Open source is answering the call at government agencies on all levels as they look for opportunities to carve out costs and improve security, transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Why? Open source is stable, trustworthy, and secure, and Red Hat solutions are being used across government agencies to create efficiencies, eliminate vendor lock-in, meet mission-critical IT demands, and improve service delivery.

John “J5″ Palmieri explains how the Fedora community–codename MyFedora–is bringing Fedora users together by integrating self-contained applications into a single framework application. This interface enables Fedora users to see and keep track of what applications other community members are working with.

Sometimes open source ideals make for the strangest–and most wonderful–bedfellows. We met Dr. Vandana Shiva–physicist, scientist, environmentalist, and activist–several years ago. Her work saving seeds and protecting traditional knowledge in the farming industry parallels the openness, transparency, collaboration and freedom of open source ideology. Her simple, clear explanation of why knowledge should be shared–and the devastating results should it be hoarded–is part of the essential truth that makes the work we do so incredibly important. But don’t take our word for it.

Get more information about Dr. Shiva’s work.

Matt Domsch from Dell talks about how Fedora’s worldwide network of mirrors are making it that much easier to download Fedora quickly.

FUNC is the brainchild of Michael DeHaan, Adrian Likins, Seth Vidal, and Greg DeKoenigsberg. In this edition of Spotlight On, Michael, Adrian, and Seth discuss how FUNC makes it easy to write commands across large numbers of machines remotely and securely, as well as where the name FUNC comes from.

Even more information

• FUNC project pages at Fedora Hosted

Do you know what’s happening in middleware? Budget crunch keeping you from attending industry gatherings? Bring the conference to your desktop. Take a minute (or a few hours) and attend the JBoss Virtual Experience.

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 LIVE online
(on-demand February 16th – May 11th, 2009)

Find out more or register now.

Join our executives, key developers, and your business peers. Attend keynote sessions for executive insight into the future of open source and the middleware roadmap for 2009 and beyond. Visit the Exhibit Hall and chat live with booth representatives. Come to the Networking Cafe for in-depth technical and business discussions, birds-of-a-feather chats, and live Q&A with our speakers.

Whether you’re a developer, enterprise architect, or senior IT manager, this one-day event will show you how JBoss can help you build, integrate, deploy, and manage mission-critical applications and services while lowering your costs without sacrificing performance, security, or functionality.

For updates, follow us on Twitter.

Here’s a few more details:

Keynotes with live Q&A:

• Business keynote by Jim Whitehurst (live event only) and Craig Muzilla
• technical keynote by Rob Cardwell and Sacha Labourey

Sessions with live Q&A:

• business, technical and government
• 2 panel discussions: Customer viewpoint and Developer panel

Exhibit Hall:
Red Hat booths, including:

• JBoss Enterprise Middleware
• JBoss Operations Network
• JBoss.org
• Customer Reference
• MRG (Messaging, Realtime, and Grid)
• Cloud Computing

Partner booths include:

• Alfresco
• Carahsoft
• CityTech
• Consilium1
• DLT
• Dell
• EnterpriseDB
• Exadel
• Freedom OSS
• Ingres
• Jaspersoft
• USolutions
• Vizuri

Media sponsor:

• DZone

Networking cafe:

• Birds-of-a-Feather sessions with JBoss Rock Stars

Find out more or register now.

Red Hat Engineer Michael DeHaan talks about why he developed Cobbler, and how it simplifies network installations for datacenters and other large-scale linux environments. For more info, check out the the Cobbler page at fedorahosted.org.

Even more information

• Open source systems management: Two conferences, two talks by Michael DeHaan (July 2008)
• Cobbler: How to set up a network boot server in 10 minutes by Michael DeHaan (August 2007)

Fedora 10 is out, and to celebrate that milestone, Fedora Project leader Paul Frields sat down with Red Hat community guru Greg DeKoenigsberg to talk about where Fedora’s been over the past five years and where it’s going. Along the way they discuss KVM improvements, the debut of new Fedora artwork, and the future of codec support. Watch the video, then head on over to fedoraproject.org to fire it up!

Related links

• Download Fedora from fedoraproject.org.
• Get the release notes.
• Ten reasons to get fired up over Fedora: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and final.

Today’s installment of Spotlight On features Dan Williams discussing Network Manager. Dan explains how the Fedora community designed Network Manager to make network configuration less of a hassle–now getting onto the internet is easier than ever before.

We caught up with Chris Wright at the Red Hat Summit to discuss how the oVirt sessions were going, and why people are so excited to see open source bring a virtualization tool to the market. oVirt works across platforms and architectures to meet the challenge of managing virtualization in the datacenter. For more information, check out http://ovirt.org.