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10 Steps To Overcome Your Fear Of Using Open Source Software

Shahid Shah | Med Device Online | October 8, 2014

The entire Internet runs on open source software (OSS) and, if we used it more in medical devices, it would lead to reduced costs and increase the quality of devices. If you ask some regulatory affairs folks in medical device companies, they think OSS is too “dangerous” for use in safety critical systems...

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10 Steps To Overcome Your Fear Of Using Open Source Software

Shahid Shah | MED Device Online | October 8, 2014

The entire Internet runs on open source software (OSS) and, if we used it more in medical devices, it would lead to reduced costs and increase the quality of devices. If you ask some regulatory affairs folks in medical device companies, they think OSS is too “dangerous” for use in safety critical systems...

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5 Myths Busted: Using Open Source in Higher Education

Have you ever heard someone say, "It's impossible to do X with Linux"? Me too. This is the story of how I busted the myths about open source in my own head and used Linux to finish my PhD in fine arts. Many people think non-technical students can't use Linux, and they make a lot of assumptions about people who use it in their advanced degree programs. They scoff and reply with something along the lines of, "Well, of course; those people do 'computer stuff,' but in my [lofty, important, unique area] it's just not possible." Well, it is possible, and I'm proof...

7 Notable Legal Developments in Open Source in 2016

In 2012 the jury in the first Oracle v. Google trial found that Google's inclusion of Java core library APIs in Android infringed Oracle's copyright. The district court overturned the verdict, holding that the APIs as such were not copyrightable (either as individual method declarations or their "structure, sequence and organization" [SSO]). The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, applying 9th Circuit law, reversed, holding that the "declaring code and the [SSO] of the 37 Java API packages are entitled to copyright protection." The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case, and in 2016 a closely watched second trial was held on Google's defense of fair use. In May 2016 the jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of Google...

A Primer on the Open Source Movement from a Health Care Perspective

Open source, in myriad forms, has emerged as a significant development model that drives both innovation and technological dispersion. Ignore it at your peril, as did the major computer companies destroyed or totally remade by Linux and free software, or encyclopedia publishers by Wikipedia, or journalists and marketers by social media. The term "open source" was associated first with free software, but it goes far beyond software now. People around the world use open hardware, demand open government, share open data, and--yes--pursue open health. The field of health, in particular, will be transformed by open source principles in software, in research, in consultations and telemedicine, and in the various forms of data sharing all these processes call for.

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A Quick Look Back on Linux and Open Source 2015

Jack Wallen | TechRepublic | December 16, 2015

The year is almost over and what a year it has been. Once again I must bemoan the fact that the year of the Linux desktop has still eluded us. That's okay...for now. Why? Because Linux managed to dominate in a world that is far more important than the desktop. Oh, and there's the fact that the desktop is slowly becoming irrelevant to a large portion of the world. More on that later. If I were to consider the most important piece of the Linux and open source 2015 puzzle, I'd have to say it would be its continued dominance in the Enterprise. This is something no one would have predicted ten years ago. But lo and behold, 2015 saw the continued dominance of Linux in the space of space...big business...

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Avoiding Bad Practices in Open Source Project Management

During OpenStack Summit Austin, I had the chance to talk to some people about my experience on running open source projects. It turns out that after hanging out in communities and contributing to many projects for years, I may be able to provide some hindsight and an external eye to many of those who are new to it. There are plenty of resources explaining how to run an open source project out there. Today, I would like to take a different angle and emphasize what you should not socially do in your projects. This list comes from various open source projects I encountered these past years. I'm going to go through some of the bad practices I have spotted, in a random order, illustrated by some concrete examples...

European Parliament To Weigh Open Source Pilots

Gijs Hillenius | JoinUp | June 18, 2014

Next Monday, the European Parliament's budget committee will consider a proposal from the Green/EFA group to pilot the use of open source encryption software, to be used by parliament members and their staff. The Green/EFA group is also asking to trial the use of open standards and open source to make available the EP's data available in machine-readable format...

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How Time-series Databases Help Make Sense of Sensors

Infrastructure environments' needs and demands change every year and systems become more complex and involved. But all this growth is meaningless if we don't understand the infrastructure and what's happening in our environment. This is where monitoring tools and software come in; they give operators and administrators the ability to see problems in their environments and fix them in real time. But what if we want to predict problems before they happen? Collecting metrics and data about our environment gives us a window into how our infrastructure is performing and lets us make predictions based on data. When we know and understand what's happening, we can prevent problems, rather than just fixing them...

How to Create an Internet-in-a-Box on a Raspberry Pi

If you're a homeschool parent or a teacher with a limited budget, Internet-in-a-Box might be just what you've been looking for. Its hardware requirements are very modest—a Raspberry Pi 3, a 64GB microSD card, and a power supply—but it provides access to a wealth of educational resources, even to students without internet access in the most remote areas of the world. I recently had a chance to visit with developers Adam Holt and Tim Moody about the project. Adam said this wonderful initiative began with One Laptop per Child at MIT. From there it was forked in 2012 into the School Server Community Edition project, and now it is called Internet-in-a-Box. I learned of the project while attending LinuxConNA last summer in Toronto, where I first met Adam... 

Is Use of the Open Source GPL License Declining?

A little while ago I saw an interesting tweet from Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk on the state of open source licensing, including this graph. This graph shows how license usage has changed from 2010 to 2017. In reading it, it is clear that usage of the GPL 2.0 license, one of the purest copyleft licenses around, has more than halved in usage. According to the chart it would appear that the popularity of open source licensing has subsequently shifted to the MIT and Apache licenses. There has also been a small increase in GPL 3.0 usage. So, what does all this mean?

Open Source Hospital Information System to be Packaged for Debian

Gijs Hillenius | Joinup | July 17, 2012

The Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), an open source hospital information system used in 160 hospitals, several hundreds of clinics and more than a hundred nursing homes, will become part of the Debian free software distribution. This was announced at the Libre Software Meeting (LSM/RMLL) in Geneva, last week Wednesday. Read More »

Why Businesses Can’t Ignore The Growing Linux Trend

Seth Robinson | The VAR Guy | May 3, 2016

It used to be a clear sign of geekiness. People who were into Linux would rave about its benefits and flexibility…as long as you knew how to install your own OS, dig around for the hardware drivers you needed, and be a master of command-line instructions. For a world building technical literacy through more user-friendly front-end systems, Linux was a niche reserved for technology enthusiasts...

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Why You’ll Want A Do-It-Yourself, NSA-Proof, Open-Source Laptop (Interview)

Dean Takahashi | VB News | April 9, 2014

Andrew “Bunnie” Huang lists a bunch of reasons why you’ll want his open-source laptop, the Novena. You can modify it yourself so that its battery will last however long you want it to.

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