Every week, I tally the numbers and listen to the buzz to bring you the best of last week's open source news and stories on Opensource.com. This week: September 22 - 26, 2014.
Top 5 articles of the week
#5. Open source tools help kids discover digital creativity
Michael Harrison, a staff writer at Opensource.com and our social media guru, interviews the founder and director of Youth Digital. Justin Richards tells Michael about their curriculm as he shows him around their Durham, North Carolina office. He says Gimp, Inkscape, Eclipse, and Blender are among the open source software tools Youth Digital uses to teach kids about graphic design and programming in onsite classes. I particularly liked this quote from the interview:
"I tell the kids jokingly: 'In a hundred years, we may have robots that program for us, but we'll still have to conceptualize, debug, design, and develop those robots. That won't change."
#4. 3 tools to make creating presentations easy
Joshua Holm reviews the simple-to-use presentation framework Bespoke.js. This tool differs from others reviewed on Opensource.com before, like reveal.js, which "creates wonderful, but rather traditional, presentations," and impress.js, which is more complex, creating "Prezi-like presentations that rotate, zoom, and scale in three dimensions." Bespoke.js is a presentation framework that Joshua says "sits at the opposite end of the complexity scale."
#3. Why Python 4.0 won't be like Python 3.0
Nick Coghlan posted this article first on his personal blog, Curious Efficiency. Nick describes himself as a CPython core developer, PSF Director, Red Hat toolsmith, cognitive science dabbler, and cynical idealist. In this article, Nick addresses concerns and expectations for the release of Python 4.0. Don't expect much. He says there will be "no profound changes to the language, no major backwards compatibility breaks." Nick goes on to tell us how Python will evolve in the future, continuing to address "backwards incompatible changes."
#2. 3 tools that make scanning on the Linux desktop quick and easy
Scott Nesbitt reviews three scanning tools for Linux. He's used these extensively and found they work well. They are Simple Scan, gscan2pdf, and The GIMP.
#1. Community at the speed of light: Best practices for the new era of open source
Greg DeKoenigsberg, Vice President of Community for Ansible, , co-writes this article with Ansible CTO Michael DeHaan. They write to share with us some of the open source practices that have helped make Ansible successful over the past year—particularly in the DevOps community. It's that relationship with the open source community that's key. Hear how they engaged developers and users to generate serious participation in the Ansible community in a short period of time.
Thanks for tuning in to my Top 5 picks this week. You can watch the video I make from the article on YouTube and share!
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