The U.K. Cabinet Office accomplished today what Massachusetts set out (unsuccessfully) to achieve ten years ago: it formally required compliance with the Open Document Format (ODF) by software to be purchased in the future across all government bodies.

Zorin OS 9 Core is a decent system, and those who it is aimed for, literally Windows migrants, will find everything they want in this operating system. As this is an LTS edition, it will be supported for a long time. It means you can install it on your computer and forget about upgrade problems, as well as forget about the Microsoft empire.

This article is based on a talk I gave at DockerCon this year. It will discuss Docker container security, where we are currently, and where we are headed.read more

A C-like language with all the OO trimmings, garbage collection, strong data types, and excellent string processing makes a powerful tool for Web programming.

In today's open source roundup: Microsoft hits the panic button about Chromebooks. Plus: Firefox 31 has been released, and how to install additional desktops in Linux.

Privacy Badger is a browser add-on for Firefox and Chrome that’s designed to stop “advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.” And it’s designed to require zero configuration to use. Just install and forget it!

A review of Linux distribution milestones.

Two recent, excellent, blog posts have touched on a topic I've been wrestling with since May's OpenStack Summit: What is the role of the Product Management function, if any, in the OpenStack development process?

As you know, GNU Linux is much more than just an OS. There is literally a whole sphere on the Internet dedicated to the penguin OS. If you read this post, you are probably inclined towards reading about Linux online. Among all the pages that you can find on the subject, there are websites that every Linux adventurer should have in his bookmarks because these websites are more than just tutorials or reviews, they are real tools that you can access from anywhere and share with everyone.

Mozilla has officially released Thunderbird 31.0, an email and RSS client, for all the available platforms, and the developers have actually made a number of improvements to the application. The first version has been released in the Thunderbird 31.x branch, but unlike some of the previous updates, this one actually brings something interesting. It's been a while since Thunderbird received any real improvements, but that's not exactly Mozilla's fault.

Big data is one of the most pervasive buzzwords in today's technology world. But it's impossible to deny how deeply data touches all aspects of not just our lives but also business and industry. The amount of data collected about everything is staggering—a typical transatlantic flight generates 30 terabytes of data about the engines alone!

Cisco has picked up a lipstick-gloss in one hand and a pig in the other, by re-launching its developer program to have another shot at attracting third party coders to its platforms. For not the first time, The Borg has hit upon the idea that getting others writing functions and applications for it is a big chunk of its future. It's not even the first time it's called the program the Cisco Developer Network (or DevNet in the parlance of today's announcement).

ProtonMail, as the name suggests, is an email service. The outfit is based in Switzerland and the service offers bumper-to-bumper encryption, is browser-based, does not log IP addresses, and will accept bitcoin and cash payments for paid accounts.

When Microsoft swallowed half of Europe's biggest tech company, it was only a matter of time before it spat something out. And so it has, ending Nokia's thirty-year roller-coaster ride. However, the decision will make tens of million of its customers take a look at Android – surely the last thing Microsoft wanted to happen.

No matter how much I love Plex, there's still nothing that comes close to XBMC for usability when it comes to watching your network media on a television. I've probably written a dozen articles on Plex during the last few years, so you know that's tough for me to admit. Still, no matter how many Plex-enabled devices I might buy (Roku, Amazon Fire TV, phones, tablets, Web browsers), I run XBMC on all my televisions. The interface, when coupled with a back-end MySQL database, is just unbeatable.

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

Read our Python masterclass for beginners and follow it up with ten projects in Understanding & Implementing Python volume one. Python is one of our favourite programming languages and we’ve covered it a lot over the years in Linux User & Developer. We’ve compiled ten of the best Python projects in the first edition of our digital Developer Manual, available now from our Newsstand app.

The pitfalls of working on closed source projects for contract developers...

A detailed analysis of iOS by a security expert digging into claims of NSA spying on Apple products has revealed some unexplained surveillance tools hidden in the operating system.

In today's open source roundup: A new distro will run Debian and Android. Plus: Android vampire apps, and take the Linux.com open source cloud project survey.