Ask fans of FOSS what keeps them loyal to free and open source software, and security will likely be high on the list. Ask proponents of paid, proprietary software, however, and they may well say the same thing.
Money makes the world go round, or so it's been said, but what about the world of FOSS?
Sparked by a recent Glyn Moody column on Heise Online, that's the question bloggers have been wrestling with in recent days.
It's hard to imagine a topic more central to the argument for or against free and open source software than security. Hardly a day goes by without news of some fresh exploit in the Windows environment, after all -- but what about Linux and other open software? Can they do better?
Jan. 4 is here at last, and not a moment too soon! Good riddance to all the eggnog, the mingling and the jolliness. It's time to settle back down to work once again, and for that, what better companion than FOSS? There's certainly no better way to get things done -- the only catch, of course, is that not everyone realizes that.
Sex is a sensitive subject in virtually any industry or profession, and FOSS, it appears, is no exception. Indeed, a recent article by Datamation's Bruce Byfield, "Sexism: Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret," has set off a conflagration on the Linux blogs.
It's not every day that a major operating system gets opened up, never mind one that leads the global market in its category. So, when the news came out last week that that's just what the Symbian Foundation had done -- and four months ahead of schedule, no less! -- it was hard not to get excited.
The growing popularity of free open source software is a sure sign that consumers and software developers alike are becoming more disenchanted with costly proprietary products. However, the promise of free software can be tarnished when software packages need configuration help and that help proves hard to find.
Red Hat Linux and the Fedora Project developers will soon introduce core technological improvements to provide better desktop environments and video driver support in the upcoming release of both the commercial and the free open source operating systems later this year.
In this debate series for LinuxInsider, we've heard from Evan Prodromou, CEO of StatusNet, who put forth the case for an open, distributed, federated model for social networking in contrast to Facebook's approach.
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