The world of open source is structured to invite unusual, often downright quirky contributions from people with unusual skills, and that inevitably leads to offbeat inventions. On the Linux front, especially because of easily executed embedded Linux concepts, both hardware and software inventions of the quirky type appear regularly.

The open source arena never fails to surprise when it comes to offbeat implementations of community-produced technologies. Put together enough eyeballs and collaboration, and unusual inventions will ensue. We've covered several examples of this phenomenon on OStatic, including open source efforts completely outside the software arena.

The second of four days at the 10th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium got off to an unusual start as a small bird "assisted" Rob Landley in giving the first talk I attended, called "Where Linux kernel documentation hides." The tweeting bird was polite, only flying over the audience a couple of times and mostly paying attention.

One of the benefits of open source software that many people are most familiar with is that it's free to download. inux is a classic example of this: there are hundreds (at least!) of different Linux-based operating systems.

Sam has recently written a few excellent posts about open source software being used in unusual ways. He's also covered a few open source hardware projects.

I love open-source and I really admire Linux for what it is and what it stands for. But I’m a Mac user. Can I last two days only with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex?

I'm a fan of many kinds of offbeat open source efforts, and the idea of community contributions can be applied to any number of pursuits, as seen previously in this post. This week I came across a few eyebrow-raising open source stories worthy of another short roundup. Here, you'll find four unusual examples of left-field open source in action.

A new email client unveiled by Mozilla this week contains code from an unusual source -- the French military, which decided the open source product was more secure than Microsoft's rival Outlook.

Historically, there have been some [gnu/linux effecting viruses]. And there are browser exploits, of course, that no operating system is completely immune from. However, viruses, as we think of them in the Windows world, are highly unusual.