When Open Source Invests in Diversity, Everyone Wins

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October 15, 2013

This article is part of an interview series highlighting the speakers of the upcoming All Things Open 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC

Jessica McKellar is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and open source developer. She helps organize the Boston Python user group and plays a big role in diversity outreach by introducing and welcoming more beginners and women. Participation has increased from 0-2% to 15% and the user group has sustained this over the past two years.

It’s results like this that convince Jessica that when open source communities invest in diversity outreach, everyone benefits. Since implementing a beginner series, intermediate workshops, and open source sprints, the Boston Python user group has over quintupled in size, from 700 members to 4000+. They are now the largest Python user group in the world. That type of growth is something all open source communities should aspire to.

Read more about Jessica McKellar in this interview.

The Disruptive Business Model for Higher Education is Open Source

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OpenSource.com

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October 15, 2013

How do you make money from something that is free? Borrow some moves from the commercial open source playbook.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are disrupting the higher education marketplace the way free and open source software disrupted the world of proprietary software more than two decades ago. The disruption in higher education, however, will be different in two key ways:

It will happen twice as fast.
It may spark a competition far different from the one you expect.

Here’s Why Radeon Graphics Are Faster On Linux 3.12

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Phoronix

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October 15, 2013

Yesterday I published benchmarks showing the AMD Radeon graphics being much faster on Linux 3.12. Ten graphics cards were benchmarked and many of them were showing rather remarkable OpenGL frame-rate performance improvements when moving from the Linux 3.11 to Linux 3.12 Git kernel. This large comparison came after benchmarks I did this weekend on a single Radeon HD graphics card showed the Linux 3.12 kernel delivering the best performance of any recent kernel release. The only thing was, this AMD Radeon performance improvement baffled the upstream developers. The AMD developers were taken off-guard and didn’t have an explanation why the Linux 3.12 kernel performance is faster… Now thanks to automated testing and bisecting by the Phoronix Test Suite, I have an answer.

Development Release: Snowlinux 5 Beta

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DistroWatch

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October 15, 2013

Lars Torben has announced the availability of the first beta release of Snowlinux 5, a new version of the project’s Debian-based distribution featuring the MATE desktop environment: “The team is proud to announce the release of Snowlinux 5 ‘Flurry’ beta. This new beta releases mostly improves the system….

Oracle Says Open Source Has No Place In Military Apps

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The Register

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October 15, 2013

Unless it’s open source from Oracle, of course

Oracle has popped out a white paper that may well turn some heads, because it contains robust criticism of open source software.…

Gates, Zuckerberg, to Deliver Free Coding Lesson

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The Register

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October 15, 2013

We all have so much to learn from the guys who brought us Clippy and Poke

Code.org, the organisation that believes “every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer programming” has signed up Microsoft Bill Gates and Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg to teach programming.…

IBM’s Watson Wants to Fix America’s Doctor Shortage

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The Verge

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October 15, 2013

In 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer got an unusually public proof-of-concept, competing on Jeopardy! and beating its human competitors hands-down. It was a powerful public win for IBM, and for artificial intelligence at large, but the computer at the center of all that publicity was still basically a prototype. If Watson can do this, IBM wanted to say, imagine what it can do in the real world.

Closed Source Enterprise Soon to be a Thing of the Past

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OStatic

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October 15, 2013

Opensource.com has an interview with developer, writer, and entrepreneur Andy Hunt. Andy has been in the business for a long time, and has seen the evolution of software through the years. According to him, proprietary software in the datacenter and enterprise desktops has had its day, and is on its way out.

My experience suggests that Andy is right, although it is important to recognize that not everyone agrees. I have spoken with many sysadmins who still swear by Windows servers, and many more who swear by one proprietary Unix system or another. However, it is also worth taking those opinions with a grain of salt, it is almost impossible to convince a person of something when their job depends on them not understanding it.

Development Release: Slackware Linux 14.1 RC1

By

DistroWatch

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October 15, 2013

Patrick Volkerding has announced that the “Current” branch of Slackware Linux has reached release candidate status in preparation for the release of stable version 14.1: “And with this batch of updates and fixes (clearing the rest of the important stuff from the TODO list), we have arrived at….

Intel Core i7 Haswell Benchmarks On Linux 3.12

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Phoronix

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October 15, 2013

So far in our testing of the Linux 3.12 kernel we have found that there are some file-system performance improvements and most noticeable is AMD Radeon performance improvements for the open-source driver. We have also found the AMD APU performance hasn’t changed much and Ivy Bridge graphics are rather unchanged among other mute workloads, but is there any other worthwhile performance improvements to be discovered? Our latest Linux 3.12 Git tests are from the System76 Galago UltraPro with Core i7 4750HQ “Haswell” processor as we benchmark every major kernel release going back to Linux 3.8.