Stories by: Dahna McConnachie

As the world gets smaller, security threats and spam seem only to grow. PhpBB is the open source Internet Forum package that underlies a majority of the online forums on the Internet and its creators take their motto "creating communities" very seriously. All communities need to interact freely and safely, and although a long time coming, the latest release, phpBB3, has several increased security measures, as well as enhanced collaboration features and mobile optimisation.

Need a project for the new year? You could consider supporting, contributing to or starting an Open Movie. The Open Movie concept gained attention with the release of Elephants Dream in 2006. The Blender Foundation is currently developing a follow up called "Peach" which is should be released later this year. Lead artist from Elephants Dream, Matt Ebb gives us some background on Elephants Dream and talks about what is involved in making an open movie.

Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell, the man behind the Samba file server and self-confessed TSP packet molester talks with Dahna McConnachie about Samba and some of his other favourite pastimes. Tridge will be speaking more about clustered Samba at the upcoming linux.conf.au.

Internationally renowned security guru, Bruce Schneier, will be encouraging technologists at linux.conf.au to take a lesson from Luke Skywalker, and "feel the force" a little more when it comes to security.

We hear from SourceForge and SourceForge.net Marketplace Vice President Mike Rudolph about the world's largest Open Source software development web site, which, as of today, claims 162,855 registered projects and 1,732,552 registered users.

GeoNames is a free and open source geographical database. Primarily for developers wanting to integrate the project into web services and applications, it integrates world-wide geographical data including names of places in various languages, elevation, population, and all latitude / longitude coordinates. Users are able to manually edit, correct and add new names with a user-friendly wiki interface. The data is accessible through a number of webservices and a daily database export.

Email sender remorse is a thing of the past, if Bigstring.com CEO and founder Darin Myman has his way. The start up has developed a service that allows emails to be edited, recalled, or made to self-destruct. Emails, videos and pictures can also be rendered non printable, non-save-able or and / or non-forward-able.

Autodesk recently announced plans to donate its coordinate system (CS) and map projection technology to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). The software, acquired from Mentor Software will help users to more easily support geographic coordinate conversions and allow accurate and precise geospatial analysis. This planned donation joins several previous Open Source donations by the company, including the web mapping MapGuide and the geospatial data access technology (FDO) software, both donated last year.

SourceForge has forged a name for itself as the one-stop shop for downloading open source software. Now it looks like it is heading to mega market status, adding services to its suite, with the recent Beta launch of Source.Forge.net Marketplace.

Openbravo, an Open Source web-based ERP product, was project of the month on SourceForge in September. The project uses a Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1). It has 68 developers and over 200 contributors and has been downloaded over 350,000 times; with that number increasing by about 1,000 downloads per day.

Open source is disruptive, it develops rapidly, is adopted quickly, and it efficiently meets market needs while enabling new market capabilities. These were some of the statements made at an open source symposium held in Western Australia (WA) earlier this month.