OStatic

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project by Richard M. Stallman. GNU is one of the oldest and best-known organizations in the free and open-source world, providing not only high-quality software, but also a well-known license (the GNU General Public License), and a philosophy that continues to influence many activists and programmers. The exact anniversary of Stallman's announcement is September 27th, 1983, when he called upon programmers to join him in creating free Unix.

Red Hat, along with the City University of New York and Intel, announced yesterday that they are creating the New York City Open Source Solutions Lab. This lab, which will be headquartered at CUNY's Institute for Software Design and Development in Manhattan, is aimed at helping local and state government agencies in New York take advantage of open-source solutions. The lab will provide governments with the ability to develop and test a variety of open-source technologies running on Intel chips.

I just spent several days helping to upgrade an organization's servers from Red Hat Enterprise 3 to the latest version, Red Hat Enterprise 5.2. One of the most important, and impressive, issues we dealt with during this upgrade was SELinux, or security-enhanced Linux. SELinux offers a great deal of functionality, and helps to protect Linux boxes from a variety of threats. It forces system administrators to learn a new vocabulary, as well as permissions, logfiles, and programs with which they were previously unfamiliar. Fortunately, there are many good tutorials for SELinux on the Web.

When you're working with a commercial software company, it's easy to keep up with their latest news: Between the company's Web sites, e-mail newsletters, conferences, and (increasingly) blogs, you can find out what is happening, and prepare yourself accordingly. Life in the open-source world is quite a bit messier, of course, in that there often isn't any central location or source for news. One of the key tools that the open-source community uses to keep in touch is blogs -- but it's not always easy to find all of the blogs on the subjects that interest you. That's where blog planets come in, providing a one-stop aggregation of many blogs on a particular subject.

The situation at One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the organization behind the $100 laptop, looks like it's going from bad to worse. As we've reported before, key personnel have recently walked out on the project.

At the center of the conflict appears to be the issue of how deep the laptop's open source roots should be.

The $100 laptop project, otherwise known as OLPC, has faced a large number of setbacks since it was initially unveiled several years ago. The most recent such problem just occurred, when Walter Bender announced his resignation.

Did he leave because the project might abandon open source software? And what does this mean?

Many open source projects are switching from CVS and Subversion to newer, distributed version-control systems. One of those is Git, written by none other than Linus Torvalds, originally for use on the Linux kernel. Git is becoming increasingly popular for use on other projects, as well. Why?

As hardware gets smaller and cheaper, we can expect to see Linux in more and more unexpected places. Why is this, and how does this benefit open-source developers?

A few months ago, I was flying from Chicago to Tel Aviv. The airplane was one of El Al's newly refurbished models, with individual video screens and on-demand video screening. The advantage of such screens is that they give each passenger a choice regarding when and what to watch.