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Today's Top Pick

Happy Labor Day!

In honor of Labor Day the boss has given the editorial team a break from our labors. We'll be back on Tuesday scouting for all the latest open source news for you. In the meantime, as is our tradition, we leave you with a list of links to help you best celebrate the holiday. Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer. It commemorates the tragic events in 1894 when laborers from the Pullman Company went on strike. Here's the history. Today's U.S. workforce is comprised of 154.4 million people, 16-years and older, according to the Washington Post's Labor Day by the Numbers. The Jerry Lewis telethon for muscular dystrophy will celebrate its 45th year on the air. Many Americans will fire up the grill, so here's a fantastic collection of BBQ recipes (with pictures, videos) from the Weber company. Don't forget to fly your U.S. flag. If the hurricane has you hanging out indoors, the U.S. Open tennis tournament is in full swing. NFL pre-season wraps up. MLB is in full swing. Stores have everything on sale. And please, pack away those summer white shirts, shoes and accessories -- winter white is now required.

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Logical Expression
What Apple has in common with successful open source projects by Eric Gries
Matt Asay hit on a fundamental - and often overlooked - point in his GigaOm post the other day: Apple is able to conquer markets by ignoring the concept of the faceless, generic "market" and instead concentrating on winning the hearts and minds of individual users.He also notes that this is one of the main failings of enterprise software today -the focus on winning the nonexistent heart of the "market," while disregarding the people who collectively ARE the heart of the marketIt's an... 1

Open Source Fact and Fiction
Linux: A Double Edged Sword for Open Source by Alan Shimel
Quick, name the most successful open source project of all time. You probably didn't hesitate a second did you? For better and sometimes for worse, Linux is the poster child for the open source movement. And why shouldn't it be. You can't argue with the enormous success and impact it has had on the world. It is truly one of the wonders of the tech world. But that success can sometimes cast a long shadow on other open source projects and how people perceive open source should... 3

Open Minded
Open Source: No one is working for free by Stephen Walli
People continue to wonder how to make money in the free and open source software world. It’s dressed up in discussions of how one makes money when you give away the software for free, or why developers are working for free. It can likewise lead to a management backlash of not contributing to FOSS projects because some think their developers are working on FOSS instead of their own work. Here’s a different way to think about it. Everyone is familiar with the idea of a normal "bell curve"...

Open Source Fact and Fiction
Open Source Cloud APIs Vie For Dominance by Alan Shimel
With Cloud Computing being the biggest thing on the technology horizon, there is a huge race shaping up over which API will allow clouds to talk to each other. Like many other sectors in tech, the open source community has several hats in this ring, any one of which could wind up the winner. This much is sure, one of the biggest inhibitors to wider cloud adoption is a lack of standards from one cloud provider to another. So a unifying standard that all cloud providers follow is seen as a...

Open Source Exposed
Are Web Browsers Going the Way of the Dinosaur? by Stephen Spector'
In the August issue of Wired Magazine, there is an interesting article “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet” which looks at the issue of no longer needing a web browser to interact on the Internet. The main point of the article is that users of the Internet are moving away from the so-called wild west of the Web for the “simpler, sleeker services that just work.” For example, the massive growth of Facebook and applications found on mobile devices and tablets are independent of any web... 11

Pragmatic open source
Have we reached a tipping point for cloud-based VoIP? by Amy Vernon
Some have said that the future of open source is in the middle, and the explosion of cloud-based telephony would seem to bear that out. OnSIP, Twilio, CloudVox, FreeSwitch, are all telephony platforms that have been making a splash and gaining popularity, and they're built firmly on open source.The reasons are legion; but for OnSIP, the two most important are what's most important to their customers: price and control. OnSIP, run by the New York-based Junction Networks, is a hosted business...

Source Seeker
Burning Man is the proving point for Earth friendly, open source Linux-based cell tower by Julie Bort
This has got to be one of the coolest -- ehem, I mean hottest -- open source projects around. It is a solar/wind powered, Linux/VoIP based cell phone network, that works with any GSM phone and costs pennies on the dollar to install and operate. And it's being tested right now at Burning Man. To summarize: "The technology starts with the "they-said-it-couldn't-be-done" open source software, OpenBTS. OpenBTS is built on Linux, distributed via the AGPLv3 license and when used with a... 15

Open Source Fact and Fiction
The Dawn Of The Age of Open Source 4.0 by Alan Shimel
When the moon is in the Seventh House And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius Age of Aquarius Aquarius! Aquarius! Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind's true liberation Aquarius! Aquarius! Much like the 5th Dimension tried to herald a... 6

Open Minded
A FOSS project isn’t necessarily a software product by Stephen Walli
Confusion often reigns over how to judge free and open source software (FOSS) as people investigate using it in their businesses. Do they use Red Hat Advanced Server? Fedora? CentOS? Should they use the community edition of the Alfresco content management server or buy the product? How does one judge the “software” and whether it’s “right” for one’s business? These are all questions that confront developers and IT managers as they encounter the FOSS world.Searching for useful lists of criteria...

Pragmatic open source
Open-sourcing SETI by Amy Vernon
The setiQuest project has released its first open source code in an effort to have anyone interested help search for intelligent life out there.The source code for Open SonATA is available on GIT Hub now and covers three programs:Waterfall Display: The waterfall display shows the power for each bin in a subchannel. The power values are reported every .75 seconds. The brighter the dot, the stronger the power.Baseline Display:The baseline display shows the average power in each subchannel over... 3