Links: NASA and Free Software, Implantable Medical Devices Need Software Freedom
    
     - Dr. Roy Schestowitz
      - 2010-07-24 07:52:32 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-24 07:52:32 UTC
 
 
Summary: Free software news roundup
- 
In order to save the data from distant spacecraft, satellites and other scientific endeavors, NASA is leveraging open source tech (including Ubuntu Linux) and regular enterprise networking components to meet their mission.
 
 I had the privilege of speaking with NASA's CTO for IT Chris Kemp this week around the OpenStack project in which NASA is participating. Kemp told me that NASA's Nebula cloud IT environment was built for science and research and has been optimized for low cost and massive scalability.
 
- The Linux and open source community provides countless user and server applications. They also provide solutions to help support these and other applications, even to support non-technical departments. You'll find many help desk or customer service trouble ticketing systems in the FOSS (free and open source software) world. Right now we'll review 5 different solutions.
 
- It's starting off to be a good week for open source configuration management vendor Puppet Labs. The startup announced today that it has raised an additional $5 million in venture funding, bringing total funding to $7 million to date. Those new funds come on the same day that a major new release of the open source Puppet framework is being made generally available.
 
- Why am I reinventing Disqus? That is the question I've been getting asked since I "announced" on Identi.ca that I'd be replacing Disqus with a free (AGPL) comment system that I was to write. Well, I am not the inventor of Disqus, so technically I can't reinvent something I didn't forehand invent. And because I'm not about to run a service for millions of people, my comment system won't have accounts (though it will have the possibility of setting a password so that only certain persons can post with their certain names.)
 
- As the commenters on Slashdot note, one of the most robust open source speech recognition solutions comes from Carnegie Mellon University. It's called Sphinx, and we covered it here. You can use Sphinx for straight speech recognition, or integrate it with applications. To find out more about Sphinx, check out this post from Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. 
 
- 
 
 FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
- Nearly a year ago the FSF held a mini-summit for women in free software to investigate practical ways to increase the number of women involved in the free software community.
 
 Those that attended the summit formed the Women's Caucus, and have been working to develop practical policy to recommend to the FSF and the wider free software community. Today, we are publishing the Caucus's initial findings and recommendations.
 
 
 
- The 3rd meeting our Fellowship group was on the 4th of March and was mainly about organizing the DFD. You can read the full minutes (in Slovenian) on the wiki.
 
 
 
- This paper demonstrates why increased transparency in the field of medical device software is in the public’s interest. It unifies various research into the privacy and security risks of medical device software and the benefits of published systems over closed, proprietary alternatives. Our intention is to demonstrate that auditable medical device software would mitigate the privacy and security risks in IMDs by reducing the occurrence of source code bugs and the potential for malicious device hacking in the long-term. Although there is no way to eliminate software vulnerabilities entirely, this paper demonstrates that free and open source medical device software would improve the safety of patients with IMDs, increase the accountability of device manufacturers, and address some of the legal and regulatory constraints of the current regime. 
 
 
 
 
- 
Project Releases
 
 
 
 
- CoffeeSaint is a fully customizable Nagios status viewer. It grabs the status from a Nagios server and displays it in a fullscreen GUI.
 
 
 
 
- 
 
 Government
- 
Licensing
- Open source is everywhere today and there is growing awareness that companies have to meet certain obligations when distributing open source software. Here are some useful resources to learn more about open source compliance.
 
 
 
 
- 
 
 Open Data
- The following recent story in the Times Higher Educational Supplement (the “mainstream” magazine for HE in the UK) shows why we desperately need a clear basis for discussing data. I’ll comment inline, but initially just to make it clear that the fuss and hyperbole is because there is no communal framework for understanding and addressing the problem. Also to remind readers of this blog that the UK has a Freedom Of Information Act (FoI) which allows any citizen to make a request to a public body (government, local government, universities, public research establishments) for information, It is the law, and a reply must be delivered within 20 working days and there are only a few grounds for refusal. 
 
 
 
 
- 
 
 Programming
- Today's commercial-grade programming languages -- C++ and Java, in particular -- are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments, Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike argued in a talk Thursday at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 
 
 Python4kids
 
 
 
- 
 
 Standards/Consortia
- Today the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I; http://www.ws-i.org) announced its decision to transition its assets, operations, and mission into a Member Section of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards; http://www.oasis-open.org/). The transition is expected to take place over the next few months. 
 
