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02.13.15

Links 13/2/2015: Krita 2.9 and Calligra 2.9 Betas, Ubuntu in Drones

Posted in News Roundup at 6:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • How we used an open source meme generator to promote our journalism

    One of the tasks of a digital team in any major news organisation is to make the newsroom more efficient. We leverage new technologies in ways that haven’t been done before, and at a pace that’s challenging to keep up with. At The Times and Sunday Times, our team is constantly on the lookout for ways of improving our editorial workflow, and ensuring we get the very best from our great quality journalism.

  • With Joyent’s Blessings, and New Members, The Node.js Foundation Takes Shape

    A foundation can do a lot for an open source project. Just look at The OpenStack Foundation or The Linux Foundation. This week, Node.js, the very popular server-side JavaScript framework that is used for building and running websites and online applications, got its own foundation. Among other things, that means that Joyent will no longer solely govern Node.js. The foundation should help the project gain more contributions and develop more quickly.

  • Enterprise Software 2015: Mobility, Cloud and Open Source

    The economy is looking up mean that business budgets will likely see healthy growth in the new year. Forrester is predicting 4 to 6 percent growth for 2015 global IT budgets, reaching $620 billion. Much of the growth in spending will go towards technology like analytics, mobile, as-a-service, and enterprise applications like ERP and CRM. The US will lead IT spending, followed by India and the UK.

  • I Do Not Fear the Greeks Bearing Gifts

    Free software is particularly well-suite to Greece because it is a small market compared to those for the anglophone or francophone worlds, say. That means software is unlikely to be produced in regional versions as a priority. Open source, of course, can be modified by anyone, allowing localised versions of existing free software to be produced easily. All of these considerations apply elsewhere, especially among smaller countries, and it has always been something of a mystery to me why they don’t embrace open source more readily.

  • Hortonworks Teams With Others on Hadoop Data Governance Framework
  • Hortonworks and Hitachi Data Systems partner to deliver Apache Hadoop to the enterprise
  • Meet Myriad, a new project for running Hadoop on Mesos

    What he means is that companies will no longer have to run Hadoop on one set of resources, while running the web servers, Spark and any other number of workloads on other resources managed by Mesos. Essentially, all of these things will now be available as data center services residing on the same set of machines. Mesos has always supported Hadoop as a workload type — and companies including Twitter and Airbnb have taken advantage of this — but YARN has appeal as the default resource manager for newer distributions of Hadoop because it’s designed specifically for that platform and, well, is one of the foundations of those newer distributions.

  • A new open source big data framework

    MapR and Mesosphere are announcing a new open source big data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacentres.

  • New open-source Myriad project unifies Apache YARN and Apache Mesos resource management
  • ONF expands open-source software development

    The Open Networking Forum (ONF), a non-profit organisation dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), has announced the appointment of Saurav Das as principal system architect, and the establishment of a new project to build upon the OpenFlow Configuration and Management Protocol (OF-CONFIG) to support Open vSwitch (OVS). Saurav’s contributions to ONF and the announcement of this project build on the organisation’s open-source software efforts that began with the OpenFlow Driver competition, followed by ONF SampleTap and the Segment Routing project SPRING-OPEN, all of which were completed in 2014. Open-source software is a key route to developing de factor standards and fostering interoperability, both of which are ONF goals.

  • Google releases open-source tool for evaluating cloud performance

    This week Google announced it would provide a cloud computing performance evaluator called PerKit Benchmarker. The evaluation tool is hosted on the open-source collaboration site Github, and will allow users of the Google Cloud Platform, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure to measure their current provider’s performance against industry-established benchmarks.

  • Open Source Node.js To Get its Own Foundation

    Node.js, the popular open-source, server-side JavaScript runtime project, will soon be governed by an independent foundation, its chief commercial sponsor announced this week.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Hortonworks dishes out Hadoop for HDS: Mmmm, open source with big vendor gravy

      HDS will offer open-source data muncher Hadoop to the enterprise after doing a deal with Hortonworks.

