Open source news for your reading pleasure.

May 3 - May 9, 2014, 2014

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we look at the new Unreal Tournament game's collaborative development plan, a website to help voters get their voice heard, and more.

New Unreal Tournament to be collaboration between studio and fans

Developer Epic Games announced yesterday that Unreal Tournament, the studio's hit multiplayer shooter, would get a reboot, and it would be done collaboratively with the fans of the game. Project lead Steve Polge wrote, "...let's do something radical and make this game together, in the open, and for all of us." What does that mean, exactly? Well, the game's assets will be shared with developers via GitHub, the developers will frequently interact with fans and collaborators on their Twitch stream, and forum discussions will involve anyone who wants to contribute ideas. Best of all, when the game is released, it'll be free, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Support program for R programming language launched

Revolution Analytics, a company that offers training and consulting to users of R, the open source statistical programming language, is now offering a real-time technical support program. While there's a fairly robust community built up around R on the web, Revolution Analytics' offering is more of a formal support program that offers individualized technical support and training webinars from vetted experts. The package runs $795 for an annual subscription.

Open source website gives voters a voice

The Net Democracy foundation, a not-for-profit organization focused on improving civic involvement with technology, has unveiled Democracy OS, a site where users get involved in politics. Citizens log in and debate proposals, elections, and anything that should require open participation from the community. Net Democracy founder Pia Mancini, interviewed in this article at Wired, hopes that Democracy OS will help solve the "crisis of representation" that exists between elected officials and their constituents.

GitHub releases Atom text editor under MIT license

After ten weeks in open beta, the super-extensible Chromium-based text editor Atom has been released to the public under the open source MIT license. While the editor is hackable, it's also touted as a text editor for beginners. Currently, it's only available for OS X, but, of course, enterprising developers can fork the project on GitHub.

Big thanks, as always, to Opensource.com moderator Robin Muilwijk and OpenStack aficionado Jason Baker for sniffing out many of these news articles with me every week.