One reason Obama won the 2012 presidential election was his staff’s use of open source. Harper Reed, CTO of Obama for America, tells all.

For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits — Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others — on which so many graphical applications already depend?

You might know bash as the old-fashioned, command-line, lowest-common-denominator fossil built into Linux. It's actually much more. Here are a handful of reasons to reconsider bash for automation – including, perhaps, things you didn’t know bash could accomplish.