Stories by Katherine Noyes

It's been less than two months since the Document Foundation announced that it was launching its own "fork" of the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, but already its new LibreOffice alternative is beginning to take shape.

It's no secret that Ubuntu 10.10, or Maverick Meerkat, is one of the most user-friendly Linux distributions of all time for business and home users.

With the many choices and factors to consider, choosing a laptop of any kind can be a considerable challenge. Choosing one for use with Linux, however, brings its own special set of considerations, since it's not yet always a plug-and-play world for the open source operating system.

If you use Ubuntu in your company, you're already familiar with its many advantages for businesses. But guess what? You ain't seen nothin' yet, as they say.

What a difference 233 lines of code can make.

Many good reasons to be wary of Facebook's newly announced "Messages" service have already been pointed out on numerous occasions throughout the media. Even besides the obvious privacy concerns, other features of the new service also could prove problematic for those who choose to adopt it, as many observers have suggested.

Samsung's Galaxy Tab has only been out a few days in the United States, but already the benefits of its open source roots are becoming evident. Specifically, Samsung has released the open source portions of the software code used to run the device, opening up the doors to a potentially exciting array of third-party modifications and enhancements.

Google's Chrome OS may be ultimately intended to run on cloud-focused netbooks when it comes out, but as of yesterday it looks like a small, startup competitor could beat the search giant to the proverbial punch.

The Linux Mint team announced today that the final release of version 10 of the free and open source operating system, dubbed "Julia," is now officially available.

We've known for some time now that the JägerMonkey JavaScript engine seen in recent nightly preview builds of Firefox 4 would increase the browser's speed, but yesterday's release of the seventh beta version of the software shows performance increases beyond what many of us might have imagined.

Earlier this fall Google promised that hardware acceleration advances were going to make Chrome 7 as much as 60 times faster than its predecessor, and now the company is working on a new feature that could boost the browser's speed even more.

Mozilla is celebrating the sixth birthday of its Firefox browser today, and it's inviting users of the popular free and open source browser to help by sending in a postcard for display in Mozilla's Mountain View or Paris offices.

Hard on the heels of Canonical's controversial decision to use the 3D-enabled Unity interface in its desktop Ubuntu operating system came word late last week that it will also adopt a new graphics system.

With the many business and government organizations that now use open source software such as Linux, it's becoming increasingly clear that price is not the only advantage such software holds. If it were, companies that adopted it during the Great Recession would surely have switched back to the expensive proprietary stuff as soon as conditions began to ease, and that's clearly not the case.

There are many ways that vendors of proprietary products try to scare business customers away from open source software, and one of the more commonly heard examples involves vague fears about compliance with open source licenses. There's nothing like the specter of a good lawsuit to scare a company back into a paid vendor's welcoming arms.