Does Open Source Have a 'Working For Free' Problem?
by Peter Reutemann
'"Let's abandon the notion that open source is exclusively charity,"
writes Havoc Pennington, a free software engineer (and former Red Hat
engineer) who's now a co-founder of Tidelift:
Look around. We do have a problem, and it's time we do something about
it.... The lack of compensation isn't just bad for individual
developers -- it also creates social problems, by amplifying existing
privilege.... The narrative around open source is that it's completely
OK -- even an expectation -- that we're all doing this for fun and
exposure; and that giant companies should get huge publicity credit
for throwing peanuts-to-them donations at a small subset of open
source projects.
There's nothing wrong with doing stuff for fun and exposure, or making
donations, as an option. It becomes a problem when the free work is
expected and the donations are seen as enough... What would open
source be like if we had a professional class of independent
maintainers, constantly improving the code we all rely on?
The essay suggests some things consider, including asking people to pay for:
* Support requests
* Security audits/hardening and extremely good test coverage
* Supporting old releases
* License-metadata-annotation practices that are helpful for big
companies trying to audit the code they use, but sort of a pain in the
ass and nobody cares other than these big companies.
"Right now many users expect, and demand, that all of this will be
free. As an industry, perhaps we should push back harder on that
expectation. It's OK to set some boundaries..."
"Of course this relates to what we do at Tidelift -- the company came
out of discussions about this problem, among others... In our
day-to-day right now we're specifically striving to give subscribers a
way to pay maintainers of their application dependencies for
additional value, through the Tidelift Subscription. But we hope to
see many more efforts and discussions in this area.... [I]n between a
virtual tip jar and $100 million in funding, there's a vast solution
space to explore."'
-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/28/0459236
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
1 year
Mark Shuttleworth Sees Increased Demand For Enterprise Ubuntu Linux Desktop
by Peter Reutemann
'Canonical's real money comes from the cloud and Internet of Things,
but AI and machine learning developers are demanding -- and getting --
Ubuntu Linux desktop with enterprise support. From a report:
In a wide-ranging conversation at Open Infrastructure Summit, Mark
Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its corporate parent
Canonical, said: "We have seen companies signing up for Linux desktop
support, because they want to have fleets of Ubuntu desktop for their
artificial intelligence engineers." This development caught
Shuttleworth by surprise. "We're starting actually now to commercially
support the desktop in a way that we've never been asked to before,"
he said. Of course, Ubuntu has long been used by developers, but
Shuttleworth explained, "Previously, those were kind of off the books,
under the table. You know, 'Don't ask don't tell deployments.' "But
now suddenly, it's the AI team and they've got to be supported."'
-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/30/1641242
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
1 year, 1 month
Vodafone Denies Bloomberg Report on Security Flaws in Huawei Equipment
by Peter Reutemann
'Vodafone denied a Bloomberg report on Tuesday that stated it had
found "backdoors" hidden in Huawei equipment supplied to its Italian
business dating back years, per BBC . From a report:
What they're saying: Vodafone said the "backdoors" in the report were
actually a common industry protocol: "The 'backdoor' that Bloomberg
refers to is Telnet, which is a protocol that is commonly used by many
vendors in the industry for performing diagnostic functions. It would
not have been accessible from the internet. Bloomberg is incorrect in
saying that this 'could have given Huawei unauthorised access to the
carrier's fixed-line network in Italy.' In addition, we have no
evidence of any unauthorised access. This was nothing more than a
failure to remove a diagnostic function after development."'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/30/1542202
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
1 year, 1 month
Fedora 30 Linux Distro Is Here
by Peter Reutemann
'Fedora 30, the newest release of the venerable Linux distribution
that serves (in part) as the staging environment for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, was released Tuesday, bringing with it a number of
improvements and performance optimizations. From a report:
The most exciting aspect, for workstation/desktop users at least, is
the update to GNOME 3.32. Of course, that is hardly the only notable
update -- the DNF package manager is getting a performance boost, for
instance. In other words, this is a significant operating system
upgrade that should delight both existing Fedora users and beginners
alike. "Fedora 30 brings enhancements to all editions with updates to
the common underlying packages, from bug fixes and performance tweaks
to new versions. In Fedora 30, base updates include Bash shell 5.0,
Fish 3.0, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 9 and Ruby 2.6. Fedora 30
also now uses the zchunk format for data compression within the DNF
repository. When metadata is compressed using zchunk DNF will only
download the differences between earlier copies of metadata and the
current versions, saving on resources and increasing efficiency," says
The Fedora Project.'
