07.15.15

Links 15/7/2015: Linux in Prison, Canonical ‘IP’ Dispute

Posted in News Roundup at 8:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why you need Open Source

    At the recent Red Hat Summit, Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst talks with Network World about new IT processes and why companies should focus on open source.

  • Xerte Project Joins Open Source Initiative

    Xerte Project’s Open Source Initiative membership furthers both organization’s commitment to growing open source community and collaboration within institutions of higher education.

  • NSA releases Linux-based open source infosec tool

    The US National Security Agency has offered up one of its cyber security tools for government departments and the private sector to use freely to help beef up their security and counter threats.

  • NSA’s new open source project is a cyber security tool
  • 10 outstanding open source server tools

    Not sure which tools belong in your open source server toolkit? Here are 10 solid go-to tools to get you started.

  • Events

    • Obsidian’s August Free Beer Session to toast open source

      Open source software supplier Obsidian Systems invites OS enthusiasts, developers, geeks and friends to the next ‘Free Beer Session’ on 27 August 2015. This session, the 17th in the series, will offer delegates fresh insight into the open source industry, challenges and opportunities.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • 10 things I want Firefox OS to do for me

        I’ve dogfooded Firefox OS since its early beginnings and have some of the early hardware (hamachi, unagi, One Touch Fire, ZTE Open, Geeksphone Keon, Flame and ZTE Open C). It was good to hear some of the plans for Firefox OS 2.5 that were discussed at Whistler, but I wanted to take the time and model of this post and remix it for Firefox OS. Firefox OS you are great and free but you are not perfect and you can be the mobile OS that I need.

      • Mozilla Disables Flash in Firefox

        As the zero days in Adobe Flash continue to pile up, Mozilla has taken the unusual step of disabling by default all versions of Flash in Firefox.

        The move is a temporary one as Adobe prepares to patch two vulnerabilities in Flash that were discovered as a result of the HackingTeam document dump last week. Both vulnerabilities are use-after-free bugs that can be used to gain remote code execution. One of the flaws is in Action Script 3 while the other is in the BitMapData component of Flash.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Teradata’s Configurable Hadoop Appliances Could Find a Niche

      Recently, all-in-one appliances have been much in the news. A few days ago, I covered Mirantis Unlocked Appliances, which deliver OpenStack and all the hardware resources you need for a deployment in one hardware/software entity. Then, Cloudera, which focuses on Apache Hadoop, and Teradata, a big data analytics and marketing tools company, announced the Teradata Appliance for Hadoop with Cloudera.

    • SafeStack attacks with a purpose

      Laura is the founder and lead consultant for SafeStack, a security training, development, and consultancy firm. What does that mean exactly? SafeStack helps organizations choose the right kind of security best practices for them. Then, Laura’s team shows them how to implement those new-found security protocols. This usually calls for a strong dose of workplace culture change, which might sound like a tall order, but Laura tells me in this interview “we want security to be any empowering tool for growth rather than a costly hindrance to innovation.”

    • SwiftStack Founder Plots a Path Forward for Cloud Storage [VIDEO]

      In the beginning of the open source OpenStack cloud effort, there were two projects – Nova Compute and Swift Storage. Swift is an integrated part of most OpenStack distributions but it is also the focus for a standalone company called SwiftStack, which was founded by Joe Arnold.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Drupal 8 Nears Finish Line

      After over four years of development, including missed deadlines on general availability, the open source Drupal 8 content management system (CMS) finally appears to be nearing the finish line.

      Drupal, one of the world’s most popular CMS technologies, is used by many high-profile organizations, notably Whitehouse.gov, the flagship website of the U.S. government. While Drupal founder Dries Buytaert in 2012 announced Drupal 8 would be generally available in December 2013, that date passed with no release.

