[ad_1] About the author Alex Sanchez – Alex is the social media, marketing, and syndication specialist for Opensource.com. He’s a multimedia storyteller interested in tech, current events, design, and photography. Outside the office, he enjoys travel, film, and gaming. This month on Opensource.com, we highlighted the many ways to get involved in open source communities in…

[ad_1] In Getting started with shell scripting, I covered the basics of shell scripting by creating a pretty handy “despacer” script to remove bothersome spaces from file names. Now I’ll expand that idea to an application that can swap out other characters, too. This introduces the shift method of parsing options as well as creating…

[ad_1] I was doing some work in the yard and I wanted to know the smallest circle that would fit around a 4×6 inch post. Of course, just as a 2×4 is not 2 inches by 4 inches, a 4×6 post (what they call its “nominal” dimensions) is actually 3.5 inches by 5.5 inches, so this…

[ad_1] The People’s Choice Award recognizes the community’s favorite contributors from 2016. Voting is open from January 23 – 31. Nominees are individuals whose 2016 contributions made a big impact. Some are now members of our Contributors Club, which recognizes writers who have made 4 or more contributions in 12 months. We excluded previous winners, Community…

[ad_1] About the author Jason Baker – Jason is passionate about using technology to make the world more open, from software development to bringing sunlight to local governments. Linux desktop enthusiast. Map/geospatial nerd. Raspberry Pi tinkerer. Data analysis and visualization geek. Occasional coder. Cloud nativist. Follow him on Twitter. Explore what’s happening this week in OpenStack,…

[ad_1] In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the new Raspberry Pi compute module, the FSF’s 2017 priorities, a new open data portal, and more. Open source news roundup for January 8-21, 2017 Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 The Raspberry Pi Foundation launched Compute Module 3, an…

[ad_1] So many free and open source software projects were started to solve a problem, and people began to contribute to them because they too wanted a fix to what they encountered. End users of the project find it useful for their needs, and the project grows. And that shared purpose and focus attracts people…

[ad_1] Happy new year! I’m in the thick of working on a couple of larger articles this month, so look for those in the coming weeks. For this month’s Nooks and Crannies, I want to point out briefly a great R library I’ve been playing with for my own self-education. A close friend of mine…

[ad_1] In this week’s Top 5, we highlight how to get started with shell scripting, open leadership, the Cinnamon Linux desktop environment, contributing to the Mozilla project, and writing web apps with R using Shiny. Top 5 articles of the week 5. How to get started contributing to Mozilla by Moin Shaikh Learn how to contribute…

[ad_1] Open source software is a great enabler for technology innovation. Diversity unlocks innovation and drives market growth. Open source and diversity seem like the ultimate winning combination, yet ironically open source communities are among the least diverse tech communities. This is especially true when it comes to inherent diversity: traits such as gender, age, ethnicity,…