In an effort to spur Artificial Intelligence (AI) development, Microsoft has announced they will be releasing AIX as open source. AIX is an AI development engine that’s based on Minecraft; the company is currently using the engine to teach an AI how to do regular tasks in the game, such as climbing to the top […]
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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 […]
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Scientific research has been held back to some extent in recent years due to the restrictions the traditional publishing model imposes. A number of tools have been built to remedy this, including the Open Science Framework: a cloud-based management system for scientific research, and GitLab: a popular platform for hosting digital resources like software code. […]
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Hot on the heels of hitting the 1 million certificates issued milestone, the Let’s Encrypt project has announced it will be changing it’s name and moving to be hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The goal of the Let’s Encrypt project is to make it as easy as possible to provide HTTPS encryption on […]
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R is a programming language and environment for statistical computing and generating graphics that is widely used in the scientific community. As a part of Microsoft’s growing embrace of open source, the company has released a first look at R Tools for Visual Studio. R has a relatively high learning curve, and one of the […]
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Let’s Encrypt is an open source tool that makes providing verified TLS encryption on websites much easier. It is a Linux Foundation project that has received major support from industry players including Automattic (the company behind WordPress), Dreamhost, Digital Ocean, and more. The Linux Foundation has announced that the tool has been used to issue […]
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Microsoft’s perception of open source has changed drastically in the last few years as the company has adopted more and more open source practices in an effort to keep up with its competitors. Two new developments have occurred as a part of this effort. The first development is Microsoft joining the Eclipse Foundation as a […]
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Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system that was launched by Google. Apprenda is a startup based out of Troy, NY that deploys computer applications in industries like finance and pharmaceuticals, and they have announced they will be merging Kubernetes into their platform and joining the Kubernetes community. They chose Kubernetes for three primary […]
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MAME is a popular arcade gaming machine emulator that has been around for more than 19 years. The project’s original license prohibited commercial use and the project leaders determined this was hurting the software’s adoption. They decided to make the code free and open source in an effort to expand MAME’s usage and adoption. The […]
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The Google Summer of Code is an international program that provides stipends to students to participate in free and open source development. The program connects fledgling developers with open source communities to work in a mentor/student relationship and give emerging developers a chance to get real-world experience. The program has announced the participants for 2016 […]
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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 […]
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Over the weekend, the Linux Mint website was hacked to offer malicious iso file downloads to anyone who tried to download the distribution. After being the victim of multiple intrusions, the Mint team completely disabled the entire linuxmint.com domain temporarily. The hackers altered the links on the download to download an iso of Linux Mint […]
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Check out this short video that explains how SageMath is ready to compete with Mathmatica.
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BeeGFS is a parallel cluster file system that is designed to offer a high level of performance by transparently spreading user data across multiple servers. It has always been free to download and use, but at the International Supercomputing Conference in 2013 it was announced the software would eventually be made open source. That day […]
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With limited fanfare, Linux 4.2 has been released by Linus Torvalds. As usual, it features a large number of new features and fixes, most notably, it includes security module stacking patches, the delay-gradient confestion-control algorithm, improvements to writeback management in control groups, and more. It also includes the addition of he AMDGPU kernel DRM driver […]
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Hack is an open source font that is optimized for use in source code and version 2.0 of this font has officially been released. It is designed to appear best in the 8px-12px range and displays extremely well on high definition devices. It improves legibility by using minimal stroke contrast, large x-height, and wide apertures. […]
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Netflix has released Sleepy Puppy: a tool for detecting flaws in XSS. The tool has been created in an effort to fight malicious cross-site scripting, which is a type of vulnerability that allows attackers to execute arbitrary scripts in a victim’s browser. XSS vulnerabilities have been one of the leading security vulnerabilities for more than […]
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Netflix, Intel, Google, Cisco, Mozilla, Amazon, and Microsoft have joined forces to launch the Alliance for Open Media. This alliance will develop a next-generation video format that is interoperable, optimized for the web, scalable to any modern device, designed with a low computational footprint, and provided royalty-free. The alliance will operate under W3C patent rules […]
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August 25th, 2015 was the 24th birthday for Linux. In 24 years, Linux has come to dominate much of the software world including mobile devices, the enterprise, web infrastructure, data centers, super computing, and more. It is the largest software project in the world and is built by thousands of developers from all corners of […]
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Facebook has released an open source code generator for Hack: a spinoff of the PHP programming language. Named Hack Codegen, it enables easy generation of Hack code in addition to writing it into signed files to prevent undesired modifications. It’s an effort to raise the level of abstraction and reduce coupling, and Hack was built […]
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OST Original
A Brief Introduction to Open Licensing
Open source communities rely heavily on the ability to freely share information with all participants; this participation requires some form of legal protection to ensure the people involved are not on the receiving end of potentially disastrous litigation. Open licensing serves as a legal method for ensuring the spread of information by protecting participants. This […]
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Nature Methods is a scientific journal that has been in existence since 1869. Recently, its been discovered that many experiements within the journal can’t be reproduced because software code was not being published along side the research articles. The journal has been updated to include provisions that require the publishing of all code with the […]
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Declining citizen participation in governance and political systems that are incapable of keeping up with the complexity of modern society is opening an innovation gap that needs to be filled in order to bring our systems of governance into the 21st century. DemocracyOS is a new project aimed at improving the interacting between citizens and […]
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Open source communities benefit from the network effect: a phenomenon in which as more people use a technology, the value of that technology increases for all other users. Linux has great potential for embedded electronics, but would require some significant changes to how the kernel operates. This might be an ideal time to create a […]
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The Java “Apache Commons Collections Deserialization Vulnerability” CVE 2015-6420 was first identified in 2015, but it received very little attention in the months after it was announced. Since then, it has been the source of a handful of high profile attacks, including the 2016 ransomware attacks on Baltimore’s Union Memorial Hospital and the San Francisco Municipal network. […]