    • Building open source e-commerce sites with PrestaShop

      Why is being open source so important to us? At its most basic, being open source means users have access to and can manipulate PrestaShop code to make improvements or develop technical answers to address specific business needs. But more importantly, open source represents accessibility and flexibility. It’s an open-door policy versus the private club mentality of proprietary software. Our community is built around this open source ethos; it’s the source of our strength and it’s how we’re contributing to a more democratic e-commerce market.

    • Drupal early adoption at Memorial Sloan Kettering

      At Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK), the world’s oldest and largest private cancer center, our researchers and clinicians have pushed boundaries to generate new knowledge in patient care and cancer research for more than 130 years. This culture of innovation allows our scientists to continually develop new methods for treatment and work tirelessly to discover more effective strategies to prevent, control, and ultimately cure cancer.

  • Education

    • First open source school management software developed in Haiti

      SIGES is a free, open source, available in French, Haitian Creole, and English. It is customizable to suit the schools: primary and secondary; professional and technical; private and public; in urban and rural areas, the school networks, sponsorship organizations, educational projects, etc…

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Container and Cloud Firm Sysdig Gets $10.7 Million Funding

      If you need further evidence that container technology is all the rage, just follow the money. Sysdig, focused on bringing infrastructure and application monitoring to the world of containers and microservices, has announced a $10.7 million Series A funding round led by Accel and Bain Capital Ventures (BCV). In conjunction with the funding, Sysdig announced the general availability of Sysdig Cloud, which it bills as “the first monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting platform specializing in container visibility, which is already used by more than 30 enterprise customers.

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD Releases Lumina Desktop 0.8.5

      The PC-BSD crew has released version 0.8.5 of their Lumina desktop.

      Lumina 0.8.5 has a speed boost for the user button, desktop icons have improved styling and appearance, a new desktop plug-in is present for monitoring system hardware sensors, and there’s a desktop plugin container for custom QML/QtQuick scripts. There are also updated translations, new PC-BSD/FreeBSD packages, etc.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • ​Canonical and Free Software Foundation come to open-source licensing terms

      Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has often rubbed other free software groups the wrong way when it came to open-source licenses. On July 15, Canonical, with support from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), have changed Ubuntu’s licensing terms. The FSF states that Canonical’s new intellectual property (IP) policies “unequivocally comply with the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and other free software licenses.”

    • Ubuntu Policy Complies With GPL But Fails To Address Other Important Software Freedom Issues
    • Statement on Canonical’s updated licensing terms for Ubuntu GNU/Linux
    • Canonical’s Ubuntu IP policy is garbage

      Canonical have a legal policy surrounding reuse of Intellectual Property they own in Ubuntu, and you can find it here. It’s recently been modified to handle concerns raised by various people including the Free Software Foundation[1], who have some further opinions on the matter here. The net outcome is that Canonical made it explicit that if the license a piece of software is under explicitly says you can do something, you can do that even if the Ubuntu IP policy would otherwise forbid it.

    • Free software fans land crucial punch in Ubuntu row – but it’s not over

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) have been bickering with Canonical since 2013 over concerns that certain clauses of the Ubuntu IP rights policy seemed to claim to override provisions of the GNU General Public License (GPL) – something the GPL explicitly forbids.

    • Conservancy & the FSF Achieve GPL Compliance for Canonical, Ltd. “Intellectual Property” Policy

      Today, Canonical, Ltd. announced an updated “Intellectual Property” policy. Conservancy has analyzed this policy and confirms that the policy complies with the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), but Conservancy and the FSF believe that the policy still creates confusion and possible risk for users who wish to exercise their rights under GPL.

    • Compilation Copyright Irrelevant for Kubuntu

      Compilation copyright is an idea exclusive to the US (or North America anyway). It restricts collections of items which otherwise have unrelated copyright restrictions. A classic example is a book collection of poetry where the poems are all out of copyright but the selection and ordering of poems is new and has copyright owned by whoever did it.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Electronic Public Records in Norway

        OEP is part of the Norwegian Government’s work to promote transparency and democracy within the public sector. OEP aims to make the Norwegian public sector more open and accessible to citizens. OEP is based upon the Freedom of Information Act and related regulations.

