[ad_1] In this week’s Top 5 articles on Opensource.com, we highlight low-cost, DIY, open hardware farming equipment; open source issue tracking tools; free and open source music making programs; a look inside the Secret Lab hackathon; and a new column on the site about how to build a business with open source. 5. Let’s talk about how to build a business…

[ad_1] Working with other artists and creatives, I’m constantly amazed—and, to be frank, a little horrified—when I look at their project directories. So frequently, they’re riddled with files that start with the same name, but with numbered with suffices like -v1, -v2, -v3-FINAL, -v3-FINAL3, v3-FINAL3-real, -v3-FINAL5-please_will_it_ever_end, and so on. And even more amazing, often these…

[ad_1] A few winters ago, while hiding from the weather, I decided—not for the first time—to learn about producing 3D images. Although I doodle and took art classes in high school, my drawings are not anything special, and my previous attempts to draw with a mouse or trackball have been disastrous. The only open source software that I…

[ad_1] Life is full of bugs. No matter how carefully planned, no matter how much time went into design, any project is going to have unforseen issues when the rubber hits the road in the implementation stage. And that’s okay. Perhaps the best measure of resiliency for any organization is not how well they handle things when everything…

[ad_1] LilyPond is a free, mature music-typesetting program, similar in flavor to LaTeX. The software is part of the GNU Project and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The authors originally developed LilyPond because they felt that computer-generated scores were, to their eyes, “soulless.” They designed LilyPond to follow the traditions laid down in…

[ad_1] Open source development and collaboration takes place online, in places made of information. From individual commit messages to project websites and even larger digital structures, each piece of information we create is part of a mess. This is not a slight against open source; all human endeavors are messy, because that is just the…

[ad_1] For more discussion on open source and the role of the CIO in the enterprise, join us at The EnterprisersProject.com. The opinions expressed on this website are those of each author, not of the author’s employer or of Red Hat. Opensource.com aspires to publish all content under a Creative Commons license but may not…

[ad_1] One thing that confuses some new Linux users is just how modular Linux can be, and on nearly every level. It turns out to be liberating in the end, but it can be overwhelming at first. That’s why it’s nice, sometimes, to come across a project that brings a bunch of modular technology and binds…

[ad_1] Doing good for the world is often the nature of an open source software or hardware project. Offering code and schematics to others free of charge and with a license that allows for reuse and modification is often done to help others. Knowing this, I was still surprised to learn about an incredible project…

[ad_1] In open source software, if you contribute enough patches to the code base, most projects will make you a committer. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised then that when you write enough articles for Opensource.com, they give you your own column. In my case, that column will be called Open Founder, and I’m going…