Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) server and cloud hosting provider Linode declared its library of guides and tutorials "open source" this week, inviting the community to peruse and contribute to the documentation for deploying cloud applications on the company's open source-friendly platform.

The guides and tutorials, which the company calls the Linode Library, has been around for five years. But they're now available in full on GitHub, where anyone can access and modify them, as well as add new content.

The Tor encryption service is a high-profile bastion of computer security, but the project appears to have been compromised earlier this year. Today, the Tor Project blog announced that an unknown party likely managed to gather information about people who were looking up hidden services — websites that users can operate and visit anonymously, like Silk Road — and could theoretically have compromised other parts of the network.

This is a simple story about a logo design process for an open source project in case it might be informative or entertaining to you.

A little over a month ago, Tomas Redej contacted me to request a logo for DevAssistant. DevAssistant is a UI aimed at making developers’ lives easier by automating a lot of the menial tasks required to start up a software project – setting up the environment, starting services, installing dependencise, etc. His team was gearing up for a new release and really wanted a logo to help publicize the release. They came to me for help as colleagues familiar with some of the logo work I’ve done.

• Five must-know open source SDN controllers

  Open source SDN controllers enable the testing of applications and the promotion of network virtualization and NFV. Check out five open source SDN controllers to know about.

• Cloudwatt deploys open source SDN controller

  French cloud service provider Cloudwatt announced that it has deployed open source SDN controller OpenContrail in its OpenStack-based datacentre in a bid to improve network operations and deployment speeds.

GPLv2 is one of the most widely used FOSS licenses, if not the most. It is the license for some of the most important and commercially valuable FOSS projects, including the Linux kernel, whose contributors include such uncomfortable bedfellows as Oracle and Google, Intel and AMD, and Cisco and Huawei. If XimpleWare is right, and a license under GPLv2 offers no protection from the licensor's patents, Linux would be a landmine for these companies, and really for any company with fewer patents than IBM.

Even without an explicit patent grant, lawyers advising businesses on FOSS issues generally agree that GPLv2 protects licensees (at least those in compliance with the license terms) from patent suits by licensors. This is because the law provides for an implied license (or judicial estoppel) where a licensor's conduct leads the licensee to believe it will not be sued, or where fairness otherwise demands that the licensor should be prevented from suing. Because the GPL encourages licensees to copy, modify, and distribute the licensed software—all conduct that would infringe any patents on the software absent a license—licensees can reasonably expect that the software's producers won't sue them for doing those things. (Adam Pugh and Laura A. Majerus of Fenwick & West discuss GPLv2's implied patent license in greater detail in this paper.)

With mid-term evaluations just around the corner for many technology-focused summer internship programs, here's a closer look at how the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreach Program for Women (OPW) are helping mentors as well as interns.

Xen Project virtualization is one of 40 open source projects involved in the OPW program run by the GNOME Foundation. This open source software is a Linux Foundation collaborative project that develops the Xen Hypervisor (for x86 and ARM), the XAPI toolstack, and the Mirage OS Cloud Operating system.

Starting this Friday, Aug. 1, the more than 300,000 students who registered for the Linux Foundation's free Introduction to Linux course on edX will be able to log in and start learning Linux. It is the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Linux, opening training access to anyone around the world with an Internet connection. It's also part of a larger revolution in education being led by edX, the online learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT.

At the annual OSCON (Open Source Convention) last week, those stuck in a worldview of open source from the previous decade would have suffered serious cognitive dissonance.

First, Microsoft was an anchor of the conference, with a full-scale display from Jean Paoli's subsidiary Microsoft Open Technologies. As I walked past I repeatedly heard people expressing shock that Microsoft was there at such scale. Wholehearted support for open source still largely stops at the boundaries of Microsoft's Azure cloud offering, but plenty of staff people with genuine open source credentials were showing their wares. Microsoft's journey is definitely progressing.

Android is a Google product—it's designed and built from the ground up to integrate with Google services and be a cloud-powered OS. A lot of Android is open source, though, and there's nothing that says you have to use it the way that Google would prefer. With some work, it’s possible to turn a modern Android smartphone into a Google-less, completely open device—so we wanted to try just that. After dusting off the Nexus 4 and grabbing a copy of the open source parts of Android, we jumped off the grid and dumped all the proprietary Google and cloud-based services you'd normally use on Android. Instead, this experiment runs entirely on open source alternatives. FOSS or bust!

For small and medium-sized businesses looking to save money, open source applications offer an easy way to reduce expenses related to software licensing and subscriptions. In addition, many open source applications offer additional features or better usability when compared with their closed source counterparts.

This month, we've updated our list of open source software that are good options for SMBs. Many businesses have their first open source experience when they deploy a Linux-based server, and our list includes a wide variety of server software, such as operating systems, accounting, ERP and mail and groupware solutions.

In a move that will please devotees of open source cloud storage, hosting giant Rackspace (RAX) has announced it will officially support two additional types of open source MySQL databases, from MariaDB and Percona.

For those excited about the recent working Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" Gallium3D support, a number of bug-fixes were committed in recent hours to Mesa for bettering the support for those wishing to use this open-source AMD Linux driver for their ultra high-end graphics hardware.

Open-source AMD Linux users wishing to use a Hawaii GPU will still need to utilize the patches that will not be queued up until the Linux 3.17 kernel (along with updating their Radeon microcode files) but the RadeonSI Gallium3D Mesa improvements are starting to hit the mainline tree.

SaaS model becoming a criterion for companies to choose testing tool for to gain the benefits of Cloud

As a technology that predates even the Web by nearly two decades, email may not seem like something with a lot of room left for improvement. But the recently announced Dovecot Rest API (DAPI), which presents new ways for apps to interact with email data on the Dovecot open source IMAP email platform, could have a significant impact on enterprise computing and the way we use email.

The power to learn, the freedom to change, and the push for innovation. What is there not to love about open source software? The world of open source consists of a passionate community of individuals hacking away in their dens, all with the same vision for the future of programming: openness and collaboration.

Meson is a new, open-source build system under development showing good results over the likes of SCons.

Meson is self-described by its developers as a "project to create the best possible next-generation build system." Meson is written in Python 3 and is designed to be high-performance while still being easy-to-use.

A nippy microkernel mathematically proven to be bug free*, and used to protect drones from hacking, will be released as open source tomorrow.

The formal-methods-based secure embedded L4 (seL4) microkernel was developed by Australian boffins at National ICT Australia (NICTA) and was part of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems program hatched in 2012 to stop hackers knocking unmanned birds out of the sky.

The open source project OpenDaylight is on a mission to increase enterprise adoption of software-defined networking (SDN). Read about this ambitious effort to unite all SDN controllers.

Remember how the open source software movement was supposed to be like Woodstock, with everybody sharing and everything free? An entire economy where you gave a little to get a lot, in a place of love and software?

At the risk of bringing down your summer, it’s time to admit that this idea didn’t work out.

Take Big Switch Networks, a company that hoped to be for computer networking what Linux operating system software is for computer servers. A few years ago, Big Switch proposed building networking controller software that was crowd-created and free, which could demolish proprietary networking boxes. It would also offer a commercial version, with a few tweaks, that could be the basis of a great, profitable empire.

Nginx, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Nginx Web server, is out today with a new release of its Nginx Plus server. The Nginx Plus r4 release provides users with new security and load balancing features.