tenets...

Novell and Lenovo, the world's No. 3 PC manufacturer, have inked a deal to pre-install the Linux operating system on certain Lenovo ThinkPad notebook PCs, the two companies announced Monday at LinuxWorld, held this year in San Francisco. Lenovo will also provide support for Suse Linux Enterprise Des...

What should the virtual world do when a neighborhood becomes a den of iniquity? The only appropriate response is to dive in and clean it up, according to Jesuit scholar Antonio Spadaro. In an article in a Catholic journal, Spadaro writes that Second Life and sites like it should be considered locati...

As part of its ongoing effort to develop an open search engine that will compete head-on with the likes of Google, Wikia has purchased the Grub Web crawler tool and released it under an open source license, the company announced Friday. Wikia, founded in 2004 by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales along w...

While the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public Licenses are used in nearly three-quarters of all free and open source software, GPL-based licenses not the only game in town. There are dozens of free and open source-focused software licenses, and while most aren't used -- or aren't even usef...

The continuing rise in popularity of Linux applications has become a boon to job opportunities for software programmers. However, the working culture of the open source industry is different from that of proprietary software developers. Code writers looking for a job as Linux developers need a uniqu...

Five years ago, the only engineering or computer science majors setting their sights on a career in writing software code for an open source company were the most hardcore of computer nerds. That was something done only by the true computer geeks, and it usually required an independent source of inc...

Intel announced Tuesday the release of Threading Building Blocks 2.0 as both an open source and commercial product. The company also launched a Web site that establishes an open source project around this product. Threading Building Blocks is a C++ runtime library that abstracts the low-level thread...

There's no doubt that the technologies have arrived to make it possible for individual citizens to participate in the legislative process. "We've already seen a shift in both software and the media where individual content is key and any one very talented coder or blogger can impact an industry," Am...