This article continues the series of articles on Fireall Builder, a graphical firewall configuration and management tool that supports many Open Source firewall platforms as well as Cisco IOS access lists and Cisco ASA (PIX).

"Web 2.0 companies are largely built upon Open Source software. But how many of them do you consider significant contributors to Open Source? [...]and with the focus on APIs, instead of contributing code back to the projects you leverage, or contributing your own projects, cooperation has been limited..."

3D computer graphics software refers to programs used to create 3D computer-generated imagery. There are typically many stages in the "pipeline" that studios use to create 3D objects for film and games, and this article only covers some of the software used. Note that most of the 3D packages have a very plugin-oriented architecture, and high-end plugins costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are often used by studios. Larger studios usually create enormous amounts of proprietary software to run alongside these programs. But thankfully, there are always free/open-source software alternatives that can help produce highly commendable 3D animations like it did in the short film entitled “Elephants Dream”.

t seems we’ve arrived upon Microsoft open source. In the last couple of years, whenever there was discussion of Microsoft’s open source projects and efforts such as CodePlex or Port25, there was typically the standard open source response: it’s not OSI-approved; it’s not real open source.

A new book on PHP Data Objects has been published by Packt Publishing. The book gives you an overview of PDO, Creating a database and connecting to it, Error Handling, Advanced features.

So, if you are a PHP developer who need to use PDO for data abstraction, this is the book for you.

More details about the book can be read at:

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, similar to Illustrator or Xara. It uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It's capable of creating objects with a variety of drawing, shape and text tools. You can edit previously created objects with scale, gradients, masks, and filtered effects.

.NET developers will learn about the use and optimization of NHibernate. Users will be shown how to integrate their .NET projects to create a rich, efficient, object-oriented data access layer quickly and efficiently.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the design of objects whether 2D or 3D, real or virtual. Linux users may want to take a close look at some of the free and open source programs that perhaps can equal most of the features offered by AutoCAD. Here are some of the best free and open source CAD software for Linux that you may want to check out...

Join Elliotte Rusty Harold for a look at some hard unit tests made easy through mock objects — more specifically, the EasyMock framework. This open source library saves you time and helps make your mock-object code concise and legible.