Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation’s founder, responds to the claim that there are fewer people now who berate him
Made entirely using Free/libre software, heavily compressed for performance on the Web at quality’s expense
Programming
Adoption of Google’s programming language is rapidly gaining on Java and others.
Hack
The new open-source programming language, Hack, is described by its Facebook developers as operating “seamlessly with PHP,” adding that it “reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.”
Women
There are rapidly growing feature set, high commit rates, and code contributions happening across the globe to Apache Hadoop and related Apache Software Foundation projects. However, the number of woman developers, committers, and Project Management Committee (PMC) members in this vast and diversified ecosystem are really diminutive. For the Hadoop project alone, only 5% out of 84 committers are women; and this has been the case for over the past 2 years.
And when it comes to the open-source software industry, women are even harder to find. A recent study found that 1 out 10 open-source programmers are women (about 10%), and that’s up from 2007, when only 2 out of every 100 were women (about 2%).
During Grace Hopper 2013 on Open Source Day, we worked on more than 10 open source projects and had more than 250 attendees. Experienced women in tech were there to help teach other women how to do programming for their particular project or to work with them in a mentorship capacity. Each year we find that we fill up in terms of the number of attendees we can handle for the event! And then we have a waiting list. So, if this sounds like something you are excited about doing or you are interested in participating in, sign up for Open Source Day sooner rather than later to make sure that you get a spot.
“This weekend, GitHub employee Julie Horvath spoke publicly about negative experiences she had at GitHub that contributed to her resignation,” GitHub CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath wrote in a blog post on Sunday. “I would like to personally apologize to Julie. It’s certain that there were things we could have done differently.”
Creative Commons and Academia
In the sharing of ideas, what Rundle, Nowviskie, and I really want—and, I’ll warrant, what most scholars really want—is simply proper attribution.
Nature Publishing Group — is telling all authors at Duke that they must obtain a waiver of the policy before their accepted articles can be published.
More Reasons to Boycott Elsevier
It’s easy (if tedious) to find paywalled Open Access articles in Elsevier journals. You go to Robert Kiley’s excellent spreadsheet (curated by Michelle Brook and others) , find publisher = Elsevier , search for the title and go to the journal pages. Here I show how
For some reason, Elsevier seems to take delight in being hated by the academic world. Its support for the awful Research Works Act back in 2012 led to a massive boycott of the company by researchers. More recently, it has cracked down on academics posting PDFs of their own research. Now Peter Murray-Rust, one of the leading campaigners for open access, has caught Elsevier at it again.
Schools and Textbooks
Several students complain every year – for good reason – about the exorbitant prices charged for textbooks. If there were any way to reduce this unbelievable cost to students, it should be implemented immediately.
College students are no strangers to shelling out hundreds of dollars for textbooks every semester. Even thrifty students find that used books will cost them greatly if they’re lucky enough to be able to get them. Students who are required to have “UConn editions” or “new editions” of books often see their bank accounts dwindle at the beginning of the semester. Often many students forgo purchasing textbooks or prowl around for an illicit online edition.
USM holds pilot in which students use free ‘open-source’ textbooks put together by their professors
Open Hardware
Brian Gerkey wanted a common robotic control language. Taking inspiration from the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Python) open source tools in the 1990s Brian worked to develop ROS, the Robot Operating System. ROS is an open source kit of tools, libraries and programming conventions for programming robots.
*Open Source is always promising to build a “whole new economy.” There’s a rather well-established open-source economy nowadays that’s neither whole nor new. Why keep saying this? It’s like promising Zen enlightenment without knowing that you still have to chop wood and carry water.
*The genuinely new development in Open Source is an open resistance to open-source by established power players. What’s especially new and different is the bitter, politicized, statehouse and working-class resistance to commercial Big Sharing efforts such as Uber and AirBnB. Distributing access to knowledge isn’t gonna be the problem any more — politics is gonna be the problem.
Electronics
“When you go to a store and buy an electronic gizmo, does it ever occur to you that you could make one yourself? Or even that it would be FUN to make one yourself?” This is how John Baichtal’s Arduino for Beginners: Essential Skills Every Maker Needs begins, and that same curiosity and ingenuity flows through the entire book.
Frankovsky
Facebook’s open-source-hardware champion, Frank Frankovsky, has left the building.
In a personal Facebook post, Frankovsky, who headed up the ambitious Open Compute Project and ran Facebook’s own hardware design, announced that he’s leaving to start his own company.
Tizen
Patches are continuing to be reviewed and refined for introducing weston-ivi-shell, a reference shell for Wayland’s Weston compositor within the world of In-Vehicle Infotainment systems, primarily for Tizen.
Like most smartwatches, Samsung’s Tizen Linux-based Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo are primarily companion devices to Bluetooth connected smartphones rather than full-fledged wrist computers. Yet, the Tizen SDK for Wearable released by Samsung yesterday enables a variety of modes on the Gear watches for both standalone and companion scenarios.
When Samsung announced the Gear 2 and the Gear 2 Neo last month, the news came with the confirmation that the company was dropping Android from both devices. Instead, both smart watches are powered by Tizen. This may not mean all that much for consumers in the short term, but it does impact developers. For you, Samsung has just shared the first version of the Tizen SDK aimed at wearables. This is what you need to grab if you intend to build apps for the company’s two intelligent wristwatches.
Android may rule the smartphone world, but it might not be top dog when it comes to smartwatches. Sony, for one, has decided not to team up with Google and its Android Wear project. Samsung won’t use it exclusively — it’s already tinkering with Tizen. “You don’t need to use the Android platform as long as you can still interact with it,” noted Tirias Research analyst Jim McGregor.
