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Struggling with what gifts to give the young person in your life this holiday season? Here are my top picks for open source presents that will spark creativity and inspire for years to come.

Django is the comprehensive web framework by which all other frameworks are measured. One of the most popular names in Python API development, Django has surged in popularity since its start in 2005.

Django is maintained by the Django Software Foundation and has experienced great community support, with over 11,600 members worldwide. On Stack Overflow, Django has around 191,000 tagged questions. Websites like Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram rely on Django for application and data management.

It is my pleasure to introduce Opensource.com's selection of books that would make excellent holiday gift ideas. We hope you find them interesting items to give as gifts this holiday season or to add to your own holiday wishlist. Each book exhibits qualities that make them excellent gifts for open source enthusiasts, as they all encourage learning, exploring, and tinkering.

From time to time, when I'm looking for some help on how to do something on my GNU/Linux desktop or server, I'll come across an article or conversation in a language other than English. If that language happens to be French or Spanish, that's fine for me. If it's in Portuguese or Italian, I can stumble through it. And, for other languages, occasionally, I'll give one of those online AI translators a go in the hopes of gleaning something useful.

Sysadmins have many tools to view and manage running processes. For me, these primarily used to be top, atop, and htop. A few years ago, I found Glances, a tool that displays information that none of my other favorites do. All of these tools monitor CPU and memory usage, and most of them list information about running processes (at the very least).

"Most designers don't have a clue about open source," says Eriol Fox of Ushahidi, a non-profit social enterprise that creates humanitarian, open source tech tools. Unfortunately, this means there are few design-related contributions to open source software, and this results in an abundance of poorly designed open source tools.

We are approaching that time of year when many folks are visiting family members or reconnecting with old friends during the holiday season. Your loved ones may or may not be the most tech-savvy. Our readers tend to fill the sysadmin role after hours. What kind of IT requests do you receive?

The compatibility of the operating system could affect your ability to assist. If you typically use an Android device, are you up for the challenge of troubleshooting an iPhone problem? How many times do you get some form of the question, "How do I _____ in Windows?"?

One of Linux's many advantages is its ability to install and run on old computers. What Linux can't technically do is make an old computer's hardware magically perform better. After all, the hardware is the same hardware as ever, and sometimes old hardware feels notably slow when processing modern software that tries to take advantage of new hardware features.

Python is a high-level, object-oriented programming language known for its simple syntax. It is consistently among the top-rated programming languages for building RESTful APIs.

I have been involved with assistive technology for about ten years now, beginning with a stint as an assistive technology tutor with the Kenya Society for the Blind.

Assistive technology helps improve the lives of people with cognitive, physical or sensory challenges. It comprises a wide range of hardware, specialist software such as screen readers, as well as accessibility features in general software.

Organizations as a whole contribute to open source software projects for a variety of reasons.

One of the most important is that the open source development model is such an effective way to collaborate with other companies on projects of mutual interest. But they also want to better understand the technologies they use. They also want to influence direction.

The specific rationale will vary by organization but it usually boils down to the simple fact that working in open source benefits their business.

Bash too basic? Too much whitespace in Python? Go too corporate?

You should try Lua, a lightweight, efficient, and embeddable scripting language supporting procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. And best of all, it uses explicit syntax for scoping!

Lua is also small. Lua's source code is just 24,000 lines of C, the Lua interpreter (on 64-bit Linux) built with all standard Lua libraries is 247K, and the Lua library is 421K.

Mobile phones are becoming more powerful every day, so it is no surprise that they can beat most computers from the not-so-distant past. This also means the tools available on them are getting more powerful every day.

My first memory of playing with a computer was through an MS-DOS terminal on the x86 PC in my grandfather's pharmaceutical research lab in the early '90s—playing games stored on 3.5" floppy disks and doing touch-typing exercises. As technology improved, I spent an obscene amount of time taking my computer apart to add more RAM, a new graphics card, or a new fan, mostly so I could play cooler games. It was a fun, ongoing project, and I bonded with my father over it. It was also way cheaper than buying a new computer.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

When I was growing up, my grandfather had a shed in his garden. He would spend hours in there, making and fixing things. This was way before we had the internet, so I spent a lot of time studying him creating things in that shed. Although the shed was full of many tools, from drills to lathes to electrical gubbins and lots of things I doubt I could identify even today, he made use of only a tiny subset of what he had at hand. Yet there never seemed to be limits to what he could achieve.

Hacktoberfest is an initiative that invites developers from around the world to participate and contribute to open source. This is the second year in a row that I participated to completion of the challenge, and I was so inspired by it that I want to share my slightly longer journey to open source software.

Awk scripts have three main sections: the optional BEGIN and END functions and the functions you write that are executed on each record. In a way, the main body of an awk script is a loop, because the commands in the functions run for each record. However, sometimes you want to run commands on a record more than once, and for that to happen, you must write a loop.

There are several kinds of loops, each serving a unique purpose.

It's my pleasure to announce that we're launching a new community program to recognize our most active open source advocates. We call it the Opensource.com Correspondent program. Keep reading to learn more about it and see if it's right for you. 

It's well-known that women are under-represented in computer science and technology. A new initiative led by the NC Department of Public Instruction, Duke University, and IBM is working to reverse that trend by using an open source approach to bringing more computer science instruction into NC public schools.