  • Programming

    • Zend Server 8.5 Announced as PHP 7 Release Nears

      Zend, the PHP company, is updating its namesake PHP application server to version 8.5 providing new features and performance for users. The Zend Server 8.5 release builds on the Zend Server 8 milestone which debuted with the Z-Ray application insight technology.

    • Interview: Larry Wall

      Perl 6 has been 15 years in the making, and is now due to be released at the end of this year. We speak to its creator to find out what’s going on.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • The Embargo on the Truth About the Iranian Arms Embargo

      The corporate media in both the UK and US are attempting to portray the Iranian desire to have the arms embargo lifted, as a new and extraneous demand that could torpedo the nuclear deal. This is an entirely false portrayal.

    • Iran Breakthrough

      There is a parallel danger in Iran. The Iraq War was totally unjustified and illegal, but Saddam Hussein might nonetheless have evaded it had he boxed a bit more cleverly and allowed some foolish inspectors to wander around his palaces prodding at the teaspoons. Yes the inspections regimes will be galling, even humiliating. But patience will have its rewards. There is real danger though that the hardliners on the Iranian side will be able to muster sufficient local points of power to hamper inspections, thus giving the US and Israeli hardliners an opportunity.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • U.S. firm sues Canada for $10.5 billion over water

      An American-owned water export company has launched a massive lawsuit against Canada for preventing it from exporting fresh water from British Columbia.

      Sun Belt Water Inc. of California is suing Canada for $10.5 billion US, the Canadian foreign ministry said Friday.

      The suit has been filed under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sun Belt says it has been “mistreated” by the B.C. government.

    • Ted Cruz at Secret Koch-Backed Fracking Lobby Group Meeting

      Senator Ted Cruz, raising cash for a 2016 presidential bid, was to meet privately Monday in Denver, Colorado with executives from major oil and gas corporations, all members of the pro-fracking lobby group Western Energy Alliance (WEA), according to details of the secret meeting shared with the Center for Media and Democracy.

      The Republican presidential candidate, a climate change denier, is also a leading proponent of opening up federal lands in the west–in fact virtually all lands everywhere–to energy development, and for scrapping regulations on oil and gas development.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • The Mainstream Discovers Mhairi Black

      Having spoken alongside Mhairi at a few meetings, and much admired her, it is rather strange to find her in danger of becoming an object of cult veneration. Just as with Nicola Sturgeon, it seems the shock of seeing the coherent and intelligent articulation of views outside the narrow consensus manufactured by the corporate media and political class, really does strike home to people. They almost never get to hear such views put; Mhairi is being given a hearing because of her youth in her position, but the marginalisation and ridicule will soon kick back in. Above all, Mhairi should remind us of how the Labour Party has completely sold out those they used to represent, and abandoned the task of proposing an intellectually compelling alternative to trickledown.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Email addresses as a trade secret; email addresses as a Trojan Horse?

      What exactly is of trade secret concern here? The answer is: the aggregate email addresses of the subscribers. Anyone who wants to show the broad scope of what is protectable as a trade secret will likely mention a customer list. What could be further from patentable subject matter, yet still be of value to its owner as a trade secret, than a customer list? Email addresses of subscribers can be likened in this respect to the classic customer list. Thus misappropriation of the email addresses might be a concern.

    • Copyrights

      • Mega Threatens Legal Action Against Search Engine

        Mega.co.nz has lodged legal threats against a New Zealand based search engine. MegaSearch.co.nz allows users to search Mega.co.nz for content but has attracted the attention of the file-hosting company after using its logos and trademarks without permission. Mega.co.nz is demanding a full shutdown.

      • FBI Assists Overseas Pirate Movie Site Raids

        Romanian authorities and the FBI have reportedly coordinated to shut down three sites involved in the unauthorized distribution of movies and TV shows. Several men were detained and various domains were seized amid allegations of criminal copyright infringement, tax evasion and money laundering.

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