Taking a page from the doctors at Moses Taylor Hospital, IT staff at the Scranton, Pa., facility last year diagnosed their messaging system and came up with an effective treatment that's turned out to be a life saver.

The tools and techniques for creating hardware designs are very different from those used for software; and because of this, developing open hardware is a significantly different and greater challenge than creating free software.

Burgeoning success for open source eLearning and a string of major university wins for a commercial vendor point to a trend.

Joel Cohen is an Emmy award-winning writer and associate producer of The Simpsons. He’s also a keynote speaker at the Red Hat Summit this June. Enjoy this sneak preview of Joel, and then join us in Boston to hear more from him about The Simpsons and keeping innovation alive for 420 episodes over two decades.

Perhaps the biggest news in Gartner's latest "Top 10 Technologies" report is the absence of open source. Or perhaps its omnipresence.

In the beginning was... hacker culture and free Internet software. They existed as outsiders. They were really known by few. But some knew of them and an idea started to grow... it was first only in one person's mind, then two, then it spread to the hacker culture and further into the business world.

Contrary to some reports, everything that makes Android “Android”, including all the core platform components and libraries needed to port Android to new devices will be open sourced under commonly used, industry standard licenses, says Google.

A) Ubuntu, B) PCLinuxOS, C) Fedora, D) openSUSE or E) None of the above?

The answer is: E) None of the above.