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: December 8 - 12, 2014.

Top 5 articles

#5. OpenMotics improves home automation

OpenMotics is an open source home automation hardware and software system that offers features like switching lights and outputs, multi-zone heating and cooling, power measurements, and automated actions. Frederick Ryckbosch is a backend developer for OpenMotics and explains that installation, configuration, and price are where home automation typically falls down. He shows us how OpenMotics set out to fix it.

#4. Open source for sensitive email

Olivier Thierry of Zimbra says that open source software is the answer for government agencies or business entities relying on secure email. He names "power in numbers," "trust," and "leverage" as the three key components of open source software that allows for high levels of security and privacy in email.

#3. Do you need programming skills to learn Linux?

A few months ago I took the Introduction to Linux course offered through edX. It's an 18 chapter course with lots of reading, some videos, and a casual level of testing your knowledge. My main goal in taking the course was to get a better, high level understanding of Linux. I installed Linux on my Chromebook too. See what it was like to test out Linux for the first time and dive deeper into the command line. If you're a coder, developer, or have been in tech for years—you may recall those days yourself. It's been a fun adventure and I look forward to learning more about Linux!

P.S. On this subject, this week we published a neat interview I did with Elaine Marino of LadyCoders Productions, on whether or not marketing professionals should learn to code.

#2. Making your IT infrastructure boring with Ansible

Michael DeHann of Ansible gives a short talk at Red Hat Tower in Raleigh, prior to the All Things Open conference this year, on why Ansible was created. Pretty much: He wants sysadmin to spend less time doing the monotonous stuff and more time on creative and interesting things for the project they work for.

#1. Tinkering with the Raspberry Pi A+

Luis Ibanez, our Community Moderator with an open hardware fascination, opens up another Raspberry Pi board from Adafruit and tinkers around. He compares it to the Raspberry Pi B+ and brings up Coder on it as well, like he did with the B+ a couple of weeks ago.