Last week I took the 20-minute BART ride from the East Bay over to Moscone West in San Francisco to visit what was once known as LinuxWorld and is now OpenSourceWorld, Next Generation Data Center, and CloudWorld all rolled into one event. Like many others, having been to previous LinuxWorlds, I was curious to see how this re-branding and grouping of events would pan out. LinuxWorld had been getting quite the panning (no pun intended) over the last five years or so, so could the new event cut the mustard and reel back in its once committed group of sightseers?

Recently, five college professors spent an intense five days with Red Hat employees and other members of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Red Hat called the experience POSSE (Professors' Open Source Summer Experience). The goal of the week was to show how FOSS could be used in post-secondary education, and to create a community to further the goal.

Others have walked a mile (or more) in your shoes.

Why are there so few female programmers on the open source scene? A discussion in the Ruby community reveals some unpleasant answers. In other news, the Uget download manager celebrates a comeback.

On July 22, O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly launched this year's OSCON conference with a challenge for open source advocates to get involved in the quest for open government.

More than 70 organizations and individuals have joined to form a "unified voice" encouraging the U.S. government to support and participate in open source software.

FISL 10.0 in Porto Alegre, Brazil was the best yet, for many reasons. For a long time I have been impressed with how the FISL organizers (most, if not all of which are volunteers) have brought together government, industry and the community to put on an ever-larger and more complex event.