Scott Merrill

The Fedora Project has been supporting Raspberry Pi, the diminutive $35 computer, for some time. Today they're making the Pidora "remix" of the core Fedora distribution available. Like the Raspbian di

An old saying states that "security is inversely proportional to convenience." This explains the slow adoption of many important security technologies. HTTPS, the secure version of the HTTP protocol u

The Xen project celebrates its 10th anniversary this week. It's also moving to a new home at The Linux Foundation as a Collaborative Project. Just like the Linux kernel, Xen enjoys contributions from

The explosion of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings has greatly expanded the ways in which hobbyists and professionals deploy web sites and web services. For about the sam

At the OpenStack Summit today, Red Hat announced RDO, "a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives." In essenc

I've written a number of times about how ubiquitous Linux has become. It powers supercomputers and cell phones. It's in automotive infotainment systems. It's in medical equipment. It's also now in fir

The "free" in Free Software refers to "freedom", rather than cost. It is largely a happy coincidence that Free Software is available gratis. Copyleft licensing certainly helps, but there's no overarch

There is no shortage of cloud-based file storage and synchronization solutions: Dropbox, Box.net, Ubuntu One, and on and on and on. Most offer pretty much the same things. A few niche players offer so

Rackspace, one of the original participants in the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.openstack.org/">OpenStack</a> project, has spent the last couple of years building a successful cloud business. A

We wander the streets with tiny computers in our pockets and in our hands. We talk casually to these computers, just like Captains Kirk and Picard talked to the computers on their Enterprises. With th

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.beta.techcrunch.com/tag/owncloud/">ownCloud</a> is a free software suite, written in PHP, that provides file storage, synchronization, and sharing. It provides the

Hot on the heels of the announcement of <a href="https://beta.techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/canonical-brings-ubuntu-os-to-phones-official/">Ubuntu on phones</a> comes Canonical's latest announcement: Ubun

Microsoft Office has long been the dominant office suite. Through the years there have been many contenders rise and fall: WordPerfect, Corel, StarOffice, and too many more to count. Sun Microsystem

<a href="https://beta.techcrunch.com/2012/09/05/dreamhost-enters-cloud-storage-fray-with-ceph-powered-dreamobjects/">DreamObjects</a>, DreamHost's scalable cloud storage solution built atop <a href="h

Ubuntu isn’t exactly a stranger to the mobile space — it started showing off its <a href="https://beta.techcrunch.com/2012/02/21/canonical-announces-ubuntu-for-android/">Ubuntu for Android</a> pro

Red Hat's OpenShift platform-as-a-service started as a hosted solution for developers. It was, ostensibly, Red Hat dipping its toe into the platform-as-a-service waters. It proved successful enough to

The <a target="_blank" href="http://www.beta.techcrunch.com/tag/ubuntu">Ubuntu</a> Linux distribution has always been free. It's also always welcomed donations from users. Historically, though, the do

It's no surprise that the pace of technological innovation in the startup and web development world greatly eclipses the pace of technology adoption at most enterprise organizations. Enterprises are g

Ubuntu Linux, which started with the tagline "Linux for human beings," was originally an easy-to-use Linux distribution for desktop users. Canonical picked what they considered to be the best of breed

It's a classic quandary -- getting people to participate in online communities can be hard, but getting people to participate <em>well</em> in online communities is even harder. To that end, behav