A week ago we announced that we were trying to start a new Linux magazine that will make all of its contents available for free after a maximum nine months. The response so far has been phenomenal, and funds have come in far quicker than we expected.

Read the full thing at http://www.linuxvoice.com/free-licence-after-nine-months/

History is written years after the events it describes. But when the history of free software finally is written, I am increasingly convinced that this last year will be noted as the start of the decline of Ubuntu.

At first, the idea might seem ridiculous or spiteful. You can still find Ubuntu enthusiasts who exclaim over every move the distribution makes, and journalists still report founder Mark Shuttleworth's every word uncritically.

Read the full thing at http://www.datamation.com/open-source/are-we-witnessing-the-decline-of-ubuntu-1.html

Today we announce OpenZFS: the truly open source successor to the ZFS project.

ZFS is the world's most advanced filesystem, in active development for over a decade. Recent development has continued in the open, and OpenZFS is the new formal name for this open community of developers, users, and companies improving, using, and building on ZFS. Founded by members of the Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and illumos communities, including Matt Ahrens, one of the two original authors of ZFS, the OpenZFS community brings together over a hundred software developers from these platforms.

For some reason, Google seems to dislike Google Drive users who prefer Linux. I find this particularly strange, since Google's Chrome OS is based on Linux. Thankfully, the folks over at Insync not only provide Linux support for Google Drive syncing, they do it with style.

Read the full thing at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/google-drive-linux

With the rise of widespread government monitoring programs, Tox is an easy to use application that allows you to connect with friends and loved ones without anyone else listening in.

Tox is built with the idea that you can keep up with friends and family without having your privacy violated. While other big-name services require you to pay to unlock features, Tox is free in both price, and in liberty. That is, you’re free to do whatever you wish with Tox.

Read more at http://tox.im/

The next-generation VP9 and HEVC codecs are the latest incremental refinements of a basic codec design that dates back 25 years to h.261. This conservative, linear development strategy evolving a proven design has yielded reliable improvement with relatively low risk, but the law of diminishing returns is setting in. Recent performance increases are coming at exponentially increasing computational cost.

Daala tries for a larger leap forward— by first leaping sideways— to a new codec design and numerous novel coding techniques. In addition to the technical freedom of starting fresh, this new design consciously avoids most of the patent thicket surrounding mainstream block-DCT-based codecs. At its very core, for example, Daala is based on lapped transforms, not the traditional DCT.


Read the full thing at http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml

Seems after getting the middle finger from Linus Torvalds for its hardware support and lack of open-source drivers, Nvidia has started to care more about the Linux users. Most recently, the GPU manufacturer has open-sourced its 3D Tegra driver code.

Read the full thing at http://www.linuxandlife.com/2013/04/nvidias-3d-tegra-driver-now-open-sourced.html

GlusterFS is a distributed file system which is supposed to scale to large storage sizes. Besides file distribution it also offers “RAID” like features: if you have two GlusterFS servers you can either stripe the data on both of them, or mirror them. Or, if you got more servers, you can even create more complex setups with a mixture of striping and mirroring. The client protocol is very similar to NFS, and thus clients can GlusterFS servers via GlusterFS-Fuse or directly via NFS.

Read the full thing at http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/glusterfs-first-impressions/

At some point over a decade ago I received my first real Unix account on Northeastern CCS’s computing infrastructure. I realized that my primary method of development — editing files in BBEdit and uploading them via FTP — wouldn’t scale for college-level projects, so I decided to learn how to efficiently edit files on a remote host. I used Pico for a while but became annoyed at its lack of syntax highlighting, so I used the only other editor I remembered bumping into: Vim.

Read the full thing at http://statico.github.com/vim.html

A large legacy code base is a challenge for any team to embrace and improve. So how well does a distributed team of volunteers address the problem?

A talk at FOSDEM shed light on how the large and diverse team assembled by The Document Foundation (TDF) is approaching the huge LibreOffice code base left in the wake of Oracle's withdrawal from OpenOffice.org. The result is not only an impressive sequence of on-time releases, but also a range of development innovation. In particular, the "bi-bisect" technique they've developed could be a great approach for others faced with large, complex code bases.

Read the full thing at http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/what-you-can-learn-the-monster-libreoffice-project-212908