OStatic

The topic of the difficulties women face in the open source community comes up often. Here at OStatic we've discussed everything from the gender bias and harassment some women say they face, to highlighting the projects that are helping change the way females experience the developer community.

A new project has gotten underway recently that aims to foster a healthy and respectful environment between female PHP developers and the PHP community. PHPWomen has teamed up in a partnership program with six open source projects that it feels represents the best the community has to offer in terms of an open, respectful, and friendly community.

Will open source accept Microsoft leadership? Its sponsoring the upcoming Open Source Business Conference, but does the FOSS community accept the company yet?

Top 10 open source server technologies you need to know. From Zenoss to Apache, there are lots of server tools you can leverage.

Fitting Android and a processor on a SIM card. South Korea's SK Telecom has all the major components needed to run Android on a card.

PHP job growth not linked to multilingual developers. Some surprising other factors are central to the rise of PHP gigs.

Is MeeGo Linux's answer to the iPad? Linux can compete on price, but where?s the magic?

RIM plays the free software card to drive revenue. Many have argued that RIM would benefit from a solid open source strategy.

PHP Developers Prefer Using Windows to Build Enterprise Apps: Study. The percentage who prefer the platform is surprising.

Is open source still a recruitment tool? It has a strong history of being one.

Can Silicon Valley write software for the 'normal'? It's surprising what the average Joe and Jane actually know about software--or don't know.

WordPress users rejoice! The latest release of BuddyPress finally brings all that social media goodness to standard WordPress installs. With BuddyPress 1.2, it should only take three steps to get BuddyPress working with a standard WordPress install.

BuddyPress was initially developed to add social networking features to a site based on WordPress MU (multiuser), and a stable release followed in 2009, but only for that platform. Installing BuddyPress in the early days was not trivial.

Are you a fan of PHP? Facebook is. The company has been working behind the scenes to create HipHop, a runtime compiler for PHP to improve the language's performance on Facebook's servers. The company is also friending the rest of the PHP community with its work by releasing its project as open source.

Rumors have been flying for a while, and the news was confirmed on Monday by ReadWriteWeb. Facebook gave a talk on Tuesday night about HipHop to introduce the technology at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

WordPress 2.9 is nearly ready. The WordPress team has announced the first release candidate of WordPress 2.9, and is calling for testing of 2.9. In addition to testing the platform itself, the team is asking users and plugin authors to test plugins to ensure compatibility with the latest release.

This release includes a number of new features, including a trash feature for comments, posts, and so on. This means that it's possible to recover elements that have been deleted until the admin permanently deletes them. 2.9 also sports image editing, a new release of TinyMCE, and improvements in media embedding.

We've done several posts on how open source skills can arm job seekers with valuable differentiation from the rest of the pack, and lots of support for that concept continues to arrive. From working for commercial open source companies to working on open source-focused divisions at big companies such as Google, skills with tools such as PHP, Hadoop, and open source content management system platforms can be really valuable in today's tough job market.

In this post, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert took note of the very favorable trends in the job market for people with Drupal skills. In Elance?s Online Work Index, which analyzes the hot categories for tech jobs posted on its online marketplace, PHP-related jobs held the number one spot in July (as has been true since February). Now, Black Duck software, which maintains a large knowledgebase of trends in open source usage, is out with some notable statistics about which programming languages are showing momentum in open source projects, and how they're being influenced by growth in web applications.

PHP 5.3.0 released. New features include namespaces, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references, new extensions, and there are many bug fixes.

Red Hat seeks to certify the cloud--Q&A. Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of Corporate Development, on the company's cloud strategy.

KDE's Aaron Seigo gives sneak peek at version 4.3. Here's a screencast on the upcoming release.

Will Stallman C# warning fall flat? Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says C# and Mono are a Microsoft conspiracy.

Building a Linux App Store: Can You Help? Isn't there room for one?

Secret EU open source migration study leaked. A hush-hush study from the EU Council has made it into the wild.

8 cool tricks to make the most of Google Chrome. Coax it to use less memory and become a wizard with tabs.

Microsoft debuts open source PHP for Azure, IE8. The company has a new Software Developer Kit (SDK) for PHP on Microsoft's cloud services platform Windows Azure.

Can the enterprise open source strategy work? In associating with Red Hat, Ingres grabs a lifeline into the larger enterprise customer space.

aTunes is an unsung cross-platform audio player and manager. It makes it easy to organize music, rip audio CDs, and more.