A little more than a year after The Document Foundation was set up to look after LibreOffice, the fork of the former OpenOffice.org project, it seems that Oracle did the users of the latter office suite a great favour by neglecting it.

The Spark, an open tablet which will be available for purchase by May this year, will run the Mer operating system, the community continuation of the Linux-based MeeGo project which is hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Bruce Perens looks a bit disoriented as he comes into the hotel lobby, looking for me. "Anyone here called Sam?" he calls out. The tiredness is evident on his face after the long haul from the US to Australia.

Tomorrow's first AdaCamp is a ground-breaking event engineered by the two founders of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit group that aims to increase the participation of women in free and open source software and culture.

There has been nearly a 25 per cent rise in the number of registrations for the Drupal Downunder conference this year as compared to 2011, according to one of the main organisers, Donna Benjamin.

One of the major plus points about free and open source software is that it adheres to widely accepted standards. Rarely does any software of this genre seek to create its own standard in order to do what proprietary systems do - grab marketshare.

A British community interest company, Rhombus Tech, is part of the way towards developing a micro-computer on a circuit board, much like the Raspberry Pi.

An adviser of a non-profit group that aims to increase the participation of women in free and open source software and culture has quit, describing the group as having achieved little since it was set up, despite spending nearly $US100,000.

A non-profit group that aims to increase the participation of women in free and open source software and culture will hold its first camp in Melbourne on January 14.

A long-time member of the FOSS community believes that men need to do much more about increasing the participation of women in the community and improving their experience of being part of the community.