Flyme
Renowned Chinese phone manufacturer Meizu has made its entry into the French market with the launch of its flagship smartphone, the Meizu MX3. This phone runs a homegrown fork of Android 4.2, dubbed Flyme OS 3.0, which the company claims to have “improved navigation” and “simple and fluid transitions”.
Meizu is thinking to take the “Xiaomi route” and allow other phones to run its own version of Android. Called Flyme OS, Meizu’s platform builds on top of the Android core adding quite a few enhancements and tweaks along the way, all of which helped made Meizu phones popular in the first place.
China Mobile
Verizon Terremark is making its biggest commitment yet to open-source cloud computing.
Today, the company announced it’s joining the Linux Foundation, an organization focused on promoting the growth of Linux, as a Gold member. The news comes several months after the launch of Verizon Cloud, its revamped cloud computing platform.
Jolla
Jolla made available today its much anticipated v1.0 update of Sailfish, their mobile Linux distribution running on Wayland and powered by Nokia’s former MeeGo code.
Over the years, the Maxthon browser (formerly known as MyIE2 way back in the day) has spread its reach beyond Windows and into different platforms, including the Mac and three mobile OSes: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Wondering where the love for Linux is at? You don’t need to wonder anymore, because you can now download 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Maxthon for Linux.
KKEdit is a text editor based on GTK3 for GNOME, currently under development, with several useful features for the average programmer.
If you have attended my FOSDEM talk or seen the slides, you know about the concept of “component metadata” to describe (almost) all software components which make up a Linux system, as well as their public interfaces they provide for users and other software to access. This metadata specification was originally designed as part of the Listaller project for use with the 3rd-party software installer.
Other than OpenOffice and LibreOffice, the Linux platform lacks any full-featured office suite. Both of these open source office suites have more in common with each other than truly distinguishing features. Both flip-flop in performance, depending on which Microsoft skill they attempt to emulate. Their user interface is strictly classic old school.
Linux within cars was a big topic at this week’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley. Besides Intel talking up Tizen IVI, Xen Automotive is the work being done for using Xen virtualization on ARM hardware within automobiles.
This code translates Microsoft High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) shaders from legacy Direct3D 9 to OpenGL GL Shading Language (GLSL) shaders.
Grave is a new open world, procedural survival horror game being developed by Broken Window Studios, Inc. The game has a release target of early 2015 and will feature a fusion between modern horror and classic survival horror gameplay elements. It will be releasing on Windows, Mac and Linux.
It’s been a while, but the Humble Weekly Sale is here again! This time, it’s called The Humble Weekly Sale: Rhythm Games, which features 3 games plus other 3 games if you pay more than $6!
The UNIGINE Engine is built by none other than Unigine Corp., the company behind the Heaven DX11 Benchmark software. The technology they develop is getting better all the time, and with their recent expansion on the Linux platform, we’re all too glad to see that major updates have been implemented in the engine.
We have just updated the released alchemist repository. This is the same content that was pushed to alchemist_beta last Monday
I’ve been a sysadmin for a long time, and part of being a sysadmin is doing more than is humanly possible. Sometimes that means writing wicked cool scripts, sometimes it means working late, and sometimes it means learning to say no. Unfortunately, it also sometimes means cutting corners. I confess, I’ve been “that guy” more than once. A good example is SELinux. On more than a few (hundred!) occasions, I’ve simply disabled SELinux, because getting things to work right is often really frustrating and time consuming. The same is true with LVM (Logical Volume Manager). I didn’t get it. I thought it added an unnecessary layer of complexity. I thought it meant another potential point of failure. I thought it was stupid.
I was wrong.
Kernel
The Tux3 author intends to publish his Tux3 patches to the kernel mailing list in the next week or two with the intent of mainlining the file-system into the Linux kernel. There’s still some features to add and bugs to work through, but Phillips is now at a stage where he’s comfortable in seeing all of the code mainlined into the Linux kernel. He also hopes that by being in the mainline kernel will be an up-tick of interest and development support for the file-system. Samsung, among others, have been interested in potentially using Tux3 as an embedded Linux file-system. In fact, he said Samsung may be more interested in using Tux3 than their F2FS Flash-Friendly File-System project and he has been communicating with Samsung’s F2FS developers.
With another Linux Foundation Summit means another time to hear an update about LLVMLinux, the Linux Foundation backed project to build the mainline Linux kernel with LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler in place of GCC.
Collaboration Summit
The panel opened with Corbet pointing out that today “Almost all the people who work on the kernel are paid to do it. Only 10 percent to 20 percent are volunteers. What do your companies expect to get from your kernel work?”
At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on March 26, a panel of leading Linux kernel developers discussed the current state of Linux development and collaboration.
Software companies have long realized the economic and strategic value of using and contributing code to external open source projects. But they’re much slower to understand and apply the same open source methods of collaboration to their own projects internally, said Phil Odence, vice president of business development at Black Duck Software in a Collaboration Summit presentation today.
Linux kernel developers Greg Kroah-Hartman, Jens Axboe, Dave Chinner, Matthew Garrett, and Mel Gorman participated in a panel discussion, moderated by LWN Editor Jon Corbet, at Collaboration Summit on Wednesday. Here are some of the highlights. For the full session, view the video, below.
Graphics Stack
NVIDIA has already made its plans clear about the legacy drivers, but now the company decided that it’s time to explain a little better what it is going to do regarding the support for old video cards in UNIX systems.
While Thunderbolt was promising from a technology perspective, it hasn’t seen too much adoption outside of Apple systems and the Linux support is still plaguing developers and causing nightmares among Linux users.
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