Imagine a robot that hands you a beer and then cleans your kitchen and living room. That's what a start-up called Willow Garage in Menlo Park, Calif., is busy developing.

A California startup is working with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot project to create an open-source robot. The demo version can do some neat stuff, but the real payoff will come once the AI is perfected and it leaves the labs.

This is an amazing device: The RepRap (short for "Replicating Rapid-prototyper"), an open-source printer developed at the University of Bath. It was built using Linux, and all of the project's software and hardware components fall under the GNU General Public License. It's cheap to use, and can even replicate most of its own parts. Most of this article is an interview with the technical lead, plus there are links on the first page to videos and sample parts and objects made with the RepRap.

A Linux-based production pipeline is a perfect choice for a major motion picture like The Spiderwick Chronicles, with its many goblins and magical creatures. Hollywood has been the realm of Linux since 1997, when the movie Titanic proved that Linux can do big computer graphics jobs like rendering a sinking ocean liner. With an industry tradition of using UNIX-based operating systems for high-computation jobs, and due to the better, faster, cheaper nature of Linux, every major effects or animation movie today is produced using Linux.

The New Zealand Stock Exchange is moving to a Linux platform for its settlement and clearing system, replacing its existing HP NonStop platform and applications in order to reduce cost and increase flexibility.

Computer companies want more control over the products they sell you, and they're resorting to increasingly draconian security measures to get that control. The reasons are economic.

Over the last few months, open source has gained momentum at Stanford University in the form of the Stanford Open Source Lab. Inspired by groups like the Free Software Foundation, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, Drupal, Openflows Community Technology Lab, and MIT’s Open Course Ware, a few people at Stanford decided to band together and dedicate their time and energies to the development of free/open/libre learning and knowledge resources.

As makers of proprietary software enter the enterprise Linux fray with their own distributions, they are contributing to the fragmentation of Linux, reports Kushal Shah