• Stop ‘Reinventing The Wheel’: Almanac Creates Open-Source Templates Library With $9M Seed Round

  Almanac, a cloud-based platform for professionals to create, collaborate and share open-source work documents, announced a $9 million seed round of funding on Thursday led by Mike Maples Jr., a Floodgate partner.

• How open source fostered the community spirit in the tech world

• RudderStack raises $5M seed round for its open-source Segment competitor

• The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® CloudStack® v 4.14

• Five Ways Open-Source Software Can Benefit You and Your Research

• 10 Best Open Source and Free App Builders -- Plus, The Top App Development Agencies to Hire in 2020, According to App Developers Rating Platform

• Beyond Linux and macOS: The best alternatives to Windows

  FreeDOS is, as its name allows us to guess, an heir to MS DOS. A free and free version If you are looking for alternatives to Windows pro, you don’t want multitasking or a graphical interface. Here you can run all MS-DOS programs and enjoy the classic adapted to the times. It receives continuous updates and works on any standard PC if you want to use any of the old code and classic operating system programs.

  [...]

  Among the best alternatives to Windows is ReactOS and so much so that from their website they promise that you wouldn’t notice the change. It came in the late nineties to imitate the windows operating system and it is an open source system compatible with most Windows applications and drivers. It was launched in 1996 as a clone of Microsoft and now, more than twenty years later it is still a good free option and with continuous updates, with a window system … it may seem retro algo’And obsolete at times but it can be a good option if you are looking for something new. You can download it from its website and, like most of this list, you will find the instructions and all doubts about its operation from the website itself. community behind ReactOS.

• Welcome to ChefConf Online Week

  Welcome to ChefConf Online week! On the surface, this year’s event looks a lot different than years past. While we’ve moved to a new online format, what hasn’t changed is creating the opportunity for the Chef community to gather in one place, learn about what’s new in the DevSecOps and Automation space, get best practices and expert guidance from your peers, and have some fun and celebrate what makes our community so special.

• Open Source Vet Joins Taylor English IP Team In San Antonio

  Taylor English Duma LLP announced this week it has hired a veteran intellectual property attorney from Dykema Gossett PLLC who is experienced with open source software to the firm's intellectual property practice in San Antonio, Texas.

  Van Lindberg joined Atlanta-based Taylor English as partner in March after serving as a member at Dykema Gossett for about three years, where he represented companies in high-stakes litigation and inter partes reviews.

  Before that, Lindberg made his name in the open source community by serving as general counsel, vice president of technology and vice president of intellectual property at cloud computing service company Rackspace,...

• How open standards guide us in a world of change

  As I write this article in my home office in Beaverton, Oregon, a Portland suburb, I'm relying (and reflecting) on years of work that went into standards like TCP/IP, HTTP, NTP, XMPP, SAML, and many others, as well as open source implementations of these standards from organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation. The combination of these standards and technologies is literally saving lives, as many of us are able to work from home while "flattening the curve."

  Nothing has dominated the news more in 2020 than COVID-19. Yet, in the midst of challenging time, I've found opportunities for personal and industrial renewal. By fortunate (some may say unfortunate) timing, I found myself switching roles in the middle of this crisis from helping to build and run Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) to becoming the executive director at OASIS Open, a standards development organization that is helping bring standards and open source together in practical and productive ways.

  Looking through the many articles on Opensource.com related to standards (and there are quite a few), I went on an interesting journey through the different thought processes—and sometimes biases—that people involved in each community have. What stood out most was this: both standards professionals and open source advocates want the same thing—better technology that we all can rely on.

  As I was transitioning to this new role at OASIS, some colleagues and friends in the open source world that I've been a part of for many years questioned my motivations for making this move. In explaining why I took this job, I reflected on the larger role I think the intersection of standards and open source can play, especially in the current crisis we all face.

• Q&A: How open source made Kubernetes appealing to enterprise app developers

  A: We are at an interesting inflection point right now with computing. We went from physical hardware to virtual machines to containers and to concepts like serverless computing. And we’re asking questions like, “Can it get even smaller?”

  We’re trying to make the underlying platform more powerful, but less and less visible. So if it’s invisible to developers, do we just stop caring about it?

  But you could make the same argument with Linux, right? If the application is done well, and Linux is doing its job, you shouldn't care about it. It's just running, it’s fast, it’s scalable. Kubernetes probably follows that path more than anything.

