"Your mother was right, it's better to share", that's the tagline of one of those awesome RedHat commercials that we featured some time ago. The idea of sharing is infectious and is fast spreading. Take Apertus for example, a project aimed at building an Cinema Camera based on the idea of sharing and mutual respect(read Open Source).

Stanford photo scientists are out to reinvent digital photography with the introduction of an open-source digital camera, which will give programmers around the world the chance to create software that will teach cameras new tricks.

All desktop environments support camera import, image management and editing applications. But the desktop defaults are really geared towards casual users. Don’t be fooled by that, though; open source can and does offer the tools to support professional photographers and high-end enthusiasts.

Both of the big powerhouses in the digital SLR camera market -- Canon and Nikon -- make software with which you can control your camera from your PC through an attached USB cable. It is a nice tool for situations when manually triggering the shutter might cause shake (such as long exposures), or for automating multiple shots at timed intervals.

Your company's IT department probably depends on at least one open source application. The software does the job, is budget-friendly, and it has an active open source community which is constantly upgrading the application. But few applications are perfect, whether proprietary or open source.

Again this year MAKE Magazine blog has publishes the annual Open Source Hardware Guide listing no less than 60 open source hardware projects, ranging from simple microcontroller boards to a fully functional cell phone.

This riveting tale describes the development of a fairly amazing Linux device. Andrey Filippov's latest paper describes how at the behest of an unnamed client, his small Utah-based company fit GPS, DMA-enabled storage, and multi-camera synchronization into its Linux-powered camera, which has an open hardware design.

Open source hacker community GizmoForYou is shipping a Linux hardware/software kit for building a modular touchcreen smartphone. Based on the OMAP35x-based Gumstix Overo Earth single-board computer (SBC), the Flow phone offers modules including GPS, 3.5G cellular, Bluetooth, WiFi, and a camera, says the group.

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric.