Responding to student interest and a growing industry demand for workers with such skills, Rochester Institute of Technology is launching the nation’s first interdisciplinary minor in free and open source software and free culture.

Starting in Fall 2014, RIT’s School of Interactive Games and Media will offer the minor in free and open source software (FOSS) and free culture for students who want to develop a deep understanding of the processes, practices, technologies, and financial, legal and societal impacts of the FOSS and free culture movements.

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Open-source products are highly customizable, and aren’t locked in to specific providers. Developers can freely make additions, modifications and alterations to the structure or the code in an open-source setup. The merging of these two technologies has given birth to the open-source virtualization phenomenon, which has key benefits over branded, locked-in solutions. According to a recent study, consumers have saved in the region of $60 billion per year by going open source.

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The Linux Foundation has decided to offer their regularly priced $2,400 introductory course free of charge, but they're not the only ones responding to recent Linux jobs reports. In other news, Jamie Watson today compared and contrasted Debian, Mint (LMDE), SolydX and Tanglu. And finally today, Andy Updegrove has shared the steps to making big money in the Open Source business.

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ThoughtWorks has recently open sourced their Continuous Delivery (CD) tool, called Go, having its origins in CruiseControl and providing a pipeline process that covers the entire code development process: continuous integration, testing and deploying.

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I am aware of situations where Open Source companies based out of US can’t offer free software to those countries which are in US’s embargo list, but something interesting popped out today when FESCo debated the issue whether Fedora should allow ‘contribution’ from such countries. Fedora’s sponsor Red Hat is a US based company and thus has to adhere to US laws so it’s tricky whether they can use the free software contribution from embargoed countries or not.

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According to some reports you'd think the security sky was falling. Yes, GnuTLS, an open-source "secure" communications library that implements \Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), has serious flaws. The good news? Almost no one uses it. OpenSSL has long been everyone's favorite open-source security library of choice.

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What was looking to be a slow news day turned into an interesting perusal headlines. Today The Daily Star introduces readers to Linux and Open Source applications and two bloggers have put Linux Mint Debian Edition 201403 through its paces. Fedora's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and Jim Whitehurst on leadership are also featured.

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National Council Of Education, Research and Training (NCERT) has released a notification on their website which promotes the use of Free and Open Source software in Indian schools. This notice is released well in time, as other schools, colleges and government institutions in India are already moving to open source software to save costs and prevent vendor locking. NCERT is responsible for maintaining standards in most government and private schools and educational institutions in India.

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There are several definitions of open source. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) website contains a very useful and detailed definition, which goes beyond access to the source code and includes ten specific criteria concerning the distribution terms of open-source software. We will not enter here into the ongoing debate concerning the differences between open source and free software, as the OSI website provides a short review of the terms.

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Like All Things Open, which is now an annual event, Great Wide Open is aimed at those who earn their living by plying their trades in the tech sector. In other words, don’t expect any workshops or presentations on “How to Setup Ubuntu for Grandma” here. However, this doesn’t mean there’ll be nothing for people who mainly use Linux and open source at home. Indeed, all FOSS supporters should look into enterprise events like this because what happens in the enterprise often eventually ends up on the desktop, either as improvements/additions to Linux or as new open source applications.

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Linux Foundation believes it has the code for unlocking Internet of Things and bringing success

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Most companies may not realize it, but a huge part of the infrastructure that they run on today is actually built on open source hardware and software. In fact, if you think about Google, Facebook and a lot of the large social media delivery companies, they no longer sell you the software, it is an open source software, because the value proposition is the service on top of those tools, not the value that is on the tool. Beyond that, they see a huge community of individuals who can contribute to moving that technology forward, with the focus on the service delivered, not the technology below it.

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People should be asking why states didn’t partner up on this using an open source model of development. Why do states and cities have to purchase systems for 10s or 100's of millions of dollars? How many water billing systems are out there in the United States? Can't we collaborate and come up with a couple good ones? What did Kentucky do right? These are the questions we should be asking.

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The European Commissions ICT procurement practices are blocking "a very large number of European entrepreneurs", says MEP Amalia Andersdotter. On Sunday, she published her correspondence with EC Secretary-General Catherine Day about the EC's procurement practice for desktop operating systems and office productivity solutions. Andersdotter: "It is disappointing that the EU has such a bad strategy for digital services and IT systems."

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The Moodle community has a tool called “code checker” which is packaged as a Moodle plugin, and allows developers to analyse their code to ensure it meets the project’s coding style. This allows them to quickly identify and fix any issues before submission, and allows reviewers to quickly direct them to instructions on how to fix any discrepancies.

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This week during Mobile World Congress 2014, Buffalo Americas launched three high speed AirStation Open Source DD-WRT wireless routers: the AirStation AC 1750 WZR-1750DHPD, the AirStation N600 WZR-600DHP2D, and the AirStation N300 WHR-300HP2D. The AC 1750 model is on sale now, while the other two won't arrive until early March.

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Cisco has released open source security software designed for building secure corporate Internet firewalls called OpenAppID.

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Since the OpenNI work was published as open source, it can still be distributed, and as I Programmer notes the files will also be available on GitHub. It's also feasible that other backers of the project will revive it in some form.

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My usual response to the question, “Do I have to worry about patent trolls and copyright infringement in open source software?” is another question, “Does your proprietary vendor offer you unlimited liability for patent trolls and copyright infringement and what visibility do you have into their source code?” In the proprietary world I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a vendor who provides unlimited liability for their products against IP infringement, or even much over the cost of the products or services rendered. How often do you review their source code and if given the opportunity are you able to share your findings with other users. In open source that’s simply table stakes.

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First of all Telegram is free and open-source, and you can grab the source from here. Well known security protocols are open-source and this gives the possibility for communities of cryptographers, hackers and public audience to test their actual security. Using two layers of secure encryption with 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie–Hellman secure key exchange. It’s impossible to brute force a RSA 2048 encryption key with all the computers available on the universe.

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