One of Linus Torvalds' greatest contributions to free software – and, indeed, to software in general – came about purely by chance. As he told me back in 1996, as he reflected on how the Linux kernel had come about and grown...

According to the Ubuntu development team and Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu derivative Gobuntu has been sucking up too many resources and will therefore be dropped in favour of an installation option in Ubuntu that installs only free software.

I’m going to make a rather broad and sweeping statement here: If you’re writing free or open source software targeting Unix or Linux systems, then you should be using the GNU Autotools.

There are lots of different ways you can build software and the typical ways in which FOSS development and proprietary development are done are quite dramatically different. In this article, I’m going to talk about what problems the typical FOSS method can face when open source products are integrated within enterprise environments.

Today interface designers are more conservative in their changes, because while drastic changes may please the geekatroids among us, they make casual users very nervous. Lately I have begun to get that little thrill down my spine when I play with KDE 4. It's an interface that's pretty and (bonus) so fundamentally different than what we have now, it brings a lot of excitement to the table.

"Grok" is a word that you may not know, but it has been in use since the 1960's. It is commonly taken to mean "understand" but it is so much more than that. Do you grok open source? The word is the key to understanding why talented developers give of their time.

The use of open source is on the rise in the corporate IT environment as organisations look to cut the cost of developing and using software.

Qtractor is an Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer application for Linux, written in C++ around the Qt4 toolkit. It is still in some alpha stage of development, but already functional.