• How open source communities work and what enterprises can learn

• Inside Red Hat: Its open source heritage means big opportunity in cloud computing

  The open source proposition has been embedded in Red Hat’s roots since the company’s founding in 1993 and has since remained at the core of its guiding principles, with Linux operating system (OS) at the heart of all its innovations. Vendor loyalty and clearly charted paths were the mantras many companies operated on for years, while “digital transformation” was barely on an enterprise’s short-term road map.

  Then a decade ago, cloud adoption surged, creating the impetus to embrace more agile and flexible development models, and open source technologies emerged.

  [...]

  While the topic of COVID-19 did not overtly dominate the discussions or significantly color the overarching Red Hat messaging, it became clear that the ability to pivot rapidly, embrace change and remain flexible will underscore Red Hat’s efforts to successfully promote transformation amid the pandemic. Red Hat’s reputation has historically been predicated on its open and agile approach to development and deployment, long before such attributes were considered valuable, let alone essential.

• Red Hat: Holding Its Own and Fueling Open Source Innovation

  When IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019, it was considered the industry’s largest software acquisition. The synergy between the two companies led them to become one of the leading hybrid multi-cloud providers globally.

  In most acquisitions, the acquired entity sometimes loses momentum and sheds some of its original luster. This does not seem to be the case with Red Hat.

Linux Lite 5.0 Final Codename Emerald is now available for download and installation.

This is the most feature rich, complete Linux Lite release to date. This is the release many people have been waiting for.
See below for details.

Also new: Whonix VirtualBox 15.0.1.3.4 - Point Release!

• Cucumber ESP32-S2 Development Board Comes with USB OTG Port, Optional Sensors

  Yesterday, I wrote about LilyGO TTGO ESP32-S2 WiFi IoT board, but one commenter mentioned it missed one of the key features of ESP32-S2 chip: a USB OTG port. While USB OTG is accessible through the header pins, it’s not the most convenient to use.

  I also quickly mentioned Cucumber ESP32-S2 development board in that post, but I did not expand too much since I thought it should only ship within Thailand. But the board does include two USB Type-C ports, one for the usual USB UART connector, and the other for USB OTG, and I found out the board is available worldwide.

• TTGO ESP32-S2 WiFi IoT Board Comes with Optional MicroSD Card and Battery Support

  All ESP32-S2 boards I’ve seen so far were from Espressif Systems themselves including ESP32-S2-Saola-1 and ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1, but LilyGO TTGO ESP32-S2 is the first third-party board for sale so far.

  The tiny board is somewhat similar to ESP32-S2-Saola-1 board and comes in two versions with a similar form factor, but a completely different pinout and the presence of a MicroSD card socket and a battery connector on one of the boards.

  [...]

  The boards are a bit more different than I expected at first look. Please note that specifications should be seen as preliminary, as there were obvious mistakes such as Bluetooth support (not available for ESP32-S2) which I did not included in the specs above, but there may be others which I missed.

• CR Deck Mk.1 Is An Open Source AR Headset Based On Project North Star With Ultraleap Hand-Tracking

• Open Source Ventilators Helped by Electronic Design Software

  In the early days of the pandemic, the first major challenge facing nations was a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators. The former helps safeguard hospital personnel from potential contamination; the latter are necessary to keep the most critically ill patients breathing once the virus attacks their respiratory systems.

  Ventilators are traditionally large and very costly devices; smaller ventilators—known as field emergency ventilators (FEVs) have been used in emergency settings, including combat missions and in Third World nations for decades to help keep patients alive as they await transport to hospitals for intubation.

• NASA JPL Team Fires up Open Source PPE Respirator Designs

  Does it really take a team of rocket scientists to rapidly engineer a top-notch line of personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect against COVID-19 spread? And then to open source its production designs for the benefit of anyone with access to a 3D printer?

  The answer: not necessarily, but it sure can help.

  That’s the latest good news on the pandemic front from the technology and innovation team at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

• NASA and other innovators work to redesign ventilators for Covid-19 patients

  NASA scientists as well as other innovators are busy developing alternatives to the traditional ventilator being used worldwide to treat severe cases of Covid-19. The movement is in response to growing evidence that in some cases ventilators can cause more harm than good in some patients with low oxygen levels. Statistics tell the story: 80% of patients with the coronavirus die on such machines.

  This comes just a few months since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when U.S. healthcare providers said that they needed ventilators to accommodate the flood of new patients, and lots of them. The crisis triggered the Trump administration to activate the Defense Production Act so manufacturers including Ford, GM and GE could start ventilator production to produce these medical devices for the U.S. government.