The Linux Foundation has strategically leaked a report showing that the "Linux ecosystem" — distributors, resellers, support specialists, and other hangers-on of the free-to-download operating system — is now worth $25 billion. Ignore the inevitable quibbling over methodology; what this means is that every open-source…
"Last week Red Hat detected an intrusion on certain of its computer systems," says a security advisory from the leading Linux vendor. "The intruder was able to sign a small number of OpenSSH packages," in what seemed like an attempt to place something into the company's downloadable enterprise software packages. Red…
The Mengloong from Chinese manufacturer Lemote is a fairly exotic machine — designed to be widely affordable like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1, its Loongson-2 processor couldn't run Microsoft Windows if you wanted it to. So it's the machine of choice for Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman
The European Commission's Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software has released a "software quality checking platform" called Alitheia Core, designed to formalize quality control over open-source code. It doesn't boost my confidence that the demo site is throwing 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable…
Online news aggregation community site Reddit is open-sourcing the company's Web application software, making it even easier to slap together a Digg-like site in whatever content or demographic vertical you think you can sell ads against. So unless I'm looking specifically for a community of gadget-obsessed, horny,…
Nicholas Negroponte, the nutty MIT professor who has championed the idea of cheap laptops for Third World children, is feuding with his own programmers. Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child is best known for its distinctive hardware — the candy-colored, devil-horn-antennaed XO notebook computer. But he's turned his…
What kind of car does Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker drive? Not sure. But here's one possibility — a 500 horsepower BMW M5 tagged with the vanity plate "Mozilla." Sure, the car costs about $80,000, but that's plenty affordable for Baker. Remember, she earns $500,000 a year overseeing free labor.
Open-source developers may not be the pinkos you thought they were, but they are just as overwhelming male — about 97.8 percent— as you assumed. Somebody should tell Leah Culver that the odds are even better at a SourceForge LAN party than they are on Kevin Rose's 94-percent-male Digg. (Photo by wickenden)
Open-source developers are motivated by personal development and building their reputation, according to Psychology Today. Which of course means that they're a self-serving, greedy bunch — just like the rest of us. If such self-interest leads to new software like the Firefox brower I'm using right now, good for us.…
To fend off European regulators, Microsoft has released 30,000 pages of documentation about its development practices. Company spokespeople insist the online reference library will make Microsoft more "open" — a word used 17 times in the press release today as Microsoft complies with a ruling it fought tooth and…
"I never cease to be amazed when supporters of Open Source, Open Standards and the relative anarchy that such regimes allow turn to the government sector and want to do just the opposite: centralize everything." — macbeach on "free culture" advocate Lawrence "Larry" Lessig's proposal to publicly fund election…
NASA could learn a thing or two from open source software such as Linux and MySQL, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday, according to PC World. Speaking at event to mark the space agency's 50th anniversary yesterday, Schmidt told the crowd, "assume that you don't have all the answers." (If only Schmidt would apply…
Matthew Szulik is out as Red Hat's CEO. CNET reports that the widely admired Szulik is stepping down because of his wife's health problems. But don't worry, open source cultists, the man replacing Szulik, Jim Whitehurst, has years of experience ... in the airline industry. As Delta Airlines' former COO, Whitehurst…
"Open source products are often high on innovation but low on user experience," self-proclaimed "Web strategist" Jeremiah Owyang notes on his blog. "They come across as geeky, not user friendly, and sometimes, just ugly." The solution? These guys! Who are so just the opposite. Oh the teeth, oh the hair, oh the neck…
A tipster told us that SourceForge had been hacked yesterday, with the site unavailable for part of the morning, so we pinged people at the open-source code repository to see what went down. Says Ross Turk, the site's "community manager":
Ken Goffman, editor of the long-defunct cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000 who goes by the pseudonym RU Sirius, hopes to create a new political movement based on the principles of open-source software development. For some reason, Goffman thinks wikis, social networks, online conferences, games and fun shindigs, melded…
Mitchell Baker, who joined Netscape in 1994 and now serves as both chairwoman of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation and CEO of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, clocks over a half million in annual salary and benefits, according to a New York Times report. That's more than the $285,000 the foundation, which holds…
Keeping up with its competitors seems like too much to ask from Yahoo these days. But not-for-profit initiatives? All over it. Today, for example, Yahoo announced it would allow Carnegie Mellon University researchers access to its newest supercomputer. Called M45, the computer is 4,000-processor computing cluster.…
A British member of Parliament thinks that the U.K. government uses too much Microsoft software. John Pugh charges that Microsoft is involved in "predatory pricing and stultifying competition." He also wants the government to transition to more open-source software. I know nothing about John Pugh, but he sounds like a…
Do we need email software anymore? That's the question raised by the turmoil at the Thunderbird project, an open-source effort run by the Mozilla Foundation, also the backers of the popular Firefox Web browser. The foundation runs the Mozilla Corporation as a separate, for-profit business, and spun off a similar…
