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Today's Top Pick

Scott McNealy discusses his latest FOSS project

Not only can free, online, open-sourced curriculum and books make education more affordable and widespread - it also can make it fun. Scott McNealy spends time these days proslytizing for his labor of love, Curriki, a nonprofit repository/community/social network that seeks to gather the best educational materials in one spot for educators, parents and students to use.

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Source Seeker
Linux community finally fixes 6-year-old, critical bug by Julie Bort
The Linux kernel folks "silently" pushed out a patch for a critical privilege escalation bug this week. It was for a hole that could allow an attacker to execute code at the root level from any GUI application. The patch took two months after the flaw was reported on June 17, researchers say. SUSE engineers claim they originally found it, reported it and patched it in SUSE in September 2004, says the security blog The H. But the SUSE patch never made its way into the kernel at that... 9

Logical Expression
Reducing Code Risks with Open Source by Eric Gries
In the old days, the commercial licensing model for software was fairly straightforward -- and somewhat risky: Company A buys a software license from Company B, a startup. Company A crosses its fingers that Company B doesn't go bankrupt and disappear, along with the source code for Company A's mission-critical software. Company B goes kaput.Company A is left with some machine-readable binary code that it is powerless to develop or use. That's when source code...

Open Source Fact and Fiction
Does Intel Buying McAfee Have Any Impact On Open Source by Alan Shimel
The big news in tech today is of course Intel buying McAfee, in a deal valued at about 7.7 billion dollars. Hey, we are all friends here, lets round it off at an even 8b. That is a lot of money to pay! Many analysts are asking themselves why (here and here). The general consensus is that Intel is really serious about security (does my heart good). Good for Intel I don' t believe that for a second. I think this deal is all about mobile devices and mobile computing security. I think... 4

Pragmatic open source
Decorate with Linux by Amy Vernon
In thinking of the great works of Western literature, many books come to mind: "Jane Eyre," by Charlotte Bronte. "The Metamorphosis," by Franz Kafka. "Peter Pan," by J.M. Barrie. The ... "Linux Kernel"?Yes, the source code for the schedule processor in the Linux kernel is depicted in poster form from Postertext (and they note,"Every source code component is in its original compilable form!"):The company takes written works and turns them into artistic renderings using only the text itself.The...

Open Source Exposed
Be A Community Manager by Stephen Spector'
I have been talking with various open source community leaders as well as general purpose community managers about who is the most important part of a community? Obviously, you need developers to build the product, users to run the product, and super-stars to help support new people to the product. As a community manager, I only have so many resources available to the entire community and must put more efforts into certain types of members over others. Here is a high level grouping of the... 3

Source Seeker
Oracle isn't completely wrong to sue Google over Android by Julie Bort
So Oracle wants a piece of Google's action and late Thursday filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Google over Android's use of Java. One thing is clear. There are no victims here. The crux of the issue is that when Google created Android, it wanted a way to use pieces of Java Micro Edition without paying royalties to Sun.Whether Google's Android engineers did so legally or not is for the lawyers. I'm more concerned over if this suit could fuel Oracle's desire to shake down other Java... 16

Open Source Fact and Fiction
Oracle to Open Source: Drop Dead! by Alan Shimel
Let's face it. While everyone in open source for the last 10 years has been beating up on Microsoft about being public enemy #1, there has been another large software company whose record is even worse. With the purchase of Sun and the dismantling of the foundational open source projects that Sun sponsored, Oracle and Larry Ellison have show their true colors. They are not only just indifferent to open source, but it seems the very principles of open source are anathema to... 4

Pragmatic open source
Support remains the weak link in open source software adoption by Amy Vernon
Acceptance of open source by IT professionals continues to increase, according to a recent survey that shows the slumping economy helped boost that trend. A report released this week by Zenoss gave the results of surveys about open source software among IT professionals who attended the USENIX Large Installation System Administration Conference in the fall and the Zenoss open source systems management community. Naturally, most of these IT professionals already were using open source software... 6

'Nix Zealot
OpenSolaris is Dead. Long Live Solaris 11 Express by Ben Whaley
A post at the alasdair on everything blog leaked a memo sent to the Oracle engineering time on August 12th, stating in no uncertain terms that Oracle will not be releasing further builds of OpenSolaris. Specifically: "All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine... 9

Open Source Fact and Fiction
Extreme CRM Makeover, Open Source Edition - Episode 4, Levementum Implements Sugar by Alan Shimel
Open source knows no limits with Levementum. That is the motto of this firm that has built a successful business performing custom implementations of several enterprise open source products, including SugarCRM. Sugar has brough Levementum into the American Bancard project to help with the implementation and customizations that American Bancard would like to have.I had a chance to sit down with managing directors, Doug Guilbeau and Geoffrey Mobisson and talk about the overall...