      Hadoop distributor Hortonworks has signed an agreement with HDS to jointly promote and support the software. HDS can now deliver Hortonworks’ Data Platform (HDP), Hadoop in other words, to its enterprise customers.

      Hortonworks strategic marketing veep John Kreisa offered this canned quote: “The strategic agreement also provides a joint engineering commitment for the two companies on current and future projects that will help make Hadoop enterprise-ready.”

  • Databases

    • Sisense, Simba Partner Around MongoDB NoSQL Business Analytics

      Hadoop has made lots of big data headlines by now. But in a reminder that it is only part of the open source big data story, Sisense and Simba partnered this week to deliver data analytics via MongoDB, the open source NoSQL platform, which is increasingly importance in production big data use.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.3.22 Brings Support for Linux Kernel 3.19, X.Org Server 1.17, Windows 10 Preview

      That was pretty fast! It looks like Oracle knows what it is doing and just updated its awesome VirtualBox virtualization software, which we have to admit that we use every day here on Softpedia to test all sorts of distributions of GNU/Linux and many other Linux-related applications, to version 4.3.22, bringing initial support for the recently released Linux kernel 3.19.

  • Funding

  • Public Services/Government

    • How open source delivers for government

      Amid the well-deserved hype around the impact of cloud technology and big data analytics, it is possible that casual industry watchers may have missed the real story behind the recent wave of IT re-architecting.

      Enabling many of these recent, powerful trends is a newly validated embrace of open source software technology. The movement to OSS solutions is empowering system designers and solution architects to re-examine methodologies that evolved out of the legacy proprietary, closed source software license model. Put simply, OSS allows developers of IT systems to create better results and cut costs.

  • Licensing

    • CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0 added to our list of free licenses

      The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International and Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licenses are now on our list of free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.

      We have updated our list of Various Licenses and Comments about Them to include the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0). Both of these licenses are free licenses for works of practical use besides software and documentation.

      CC BY 4.0 is a noncopyleft license that is compatible with the GNU General Public License version 3.0 (GPLv3), meaning you can combine a CC BY 4.0 licensed work with a GPLv3 licensed work a larger work that is then released under the terms of GPLv3.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Commuter disruption after motorist drives car on to tram tracks in Wythenshawe

    The white Fiat drove on to the line at Baguley this afternoon, causing delays to services between Cornbrook and Manchester Airport.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • Chris Matthews Calls for ‘Rambo Kind of Stuff’ as Response to Real-World Violence

      In response to Matthews’ call for “bombing the hell out of them,” Sheehan does make an important point about ISIS’s well-publicized display of violence, which is “they did this for a purpose.” The purpose he proposes–”They’re doing this to try to intimidate us so that we go home”–is implausible, since ISIS surely knows that the United States, like most countries, generally responds to violence with more violence. It’s much more likely that ISIS, like the Al-Qaeda movement it springs from, believes spectacular acts of terror will draw a military response from the United States that will help it to build its movement (Extra!, 7/11). But at least Sheehan is thinking of violence as being part of a political strategy rather than as a form of emotional release, as Matthews seems to see it:

    • Nagging questions on US role in Mamasapano mission

      Questions persist over the true role of the United States in the events leading up to the deadly encounter in Mamasapano and in the immediate aftermath.

      Did the US provide all or part of the intelligence that formed the basis for the ill-fated Special Action Force operation?

      Were its operatives involved in the planning of the mission and in its execution?

    • Protesters call for Aquino resignation

      “The blood debt of the US which include the genocide of 1.5 million Filipinos in the Filipino-American war remain unpaid and their atrocities continue to spiral up. They’re even using Filipino troops as pawns in their interventionist terror war such as what happened the covert SAF operation Mamasapano,” said Charisse Bañez, national spokesperson of the League of Filipino Students.

      Vencer Crisostomo, Anakbayan National Chair, said that Aquino “sacrificed his own troops in the name of the US war on terror.”