 
 
 
 
   
   
   
  Recent Techrights' Posts
  
 - Slopwatch: Brian Fagioli, Google News, and Other LLM Slopfarms
- Why does Google News keep promoting these fake articles?
- Links 29/10/2025: Amazon Kept "Data Center Water Use Secret", "Abuse of Power" Against Media
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/10/2025: "My Hardware Specs" and "Goodbye Debian…"
- Links for the day
- EPO Cocainegate: Feedback and Clarifications
- Part III will come out soon
- Links 29/10/2025: "US Military Is Destroying the Planet Beyond Imagination" and Boat Strikes Deemed Unlawful
- Links for the day
- Quality Comes First (Techrights Search)
- It's generally working already, but we wish to polish it some more
- Techrights Party Countdown
- Late next week we'll be holding a party near our home
- European Parliament and Council Directive on Privacy is Vanishing
- "edited / censored some time more recently"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 28, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, October 28, 2025
- Slopwatch: The March of Slopfarms, From UbuntuPIT to Linux Journal and to Various Fake Sites Still Promoted by Google News
- It's so worrying to see what the Web has become
- Links 29/10/2025: CISA, Ukraine, and Amazon Problems
- Links for the day
- [Teaser] The EPO's Spokesperson, a Cocaine User, Fancies Young Women
- How's that for "optics" in the EU and Europe's second-largest institution?
- How Will António Campinos Respond to the EPO's 'Cocainegate'?
- That's the same thing we saw and still see when the press deals with enablers and partners of Jeffrey Epstein
- Join Us Now and Share the News - Part IV: There Cannot be Free Software Without Free Press and Free Information
- One day, one can hope, more people will recognise that for Software Freedom we need free press and free thinkers
- Join Us Now and Share the News - Part III: Principled Stance Is Never Cheap
- Protecting the truth and insisting that the general public is made aware of things that really happened isn't cheap
- Join Us Now and Share the News - Part II: Because Scarcity of Accurate Information Breeds Collective Ignorance
- we too will strive to share information that's aggressively suppressed
- Gemini Links 28/10/2025: More New Arrivals at Geminispace, xkcd on "Document Forgery"
- Links for the day
- Join Us Now and Share the News - Part I: Defence of the Truth
- This year we make a very strong, firm statement for truth, even if that means explaining our work to the top media judge in the country
- Links 28/10/2025: Meta and Fentanylware (CheeTok) Age-Restricted Down Under, "Britain Needs China’s Money"
- Links for the day
- Links 28/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Charter to Cut 1,200 Jobs
- Links for the day
- The Cocaine Patent Office - Part II: The Person Who Planted Paid-for Fake News for the European Patent Office (EPO) is a Cocaine User, Friend of António Campinos, Now on Record as Having Been Arrested
- Background: High-level manager at the European Patent Office caught in public with cocaine, arrested
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 27, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, October 27, 2025
- Google News Drowning in Slop (and Slopfarms That Hijack About Half the Results)
- Google News seems to be drowning in this stuff
- Gemini Links 28/10/2025: "How to Maximize Your Positive Impact" and ASCII Art and Artist Attribution
- Links for the day
- PETA and Activism
- Being staff or volunteer in PETA isn't easy
- Big Blue, Huge Debt
- debt will soar again
- Links 27/10/2025: Mass Surveillance Sold as "AI", People Reluctant to Lose Physical Media
- Links for the day
- Parties and Milestones Again
- we've begun putting up about 40 balloons
- Techrights' 19th Anniversary: Bronze
- Time to go back to preparing for this anniversary
- Our Latest European Patent Office (EPO) Series Will Last Several Weeks, Will Ask the EPO Management and the European Union (EU) Very Difficult Questions
- If nobody loses a job (or jobs) over this, then the EU basically became no better than Colombia or Nicaragua
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, Brian Fagioli, and Google News
- We focus on stories that are fake or LLM slop that disguises itself as "news" about Linux
- Links 27/10/2025: Wikipedia Vandalism, Bruce Perens Opens up on Childhood
- Links for the day
- This Site Could Not be Done by LLMs Even If It Wanted to (Because It's Not a Parrot of What Other Sites Say)
- LLMs have no knowledge or deep understanding
- Microsoft is Disloyal Towards Its Most Loyal Employees
- Against its most faithful enablers
- 19 Years, No Censorship
- No factual information is ever going to be removed, more so if it is in the public interest
- We Are Not a Conventional Site, That's Why They Hate (or Love) Us
- Throughout the week this week we'll be focusing on the EPO
- Following the Line of Cocaine All the Way to the Top
- Even a million denials and spin-doctoring won't distract from the core issue
- The Cocaine Patent Office - Part I: António Campinos Brought Corruption and Nepotism to the EPO, Then Came the Cocaine
- High-level manager at the European Patent Office (EPO) caught in public with cocaine, the Office has some answering to do
- Purchasing/Possessing Computers Isn't the Same as Controlling Computers
- Let's strive to put computers back under the control of their users, no matter who purchased these (usually the users)
- Gemini Links 27/10/2025: Alhena 5.4.3 and Fixing Bash
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 26, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, October 26, 2025
- Thankfully We've Made Copies of More Interesting Data From statCounter
- If statCounter (the Web site or the 'webapp') vanished overnight, we'd still have something left of it
- More Silent Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
- when the media counts such layoffs or presents tallies the numbers are very incomplete