free and open source software (FOSS)

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How "Open Source" Seed Producers from the U.S. to India Are Changing Global Food Production

Rachel Cernansky | Ensia | December 12, 2016

Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding...

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How I Use Linux for Theoretical Physics

In 2008, I started studying physics and got in contact with Linux, since a bunch of people used it for data analysis and simulations. Comprehension came fast and easy with such people around, and I was strongly encouraged to get things done with Linux. I installed Ubuntu on my notebook, and soon got familiar with Bash and the standard tools. After some years I turned to theoretical physics. While I was writing my master's thesis I gained access to a workstation running Scientific Linux, and a cluster system with a few hundred cores. I was impressed that each of my peers had implemented his own customized workflow, and that it was actually possible to work entirely with the keyboard, which is inconceivable for a Windows user...

How Open Source Communities in India Support Privacy and Software Freedom

The free and open source communities in India, particularly Mozilla and Wikimedia communities, are leading two unique global events for better privacy and in support of free software. January Privacy Month is led by the Mozilla community in India to educate the masses about online privacy via both online and offline outreach events. And, Freedom in Feb is led by the Centre for Internet and Society to educate content producers like bloggers and photographers on how to donate their content under open licenses...

How Open Source Software Has Changed Samsung

Libby Clark | Linux.com | October 2, 2013

In recent years, Samsung has moved from being a mere consumer of open source software to actively participating in its development as a top-10 contributor to the Linux kernel. Read More »

How to Grow Healthy Open Source Project Infrastructures

In 2013 I joined the OpenStack Infrastructure team. In the four years I spent with the team, I learned a considerable amount about the value of hosting an infrastructure for an open source project in the open itself. In 2014 I gave a talk at All Things Open and was interviewed by Jason Baker about how we'd done our systems administration in the open. My involvement on this team led me to advocate for systems administrators to use revision control and learn about tools for working with a distributed team. At the OpenStack Summit in Austin in 2016, our team did a talk on navigating the open source OpenStack Infrastructure...

How to Open Source Your Academic Work in 7 Steps

Open source technology and academia are the perfect match. Find out how to meet tenure requirements while benefiting the whole community. Academic work fits nicely into the open source ethos: The higher the value of what you give away, the greater your academic prestige and earnings. Professors accomplish this by sharing their best ideas for free in journal articles in peer-reviewed literature. This is our currency, without a strong publishing record not only would our ability to progress in our careers degrade, but even our jobs could be lost (and the ability to get any other job). The following seven steps provide the best practices for making an academic's work open source...

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How to Successfully Enter Emerging Markets in Open Source Software

In business speak, an "emerging market" is a market that is not yet well developed but on the rise and shows strong potential to be as robust as other developed markets. The Wikipedia definition focuses purely on countries, but this is a limited view of the meaning of "market." Whether a market is developed or emerging depends entirely on the product or service being offered and the receptiveness and awareness of a market to that product or service. For instance, Italy would not qualify as an emerging market by the Wikipedia definition. Yet, with an Internet penetration of only 58.5% of the country, it could be considered one for broadband Internet providers...

Hybrid Open Source Software Development & Business Models

Starting in the early 2000s, a number of companies began to release a portion of their product's source code to the open source community, while keeping key parts closed. This allowed them to make claims that their company and products were open source. These products were termed commercial open source or hybrid open source software, to distinguish them from true free and open source software (FOSS). In hybrid open source business models, some of the software products are released using a business-friendly open source license, but some of the special source code add-ons are only available for a fee. There currently appear to be two major forms of the hybrid open source business model...

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If You Build It, They Won't Come: Why Your Open Source Project Needs Better Marketing

FOSS (free and open source software) conferences are full of talks about how to improve your code, or how you manage your code, or what the latest and greatest languages and tools are. But a successful open source project is about more than good code. First, let's talk about what success is, because success isn't a guarantee. University of Massachusetts faculty members Charles Schweik and Robert English have studied open source projects and their success extensively. In a study of 174,333 projects through 2009, they were able to declare success or abandonment for only 145,475...

Indian Companies opt for Open Source Softwares to cut costs

Jochelle Mendonca | The Economic Times | September 9, 2013

Indian enterprises are increasingly moving to open-source software, recognising the cost benefits and flexibility Read More »

Involving government in 'open source' is hard but profitable

Gijs Hillenius | EU Joinup | September 30, 2013

Getting public administrations involved in communities of developers of free and open source solutions "is not easy", says Cenatic, the Spanish government's resource centre on open source. Read More »

Italian Public Administration gives priority to Open Source Software

Guglielmo Troiano | OpenSource.com | November 11, 2013

Italian public administrations are now obliged to give priority to free and open source software. Public administrations in Italy and elsewhere in the European Union are expected to provide efficient services to businesses and citizens, to share software solutions, to discuss best practices, and to generally share their experiences. Read More »

iText Group

iText Group is a global leader in PDF technology. With iText DITO, we provide business users with a powerful and convenient document generation solution. iText Group has a long history of high-quality software development. Our flagship product, the open-source iText Core library, is used by tens of thousands of developers worldwide to add PDF capabilities to their applications.

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Karen Sandler Addresses Open Source's "Identity Crisis"

For Karen Sandler, software freedom isn't simply a technical matter. Nor is it a purely ideological one. It's a matter of life and death. Sandler, Executive Director of the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy, says software freedom became personal when she realized her pacemaker/defibrillator was running code she couldn't analyze. For nearly a decade—first at the Software Feedom Law Center, then at the GNOME Foundation before Conservancy—she's been an advocate for the right to examine the software on which our lives depend...

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Kids on Computers Establishes Computer Labs in Five Countries

Linux and open source software are not just fueling charities, they are gifting the freedom of education and knowledge to the people the charities are helping because of the low cost, yes, but also the exceptional technology. This sentiment is proven when you look at the work the Linux Foundation does supporting a variety of community initiatives and organizations that are using Linux and open source software. While attending LinuxCon NA 2016 in Toronto I learned of Kids on Computers, one such organization...