A new project for sharing media files might be as important for its philosophy as its features.

Land of the fries, home of the beer? Belgium has more to offer than that! In 2001 the LBW went to Bouillon, and this year the geeks returned to the small country in Western Europe – specifically to Diksmuide in West Flanders.

At a time when many developers are focused on cloud applications, Yorba’s sights remain fixed firmly on the desktop.

News of Google’s employee survival benefit surfaced recently, much to the amazement of bloggers, who were all out on the prowl for some tech news. In an interview with Forbes Magazine’s Meghan Casserly, Google Chief People Officer Lazlo Bock spelled out the terms. If a Google employee dies, the company will give a surviving spouse or domestic partner half the employee’s salary for up to 10 years.

Here’s how one free culture project is trying to use free software and crowdfunding to realize its goals.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.

Since they print my picture with this column, I have little hope of concealing my age, so I’ll just come out and say that I remember Ronald Reagan’s first year in office in 1981 – in fact, I was already a young adult at that time and was living in Reagan’s home state of California, working my first professional job after college. Reagan became known as “the great communicator” for the hypnotic optimism with which he could render his own point of view. In a speech somewhere around that time, the new president made a comment that was something like “We have come a long way since before we knew we had a problem with racism.”

Open Source Initiative seeks to broaden its base.