-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/30/1742231
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
1 year, 1 month
Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community
by Peter Reutemann
'Today we’re excited to welcome the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to
GitHub. Apache is the world’s largest open source foundation, with over 200
million lines of code managed by an all-volunteer community of 730 members
and 7,000 code contributors. Over their 20 year history, one billion lines
of code have been committed across three million code commits.
In 2016, Apache made the decision to start integrating GitHub’s repository
and tooling with their own services. After solidifying the integration over
the years, they decided to simplify how they work and move all Git projects
to GitHub. As of February 2019, Apache’s migration to GitHub was complete,
enabling all these projects with a simple platform to host and review code,
collaborate on projects, and build software alongside 31 million developers
around the world.'
-- source: https://github.blog/2019-04-29-apache-joins-github-community/
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
1 year, 1 month
How an Obsolete Medical Device With a Security Flaw Became a Must-Have For Some Patients With Type 1 Diabetes
by Peter Reutemann
'In 2014, a few hackers realized that the security flaw in certain
Medtronic pumps could be exploited for a DIY revolution. Type 1
diabetes is a disease where the pancreas is unable to produce insulin
to control blood sugar. For years, Boss (the anecdote in the story who
purchased used insulin pumps from some dealer on Craiglist) had
counted, down to the gram, the carbohydrates in every meal and told
his pump how much insulin to dispense. [...] By 2014, the hardware
components of a DIY artificial pancreas -- a small insulin pump that
attaches via thin disposable tubing to the body and a continuous
sensor for glucose, or sugar, that slips just under the skin -- were
available, but it was impossible to connect the two. That's where the
security flaw came in. The hackers realized they could use it to
override old Medtronic pumps with their own algorithm that
automatically calculates insulin doses based on real-time glucose
data. It closed the feedback loop.
They shared this code online as OpenAPS, and "looping," as it's
called, began to catch on. Instead of micromanaging their blood sugar,
people with diabetes could offload that work to an algorithm. In
addition to OpenAPS, another system called Loop is now available.
Dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands of people are experimenting
with DIY artificial-pancreas systems -- none of which the Food and
Drug Administration has officially approved. And they've had to track
down discontinued Medtronic pumps. It can sometimes take months to
find one. Obviously, you can't just call up Medtronic to order a
discontinued pump with a security flaw. "It's eBay, Craigslist,
Facebook. It's like this underground market for these pumps," says
Aaron Kowalski, a DIY looper and also CEO of JDRF, a nonprofit that
funds type 1 diabetes research. This is not exactly how a market for
lifesaving medical devices is supposed to work. And yet, this is the
only way it can work -- for now.'
-- source: https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/04/29/2051257
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
1 year, 1 month
Finally ... The Vertical TV
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I’ve been wondering when this was going to happen. Just as widescreen
TVs and computer monitors have become standard, more and more video
footage is being shared, whether on broadcast TV, social media or
whatever, that was captured on mobile phones in *portrait* mode. So you
get the awkward problem of filling in the gaps on the sides of the
screen with something useless but unobtrusive (heavily-blurred
portions of the actual content seems popular right now), and wasting all
that display resolution to boot.
Seems like going back to 4:3 monitors, or even an orientation-neutral
square 1:1 shape, is not an option.
But Samsung has the solution: a TV that can rotate to portrait mode!
<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/samsung-embraces-vertical-videos-...>
1 year, 1 month
