open source

How Can We Bring FOSS to the Virtual World?

Is there room for FOSS in the AI, VR, AR, MR, ML and XR revolutions—or vice versa? Will the free and open-source revolution end when our most personal computing happens inside the walled gardens of proprietary AI VR, AR, MR, ML and XR companies? I ask, because that's the plan.

Reinventing Software Development and Availability with Open Source: an Interview with One of Microsoft Azure's Lead Architects

Microsoft was founded in 1975—that's 43 years ago and a ton of history. Up until the last decade, the company led a campaign against the Open Source and Free Software movements, and although it may have slowed the opposition, it did not bring it to an end. In fact, it emboldened its supporters to push the open-source agenda even harder. Fast-forward to the present, and open-source technologies run nearly everything—mobile devices, cloud services, televisions and more.

Eren Niazi, Part II: the Untold Story

It was 2014, and everything seemed fine with Eren Niazi and the company he founded, Open Source Storage or OSS, although at the time, both the industry and the market were changing. Not only were open-source technologies used in every form and fashion to enable what has become the cloud, its users also were connecting in droves to take advantages of the many services it offered. We matured into an always connected society.

Now Is the Time to Start Planning for the Post-Android World

We need a free software mobile operating system. Is it eelo? Remember Windows? It was an operating system that was quite popular in the old days of computing. However, its global market share has been in decline for some time, and last year, the Age of Windows ended, and the Age of Android began.

What Is the Point of Mozilla?

Few journeys in the world of open source have been as exciting as Mozilla's. Its birth was dramatic. Netscape, the pioneering company whose Netscape Navigator browser shaped the early Web, had enjoyed the most successful IPO up until then, valuing the 18-month-year-old company at nearly $3 billion. That was in 1995. Three years later, the company was in freefall, as the browser wars took their toll, and Microsoft continued to gain market share with its Internet Explorer, launched alongside Windows 95. Netscape's response was bold and unprecedented. On January 27, 1998, it announced that it was making the source code for the next generation of its web browser freely available under a GPL-like license.

Join the Linux Journal Crusade

Linux Journal has been reporting on Linux every month since version 1.0 in April 1994. Through the nearly 25 years that have passed since then, Linux has come to support approximately everything an operating system can, while Linux Journal has maintained its status as the leading magazine covering Linux and all Linux does (or at least as much as we can fit into more pages than ever). Here is where Linux currently stands among the world's operating systems (stats via the Linux Foundation):

What Does "Ethical" AI Mean for Open Source?

Artificial intelligence is a threat—and an opportunity—for open source. It would be an understatement to say that artificial intelligence (AI) is much in the news these days. It's widely viewed as likely to usher in the next big step-change in computing, but a recent interesting development in the field has particular implications for open source. It concerns the rise of "ethical" AI.

Crossing Platforms: a Talk with the Developers Building Games for Linux

Games for Linux are booming like never before. The revolution comes courtesy of cross-platform dev tools, passionate programmers and community support. In the last five years, the number of mainstream games released for Linux has increased dramatically, with thousands of titles now available. These range from major AAA releases, such as Civilization VI and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, to breakout indie hits like Night in the Woods

A Git Origin Story

A look at Linux kernel developers' various revision control solutions through the years, Linus Torvalds' decision to use BitKeeper and the controversy that followed, and how Git came to be created.

Open Source at 20

Open source software has been around for a long time. But calling it open source only began in 1998. Here's some history:

Python and Its Community Enter a New Phase

On Python's BDFL Guido van Rossum, his dedication to the Python community, PEP 572 and hope for a healthy outcome for the language, open source and the computing world in general. Python is an amazing programming language, there's no doubt about it. From humble beginnings in 1991, it's now just about everywhere. Whether you're doing web development, system administration, test automation, devops or data science, odds are good that Python is playing a role in your work.