A new open source Linux filesystem is now available to the general public. The Bcache File System (Bcachefs) is a Linux kernel block layer cache that aims at offering a faster and more advanced method of storing data on servers. It supports checksumming, compression, caching, and copy-on-write which will allow the file system to ensure […]
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The need for Linux Systems Administrators is growing, a trend highlighted by a recent Linux Foundation (LF) Survey. Proper education and training is needed in order to prepare individuals for a career in Linux, and the LF is helping that happen with the release of LFS201: Essentials of Linux System Administration on the popular online […]
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GEGL is the image processing engine that forms the foundation for many of GIMP’s functions. Version 0.3 was recently released, and is the first update the engine has seen in three years. It includes experimental multi-threading support, mipmaps, a new default tile backend, and 71 new image processing operations which are mostly ports of existing […]
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A problem with Wayland’s license was recently uncovered when a Wikipedia editor pointed out a discrepancy between the license statement in the project’s FAQ, and the license found in the actual code. The code was licensed under a Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (HPND) license when it should have been licensed under MIT. This confusion […]
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Pinot has been the de-facto analytics program used by LinkedIn for more than two years to provide insight to information like profile views, company follow analytics and A/B testing analytics. The program provides an OLAP datastore that emphasizes scalability, low latency, data freshness, and high availability. It uses data from Hadoop and Kafka, and provides […]
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Fedora 22, the latest version of a popular Linux distribution that’s backed by Red Hat, has been released. It includes quite a few improvements, with one of the major changes being the new package management system, DNF. This new package management system replaces Yum and is a fork of the same project. It makes use […]
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The Docker Hub is a central repository for Developers to push and pull container images. Banyan performed a study on the security of numerous Docker Hub images to understand how vulnerable they might be to security threats. Their research uncovered the fact that 36% of Docker Hub images contain what the US Government considers high-profile […]
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Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a collaborative environment to bring a Linux software stack to the connected car. The project has released its own open source In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) software that features a dashboard, home screen, navigation map, media playback, audio controls, and more. Each feature also includes detailed design requirement documents with descriptions, use […]
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Rust is a programming language that combines low-level performance control with high-level convenience and safety guarantees to serve as a “drop-in” replacement for C. The language is designed to appeal to both experienced systems programmers and newcomers alike. The release of version 1.0 marks the community’s commitment to providing a stable language, and the project […]
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Canonical, the lead company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced an expansion of their effort to run Ubuntu on as many platforms as possible. The company announced that Ubuntu Snappy will be coming to the Open Compute Platform (OCP) network switches.Ubuntu will bring an assortment of benefits to the OCP, including the fastest, smallest, […]
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For the last 15 years, North Bridge and Black Duck Software have joined efforts every year to conduct a survey about the use of open source in modern business. A record 1,300 people responded to the survey, up from 822 in 2013. Respondents included software engineers, CIO’s, CEO’s, educators, analysts, and more. There is little […]
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LucidWorks is a company the uses open source tools to help improve information accessibility through search, machine learning, and natural language processing. Their heavy reliance on open source software requires them to take a different approach to business than companies that rely on proprietary software. The founder has taken away three key lessons from running […]
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Netflix has released FIDO (Fully Integrated Defense Operation) as open source. This is a tool that has been used internally by the company for years to manage security alerts and incidents. The tool is designed to research, score, and categorize threats to help speed up the process of identifying the most important. FIDO was used […]
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Valve recently launched a program to allow video game mod developers to sell their mods through Steam: Valve’s game distribution platform. The program was promptly removed after a severe backlash from the community which included a group of gamers on Reddit who decided to launch their own open source platform to improve competition in video […]
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These 5 FOSS projects focus on helping people in need. Humanitarian OpenStreetMap – After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the OpenStreetMap community joined together to build maps of Haiti from any pre-earthquake data they could find. After the crisis, the community stayed involved in the recovery process to help continually improve the map information. Literacy Bridge […]
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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 […]
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Much like how the software industry is shifting from large companies controlling the production to distributed open source communities controlling the production, the energy production industry is going through a similar transformation to small-scale renewable technologies, such as solar panels, to produce energy through distributed networks. PowerMatcherSuite is a new open source project that includes […]
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Docker and other Linux container technologies have been incredibly beneficial to the open source cloud community in recent years, but these technologies are not without their downsides. In particular, security is still a major concern in this area, and has so far gone mostly unaddressed. The unikernel is a slightly different approach to solve the […]
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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 […]
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ResearchKit is a new open source framework that can be used to conduct medical research. Apple released it on GitHub and it currently only works on iOS devices, something Apple hopes to address by making it open source. The app is built from three primary blocks: Participant Consent, Surveys, and Active Tasks. The goal is […]
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OST Original
The State of Open Source: Android
A Giant is Born Andy Rubin founded Android INC in 2003. Originally, his plan was to create a camera platform that included a selection of third party apps, but this was ultimately expanded to include smartphones after concluding the digital camera market was too small. Google purchased Android in 2005 and went public with its […]
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Barclays and CommBank have announced a partnership to develop an open source extract, transform, load (ETL) tool that works on top of Hadoop to evaluate large sets of data. The ETL market is currently dominated by proprietary offerings that require expensive new licenses every time a bank wants to evaluate a new data set. An […]
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Michael Tiemann played a major role in establishing open source as a legitimate market force in its early days. His foray into open source started by making contributions to the GNU C Compiler and led to him being a co-founder of Cygnus Solutions: the world’s first open source software company. This company was ultimately sold […]
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In the wake of the heartbleed bug, multiple organizations have stepped up with their own solutions to the problems of OpenSSL. Google now enters the foray with their own fork of OpenSSL called BoringSSL which has been released under the ISC license. More from the Var Guy
