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Open source is a good thing. Open source is a particularly good thing for security. I've written about this before (notably in Disbelieving the many eyes hypothesis and The commonwealth of open source), and I'm going to keep writing about it. In this article, however, I want to talk a little more about a feature of open source that is arguably both a possible disadvantage and a benefit: the difference between a project and a product.

It was fun to work at a large web property in the late 1990s and early 2000s. My experience takes me back to American Greetings Interactive, where on Valentine's Day, we had one of the top 10 sites on the internet (measured by web traffic). We delivered e-cards for AmericanGreetings.com, BlueMountain.com, and others, as well as providing e-cards for partners like MSN and AOL.

NumFOCUS is a nonprofit charity that supports amazing open source toolkits for scientific computing and data science. As part of the effort to connect Opensource.com readers with the NumFOCUS community, we are republishing some of the most popular articles from our blog. To learn more about our mission and programs, please visit numfocus.org.

Awk is one of the oldest tools in the Unix and Linux user's toolbox. Created in the 1970s by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the A, W, and K of the tool's name), awk was created for complex processing of text streams. It is a companion tool to sed, the stream editor, which is designed for line-by-line processing of text files. Awk allows more complex structured programs and is a complete programming language.

This article will explain how to use awk for more structured and complex tasks, including a simple mail merge application.

Ansible has long been seen as more than configuration management—it's an orchestrator more than anything, a conductor of the orchestra rather than playing a singular instrument. Since realising this, various tech communities have used Ansible to automate some interesting technology arenas.

Awk is a powerful text-parsing tool for Unix and Unix-like systems, but because it has programmed functions that you can use to perform common parsing tasks, it's also considered a programming language. You probably won't be developing your next GUI application with awk, and it likely won't take the place of your default scripting language, but it's a powerful utility for specific tasks.

Graphical user interface (GUI) test automation is broken. Regression testing is not testing; it's version control for a software's behavior. Here's my assertion: test automation without assertions works better!

Containers have taken the world by storm. Whether you think of Kubernetes, Docker, CoreOS, Silverblue, or Flatpak when you hear the term, it's clear that modern applications are running in containers for convenience, security, and scalability.

Everybody knows sudo, right? This tool is installed by default on most Linux systems and is available for most BSD and commercial Unix variants. Still, after talking to hundreds of sudo users, the most common answer I received was that sudo is a tool to complicate life.

After you've established a positive reputation in an open community—hopefully, as we discussed in our previous article, by being an active member in and contributing productively to that community—you'll have built up a healthy "bank balance" of credibility you can use to influence the direction of that community.

What does this mean in concrete terms? It means you can contribute to the decisions the community makes.

I have been using Python since it was a little-known language in 1998. It was a time when Perl was quite popular in the open source world, but I believed in Python from the moment I found it. My parents like to remind me that I used to say things like, "Python is going to be a big deal" and "I'll be able to find a job using it one day." It took a while, but my predictions came true.

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.

Linux users are a diverse bunch, but many of us share a few habits. You might not have any of the telltale signs listed in this article, and if you're a new Linux user, you may not recognize many of them... yet.

Here are six signs you might be a Linux user.

Suppose you have a text file and you need to remove all of its duplicate lines.

To remove the duplicate lines while preserving their order in the file, use:

I recently listened to an interesting interview on Linux for everyone. Host Jason Evangelho interviewed Christopher Scott, senior premier field engineer (open source) at Microsoft. Christopher is a Linux advocate who has a unique perspective as an avid Linux user who works for Microsoft.

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at a machine learning tool from Netflix, Microsoft's election software bug bounty, a cost-effective microscope built with Raspberry Pi, and more!

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There are hundreds of different Linux distributions, each meeting the unique needs of its users. This diversity of distributions is what makes Linux the preferred operating system, but choosing the best one to get started can be quite daunting. First-timers need to take into consideration hardware, internet connection, installation method, desktop environment, support community, and more. So which one should a beginner choose? Take our Linux poll!

In 2004, the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) was launched as a source of free illustrations for anyone to use, for any purpose, without requiring attribution or anything in return. This site was the open source world’s answer to the big stacks of clip art CDs on the shelf of every home office in the 1990s, and to the art dumps provided by the closed-source office and artistic software titles.

A system call is a programmatic way a program requests a service from the kernel, and strace is a powerful tool that allows you to trace the thin layer between user processes and the Linux kernel.

To understand how an operating system works, you first need to understand how system calls work. One of the main functions of an operating system is to provide abstractions to user programs.

An operating system can roughly be divided into two modes:

I have been a huge Mac fan and power user since I started in IT in 2004. But a few months ago—for several reasons—I made the commitment to shift to Linux as my daily driver. This isn't my first attempt at fully adopting Linux, but I'm finding it easier than ever. Here is what inspired me to switch.