Governance

  • The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of LF Edge: “an umbrella organization to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system.“ The projects include Akraino Edge Stack – an open source software stack for high-availability cloud services. EdgeX Foundry – a common framework for IoT edge computing. […]

  • Quote from Tech Crunch: The Linux Foundation is adding yet another foundation to its stable: the LF Deep Learning Foundation. The idea behind the LF Deep Learning  Foundation is to “support and sustain open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning while striving to make these critical new technologies available to developers and data scientists everywhere.” The founding […]

  • The German city of Munich has been applauded in the past for their decisions to embrace the use of open source software in the city government. They had the largest initiative of this type when they completed LiMux, their own custom version of Linux, in 2013 and subsequently deployed it to more than 15,000 city […]

  • The Swedish National Survey is leading an effort to track land ownership in their country using a public blockchain; testing for this is set to begin in March 2017. At this time, the system will be populated with test data and made public, and the public is invited to test out the system from a […]

  • Government institutions are a prime target for open source software for many reasons, primarily the low cost of ownership and relative ease of upgrading to the latest standards and software. Network World has pieced together a map of governmental adoption of open source around the world, and it paints an interesting picture of worldwide open […]

  • The British Government Digital Services (GDS) seeks to hire an Open Source Lead to help the UK government advance open source initiatives. The UK government has been receptive to open standards and open source technology over the past few years, so it’s a natural step for them to hire someone to lead this effort. The […]

  • The Linux Foundation Hyperledger project is an effort to advance open source blockchain technology. It’s goal is to “build and sustain an open, distributed ledger platform that will satisfy a variety of use cases across multiple industries.” The project has announced the election of a board of directors and technical steering committee that includes representatives […]

  • Senator Daniel Squadron, a senator from New York Stat, has co-sponsored a bill along with Senator Ruth Russel-Thompson to provide a tax credit to open source software developers for writing free software. The senators hope to encourage greater technology development in an effort to create jobs and add to the state’s technology sector.  Senate bill […]

  • In the Second Open Government National Action Plan, the White House committed to providing an open source software policy for the US Federal Government. On Friday, that commitment was met when Tony Scott, the US Chief Information Officer, announced the release of the first draft of the Federal Source Code Policy which provides an initial […]

  • The Software Freedom Conservancy has stated in a blog post that they believe Canonical’s work to add ZFS to Ubuntu violates the GPL license. ZFS is a Unix file system that has been gaining popularity in recent years that is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDLv1). Canonical’s decision to add this file […]

  • As a part of the White House’s efforts to expand the federal government’s involvement in open source technology, the administration has released an open source tool that shows government projects on an interactive map. The source code is hosted on Github, and developers are invited to check out the code and get involved in it’s […]

  • The US Federal Government has attempted to pass bills in recent years to reform the US patent system, but so far nothing has made it through. One of the major attempts in recent years was the Innovation Act which passed the House in 2013, but never made it through the Senate. This bill is back […]

  • A European Parliament study has recommended that the EU finance open source audits and bug bounties in order to improve privacy in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations. The study was led by a dozen European security experts and concluded “EU should promote and foster the development and usage of open protocols, open implementations and […]

  • DARPA has released Memex, a suite of dark web search tools, as open source. The suite is a collaborative project that includes components built by numerous universities, small and large companies, NASA, and R&D firms. There are 40 tools in this release, and the following are a few of the more notable components that make […]

  • US Patent 6442485 covers a “method and apparatus for an automatic vehicle location, collision notification, and synthetic voice.” It is owned by NovelPoint, who despite not ever creating something from it, has used it to sue more than 90 companies for infringement, the latest round of which includes notable fast food chains including Subway, Buger […]

  • Many people have already commented on the benefits and problems of Bitcoin as a currency, but perhaps the most valuable aspect has been explored only minimally. The blockchain is at the core of Bitcoin and serves as a distributed ledger of all transactions that can validate the authenticity of each individual Bitcoin without relying on […]

  • Random Articles from the OST Archives