The art of burying invisible malware deep inside a Linux machine is about to go mainstream, thanks to a new open-source rootkit released Thursday by Immunity Inc., a firm that supplies tools for penetration testers.

If you happen to own a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, you already have a robot in your life. (I have a Roomba, and highly recommend it--available at Target.) Roomba is a classic example of how a robot doesn't have to be humanoid to be useful. In the open source community, though, there are several efforts to develop robots that look and/or act like humans, performing interesting and useful tasks.

Bug Labs will ship its tiny, open-source ARM11-powered BugBase and three add-on modules next week, and will soon switch to Poky Linux. Meanwhile, a recent review finds the hackable Linux-based platform to be intriguing fun for "bleeding edge developers," but too "flaky" for average consumers.

Anti-virus companies play a losing game. Casting their nets wide, they catch common, malicious viruses and worms (known to the industry as “malware”), but it may take days before their software updates can prepare your computer for the next attack. By then it could be too late.

If the House's proposed 2009 Defense Department budget is any indication, Congress may want to see more open-source software (OSS) in defense systems.

You may know about One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Sugar, and the many projects inspired by this initiative. You may not know Edward Mokurai Cherlin or of his plans for OLPC: Education, economic development, global commerce, all in an environmentally friendly, fair-trade context -- plus ending poverty at a profit. All in less than 40 minutes of conversation.

Linux fans are now being compared to Cubs fans. For you non-sports enthusiasts, the cubs haven’t won a world series since 1908. According to Ben Gray of Forrester, “as optimistic as Linux enthusiasts are and will forever remain, they’re beginning to sound like Cubs fans with the never-ending hope of ‘There’s always next year.’”

A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. For example, many Linux distributions can be traced back to either Debian, Fedora or Slackware.