People power transforms the web in next online revolution, Mar 10, 2008

The Linux community is the most impressive example of sustained We Think. A version of Linux released in June 2005 had 229 million lines in its source code that would have taken 60,000 man-years to develop at a cost of perhaps $8bn. Every day most people who use the web rely on open source: Google's servers run on Linux; most websites rely on servers running the open-source Apache program. Open source could in time provide a model for other areas of life, for example turning We Think into We Make.

Jonathan Schwartz, its ponytail-wearing chief, has turned the company around by focusing on free software for new business

Nokia said it will offer 843 million Norwegian crowns ($153 million) for all the shares in loss-making Norwegian mobile software firm Trolltech to support its new push into services and software.

Under the banner of "Hana Linux" - literally "One" Linux - the two countries have agreed to work on a groundbreaking IT development project that might shatter the final Cold War boundary.

Grid computing makes modelling of energy sources very accurate and helps manage them as efficiently as possible

Canonical has released the latest version of its Linux distribution, Ubuntu. It's easy to install and use. Why don't more people use it?

Linux vendors and developers didn't get to relax for long after an August court ruling had the effect of ending SCO's copyright lawsuit against IBM and Novell over their distributions of Linux

If it wasn't for the free Linux operating system, Facebook would not exist

The new iPods released this past week have a database that's encrypted, apparently to prevent other media players being used - but it also blocks people installing Linux on them.

... while not every geek was delighted about a Microsoft technology appearing on Linux, many of them aren't too keen on the rival Adobe Flash system, either.

... in an SEC filing, TiVo says: "If the currently proposed version of GPLv3 is widely adopted, we may be unable to incorporate future enhancements to the GNU/Linux operating system into our software, which could adversely affect our business."

Google's open source chief talks about the joys of Linux, the cost of Windows and his concerns about the new version of the GPL

When Bill Clinton made his speech to the Labour Party conference, he bamboozled a few by finishing with the word "Ubuntu".

Microsoft is an extremely rich, resourceful company - and yet the task of creating and shipping Vista stretched it to breaking point. A lesser company would have buckled under the strain. And yet while Microsoft engineers were trudging through their death march, the open source community shipped a series of major upgrades to the Linux operating system. How can hackers, scattered across the globe, working for no pay, linked only by the net and shared values, apparently outperform the smartest software company on the planet?

The really interesting comparison is with Linux, a product of comparable complexity developed by an independent, dispersed community of programmers who communicate mainly over the net. How come they can outperform a stupendously rich company that can afford to employ very smart people and give them all the resources they need?

"GPL 3 is like GPL 2," Moglen says. "It wants you to be able to use free software in combination with non-free software, providing you do so in ways that don't obscure the user's rights in the free software parts."

Of all the myths that have grown up around open source software, perhaps the most pervasive is Eric Raymond's aphorism that "Many eyes make bugs shallow", suggesting that if lots of people can view a program's source code, they will find and fix its errors more quickly than commercial products whose code is jealously guarded. The only problem with this is that it's not true - certainly not in one of the flagship projects of open source, OpenOffice.

Every year, Novell takes a group of journalists to the ski slopes of Utah to relax before its annual BrainShare conference at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. And, let's face it, when it comes to going downhill fast, who better than Novell to act as host?

Even today, a great deal of the most important software in the world is freely produced and freely given away. Every time you connect to the internet, or look something up on Google, you are relying on software at the other end of the connection which, like Linux, is free for anyone to copy or use.

Do you use open source software? You probably do. If you have a GPS navigator, a wireless router or an NAS network storage device, they may well be based on an embedded version of Linux.