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The Linux Foundation has achieved a major milestone: formal status on the international standards front. Its Joint Development Foundation received approval as an ISO/IEC JTC 1 Publicly Available Specification Submitter. The submitter status designation benefits the global business and technical ecos...

GitHub has lowered its pricing plans drastically and made its core features free for everyone, even for private development. GitHub CEO Nat Friedman announced a plan that has been in the works for some time, noting that the changes were not related to the COVID-19 worldwide health crisis. The new st...

The worldwide 3D printing community is stepping up to alleviate the shortage of medical equipment needed to battle the coronavirus pandemic. Participants include entrepreneurs and hackers, companies in the 3D printing industry, automobile makers, aircraft manufacturers, universities, and even a ship...

Open Source software, once the scorn of Microsoft and profit-seeking software developers, is playing an active role in efforts to combat COVID-19's spread. Several open source projects are assisting health providers and helping people mitigate some of the hardships associated with the pandemic. Ofte...

Researchers into the COVID-19 virus have a new source of distributed computing power: crowdsourcing. Usually crowdsourcing involves information or opinion gathering, but in this case it involves computing power. By installing the [email protected] software program, anyone with a computer, gaming console,...

Open source vulnerabilities rose by nearly 50 percent in 2019 over the previous year, based on a new report. Common vulnerabilities rated as high or critical severity were found in all of the most popular open source projects, according to the WhiteSource 2020 annual report, "The State of Open Sourc...

Microsoft has announced the general availability of its Azure Sphere secure IoT service. It first introduced Azure Sphere in 2018, opting to use its own version of a Linux operating system instead of Windows 10 to drive its new Azure Sphere OS to securely connect Internet of Things devices. Azure Sp...

The open source software movement has evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Many businesses that once considered open source a threat now recognize its value. In spite of increased enthusiasm among enterprises, consumer interest by and large has not materialized. With large companies incre...

The Free Software Foundation wants Microsoft to keep Windows 7 alive as a free operating system. Microsoft stopped providing free security patches and support for Windows 7 earlier this month. Although the popular operating system reached its 10th birthday last fall, some 200 million PCs around the ...

Optimism about the future of open source is high among software developers worldwide. However, a growing number of devs worry that a lack of funding and corporate support threatens its sustainability. That is one of the key takeaways from DigitalOcean's second annual open source survey. The online ...

When Linux first emerged from its cocoon in a frenzied Usenet thread, it is doubtful that almost anyone imagined the project would ascend to global prominence. Even more astonishingly, its dominance was driven as much, if not more, by its adoption by the private sector -- although it posed an antith...

GitHub wants to make sure its entire warehouse of open source code survives an apocalypse by burying it deep within an Arctic vault as one of several preservation strategies. Microsoft-owned GitHub is creating the Arctic Code Vault as a data repository for the existing Arctic World Archive. The AWA ...

Two things to avoid in online discussions are politics and religion. Open source technology may be an explosive third topic that software developers should be wary of subjecting to a virtual debate. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and Ruby on Rails creator and Basecamp cofounder David Heinemeier Hanss...

While open source enthusiasts still await the year of the Linux desktop, hardware developer Pine64 is advancing the cause of a $25 Linux-powered smartwatch, dubbed "PineTime." The Pine64 community has invited FreeRTOS or ArmMbed developers with an interest in smartwatches to join in its efforts to b...