      “This disastrous collaboration between Aquino and the US is a disrespect to all the victims of the Filipino genocide during Filipino-American War,” said Crisostomo.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Privacy

    • Instrumentalizing Fear to Control Encrypted Communications is Dangerously Anti-Democratic

      Recent Paris attacks have triggered a wave of securitarian discourse and dangerous upcoming legislative measures that are spreading way beyond France. Increased control of communications online, surveillance, attacks against anonymous speech and encryption are already on the table, under the pretence of fighting an invisible enemy in a perpetual war.

    • Facebook and “Corporate Friends” Threat Exchange?

      Fahwad Al-Khadoumi (nsnbc) : Facebook teamed up with several corporate “friends” to adapt Facebook’s in-house software to identify cyber threats and their source with other corporations. Countering cyber threats sounds positive while there are serious questions about transparency when smaller, independent media fall victim to major corporation’s unwillingness to reveal the source of attacks resulted in websites being closed for hours or days. Transparency, yes, but for whom?

    • Court upholds NSA snooping

      The challenge against the controversial Upstream program was tossed out because additional defense from the government would have required “impermissible disclosure of state secret information,” Judge Jeffrey White wrote in his decision.

    • New York Times columnist David Carr has died. Here is his last interview, with Edward Snowden

      David Carr, the 58-year-old media columnist for the New York Times, collapsed suddenly at the newspaper’s office this evening and died after being rushed to the hospital.

      Carr was previously the editor-in-chief of Washington City Paper and the author of a memoir, Year of the Gun, about his recovery from drug addiction and cancer while raising two young daughters.

    • SOCIALIZE THE DATA CENTRES!

      Technology companies can enact all sorts of political agendas, and right now the dominant agendas enforce neoliberalism and austerity, using centralized data to identify immigrants to be deported, or poor people likely to default on their debts. Yet I believe there is a huge positive potential in the accumulation of more data, in a good institutional—and by that I mean political—setup. Once you monitor one part of my activity and offer me some proposals or predictions about it, it’s reasonable to suppose your service would be better if you also monitored my other activities. The fact that Google monitors my Web searches, my email, my location, makes its predictions in each of these categories much more accurate than if it were to monitor only one of them. If you take this logic to its ultimate conclusion, it becomes clear you don’t want two hundred different providers of information services—you want just one, because the scale-effects make things much easier for users. The big question, of course, is whether that player has to be a private capitalist corporation, or some federated, publicly-run set of services that could reach a data-sharing agreement free of monitoring by intelligence agencies.

    • David Carr, Influential New York Times Media Columnist, Dead At 58

      New York Times columnist David Carr, one of the most incisive and influential writers on the media business, died Thursday night after collapsing in the paper’s midtown Manhattan newsroom. He was 58.

      Times executive editor Dean Baquet informed staff of the death of their “wonderful, esteemed colleague” in a newsroom memo.

      [...]

      Earlier Thursday, Carr moderated a TimesTalk on the National Security Agency leaks with Edward Snowden, and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Within hours, he was dead.

  • Civil Rights

  • DRM

    • Keurig Delivers DRM in a Cup

      Who would’ve thought it possible that digital rights management (DRM) would come to the coffee business? Well, it has. Believe it or not, Keurig now includes DRM on their coffee makers. Why? To keep users from using anything but Keurig coffee pods on their machines, of course. You know, just like the DRM used by some printer manufacturers to keep you coming back (and coming back) for their branded replacement ink cartridges instead of opting for the much cheaper store brand.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The secret business plan that could spell the end for SMEs

      Despite its extensive implications, TTIP has generated relatively little coverage, not least because negotiations are shrouded in secrecy and conducted primarily with corporate lobbyists, who have minimal obligations to the public interest. So clandestine are the talks that the few MEPs that are granted access can only view the plans in their original documentation, in a secure location, with the threat of espionage charges if they try to make copies or share the details with the public.

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