"The Hacker Attitude Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, profanity is a lot more common in open source than in closed source software. Also not surprisingly, some people find it offensive while others view it as nothing more than an exercise of free speech.

Recently Greg Kroah Hartman showed some very interesting Linux kernel development stats. I decided to do some too and the result are 5 cool things you probably didn’t know about the kernel code

Learning from other people's code

The reason I want this debugging feature so hard is that I like to learn from other people's code. The thing I like so much about running an open source OS, is that I can just read the sources for programs on my system and try to figure out what they do and how they do it

The Linux world makes much of its community roots, but when it comes to developing the kernel of the operating system, it's less a case of "volunteers ahoy!" and more a case of "where's my pay?".

I've been thinking about something. And I can't figure out the answer. Remember when SCO's Erik Hughes was deposed [PDF; text] in the SCO v. IBM litigation, he said that at first the LKP did have kernel code in it, but later it was taken out? So then why, when SCO announced it was stopping distribution of Linux in May of 2003, would it have needed to stop distributing the LKP also?

"...HAR (Hacking At Random) is an international technology and security conference, with a strong free software, freedom of information political leaning [...] The issues addressed by these talks are not just technical, they have political implications for how we live [...] But HAR2009 was not just about talks. It was also about meeting people, talking, exchanging ideas.

"...The goal of the Hacker Space Festival is to bring together people from many cultural and technological backgrounds and from different Hacker Spaces and Autonomous zones in France and Europe (and from beyond, if they can attend) to share and show what's going on..." -- via http://artlibre.org/archives/news/315

Red Hat was the first major GNU/Linux company, which gave it a number of advantages, including the fact that it was able to sweep up many of the top kernel hackers to work for it...