More and more open-source developers these days are employees of companies, paid to work on open-source projects, rather than independent programmers doing it for fun. The change raises issues for projects, programmers and employers alike.

More and more open-source developers these days are employees of companies, paid to work on open-source projects, rather than independent programmers doing it for fun. The change raises issues for projects, programmers and employers alike.

GStreamer is an open source multimedia framework that's used by many GNOME applications and a few KDE apps as well. It's really meant to be used by programmers to create rich applications by accessing GStreamer's API. Thankfully there's also a command line interface available for us non-programmers. It's really meant for only testing, but that's OK. If it works, it works.

The near-shoring trend to Latin America is an incidental side effect of progressive social policies that have put migrating to open source as a priority in countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela and this has created an enormous pool of free software programmers that are being discovered by Bay Area companies looking for an alternative to Indian or Eastern European off-shoring.

About a year ago, we took a look at the growing trend toward open-source security and highlighted 10 of the best apps available. Since then, the area has continued to mature, and now we're back highlighting 75 of the most frequently downloaded open-source security applications.

On too many occasions I've found myself staring dumbfounded at my computer screen, wondering "what's going on in there?" Despite the steadily raising computer savvy in today's high tech populace, many software companies still believe it best to not burden our pretty little heads with what exactly they're doing on our machines.

Now that Firefox 3 is out and so many of us dislike some of the new default behaviors I thought of a way that a number of us could be made very happy, but it requires the services of programmers within the open source community.

In articles past, we have examined both the up-and-coming open source projects to watch, and which open source applications you simply cannot live without. But where does this leave the enterprise user? Often times, the need of the enterprise user differs from that of the home-office/small-office worker.

The enterprise software vendor consolidation trend has now reached the open source corner of the market, with Consona's announcement that it is acquiring Compiere, Inc.,