Assuming that the numbers from 2006 hold true, the level of participation by women in open source could use a lot of improvement. According to the Flosspols study, women make up less than 2 percent of the open source community. Proprietary software shows a not-great but much higher participation rate of nearly 30 percent.

ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be complex. Given the deficiencies in ReactOS developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch using Wine source code.

First branded as a communist plot, then derided as a form of cancer, before being upgraded to merely a 'grey spectre', free and open source software (FOSS) has had a pretty rough ride from Microsoft over the years. For many in the open source community, the company represents all that is troubling about closed source software development. Recently, though, there have been developments.

Andy Updegrove writes an article providing an overview of the history of FOSS and its champions, the major philosophical differences that divide FOSS from OSS developers, the multiple licenses under which FOSS is made available, and the principle non-profit institutions that support and promote FOSS.

I am looking at a claim thats usually made against many outspoken people in the FOSS, but often you see it when there is no counter in an debate/argument. When I first started writing this article little did I know I would get my own example of “killing the FOSS” directed at me.

Matt Asay, CNET New's columnist on the business and politics of open source, takes new comers and the nostalgic among us on a retrospective of just how far the FOSS community has come over the past few years, paralleling his own introduction to and involvement in the community. A good introduction to FOSS for beginners and a good indicator of how far we've come and what we've yet to accomplish.

James Hall is a very experienced software and system engineer who is probably best known for creating and maintaining the freeDOS project for several years. James is eminently qualified to provide an oriention to FOSS and to discuss its sometimes obvious and sometimes rather nuanced significance.