Late last week, Mark Shuttleworth set off a series of heated debates about just how transparent the development process for Ubuntu should be. Specifically, he wrote this regarding the next 13.04 version of Ubuntu: “Mapping out the road to 13.04, there are a few items with high “tada!” value that would be great candidates for folk who want to work on something that will get attention when unveiled. While we won’t talk about them until we think they are ready to celebrate, we’re happy to engage with contributing community members that have established credibility (membership, or close to it) in Ubuntu, who want to be part of the action.” The question is, why is everyone interpreting this as the end of an open Ubuntu development model?
Is Mark Shuttleworth Really Arguing Against Open Ubuntu Development?
Cloudyn Launches Free Tool For Making Sense of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Costs

Today cloud cost management company Cloudyn announced a new free service for calculating costs of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances are sort of like cloud instances that you pay a retainer for: you pay an upfront fee, and can then pay a discounted rate if/when you use them.
Amazon offers Reserved Instances at different rates depending on term of commitment — either one, two or three years. Cloudyn’s Reserved Instance Calculator will use predictions based on usage patterns to recommend optimal purchases. Given that Amazon actually opened its own marketplace for unused Reserved Instances last month, it seems like a tool for planning these purchases could come in pretty handy.
With Wayland 1.0, A Large TODO List Remains
Wayland 1.0 will be released as soon as today, but this doesn’t mark the death of X11 and Wayland beginning to secure major traction on the Linux desktop…
Tokyo Court Finds Apple Doesn’t Infringe Samsung Patents
The court decided on two occasions that the iPhone maker didn’t violate patents related to app downloads and airplane mode. [Read more]
Cordova Becomes Apache Top Level Project
The mobile development and deployment platform has taken just over a year to graduate to top level status at the Apache Software Foundation.
5 Big Things That Baffle Me About Microsoft Surface RT
The Microsoft Surface RT doesn’t seem to fit any one target customer profile particularly well. In this in-depth analysis, former product marketing director David Gewirtz subjects the Surface RT to a series of product marketing questions and comes away concerned.
Bogus Apps Litter Android With Malware
Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems in the world. As a result, it’s also one of the most popular mobile operating systems to be targeted by malware writers. Malware aimed at Google’s Android platform increased sixfold during the quarter that ended in September, according to a report released Monday by Trend Micro. “What had been around 30,000 malicious and potentially dangerous or high-risk Android apps in June increased to almost 175,000 between July and September,” Trend Micro reported.
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Samsung Set to Open-Source Parts of the Exynos
It appears that Samsung is preparing to open-source some code pertaining to their Exynos ARM SoC…
Git 1.8.0 Can Access Windows and GNOME Keyrings
The latest version of the distributed version control system Git adds several new features and options to the open source package, including the ability to access keyrings under Windows and GNOME.
First VirtualBox 4.2 Update has Linux 3.7 Fixes
Version 4.2.2 of the open source desktop virtualisation system includes fixes for the recent Linux 3.7-rc1 kernel and a fix for a problem that stopped VMs from booting under Mac OS X.