OSS Leftovers

• Oasis Loss Modelling Framework Offered Open Source, Free of Charge

  Not-for-profit catastrophe modeling platform Oasis Loss Modelling Framework announced that all components of its catastrophe modeling software are now open source and downloadable from GitHub, free of charge.

• Open source adoption key to fintech sufes: FINOS

  Is there a place for open source, and open source collaboration in particular, in the financial services industry, with its strict security, governance, regulatory and privacy requirements? According to the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the answer is an emphatic "yes". FINOS, an independent non-profit organisation, believes that as the financial services sector is going through a period of unprecedented technological transformation, organisations that embrace open source software development and common standards will be best positioned to capture the growth opportunities that this transformation presents.

• The Open Source Initiative: Worth the Hype?

  The popular internet advertisement blocker Adblock Plus — originally built with open-source code — is partnering with the OSI. Along with funding, innovation is underway. Google is opening an AI research center in France, with all code and results open to the public, according to Tech Crunch. As noted by FossBytes, Facebook used open-source technology to develop a new unit of time known as a Flick, which is short for frame-tick and is exactly 1/705,600,000 of a second. It allows videos at certain hertz to represent single-frame durations as integer quantities rather than decimal places. Flick should make it easier for companies and content creators to keep their videos in sync regardless of their encoding frequency.

• 5 questions to answer before building a community

  I've talked to a number of business leaders recently about building communities for their company or product. While everybody recognizes the benefits of having a vibrant and active community, many are unsure about what it means and how to build it. Not knowing these details can mean wasting time and money on things that will not give you the results you want. While interviewing for community management roles, I started asking for these details to determine whether company leaders understand why they want a community and what they want it to do for them.

• Hackers on Planet Earth, Here We Come!

  Dating all the way back to 1994, HOPE is an excellent collection of people and ideas. I was lucky enough to attend two years ago (my first time) and had a fantastic time meeting Cory Doctorow after his rousing talk about DMCA 1201, I got to hear Richard Stallman discuss why all software must be free, the talent show was off the hook, and there were fun people to hang out with at every turn.

• Huawei makes prominent showing at open source event

  For a company that is supposed to be down and out (of the U.S. telecom space), Huawei made a relatively prominent showing at OSCON 2018, where it sponsored a keynote Wednesday morning and made its presence known throughout the convention center’s halls and on the exhibit floor. Such a showing by Huawei is nothing new. The company has sponsored events and plastered banners at wireless industry events in the past. But the moves are notable given the wrath that Huawei has seen in the nation’s current political climate and heightened scrutiny concerns it continues to get in the telecom space.

• A guide: The incorporation of OpenStack and Open Source MANO for NFV deployments

  As we know, OpenStack is mainly known to be the largest pool of open source projects which collectively form the software platform for cloud computing infrastructure. This infrastructure is used widely in private cloud use cases by many enterprises. After an introduction of NFV by ETSI, OpenStack has emerged as a key infrastructure platform for NFV. In most of the NFV deployments, OpenStack is used at VIM (Virtual Infrastructure Manager) layer to give a standardised interface for managing, monitoring and assessing all resources within NFV infrastructure. Various OpenStack projects, such as Tacker, Neutron, Nova, Astara, Congress, Mistral, Senlin) are capable of managing virtualised infrastructure components of NFV environment. As an example, Tacker is utilised to build a generic VNF Manager (VNFM) and NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) which helps in deployment and operation of VNFs within NFV infrastructure. Additionally, integration of OpenStack projects introduces various features to NFV infrastructure. Features include performance features like huge pages, CPU pinning, NUMA topology and SR-IOV; service function chaining, network slicing, scalability, high availability, resiliency and multi-site enablement.

• The changing role of DBAs in an "as-a-service" world

  Over the years at Percona, we have seen this shift as well. The types of issues we face daily have evolved along with the database environment (and the role of the DBA). Currently, more than 50% of the support tickets our customers open are related to application design issues, query performance, or database infrastructure design. Five years ago, help requests and support tickets around issues like these represented less than 20% of our overall caseload. This makes sense when you think about the maturity of open source databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL and the technological advances that impact the database. More stable databases, coupled with advances in either homegrown automation or cloud-based infrastructure, reduce the likelihood of general crashing bugs due to the core database software. Often, today's causes of outages and issues are design decisions, bad code, or odd "edge cases" that weren't considered in the initial planning. All of this means that the role of the DBA is moving away from simply "keeping it up and running" to a much more strategic position: The DBA is one of the experts that helps enterprises reach their strategic business goals.

• GCC 8.2 Release Candidate Arrives For Compiler Testing

  GCC 8.2 as the first point release to the stable GCC 8 compiler is tentatively set to debut next Thursday, 26 July, but available now for testing is the release candidate. Available today is 8.2.0-RC-20180719 as the release candidate to GCC 8.2.0.

• FSFE Newsletter - July 2018

  On July 5, The European Parliament rejected the mandate to fast-track the controversial legislation intended to reform online copyright.

• g2k18 hackathon report: Florian Obser on rtadvd(8) -> rad(8) progress (actually, rewrite)

• Python post-Guido

  There were two main areas that Van Rossum called out for governance: how PEPs are decided and how new core developers are added. The latter seems to already be based on a vote of the existing core developers. They are the only ones allowed to post to the core-committers mailing list, which is where Van Rossum posted his resignation, presumably to avoid wading through hundreds of messages—nearly all undoubtedly positive and grateful, though surely there would have been some trolls as well.

Google and Android

• Google Partners With Zapata on Open-Source Quantum Computing Effort

• Google launches quantum framework Cirq, plans Bristlecone cloud move

  Google today launched Cirq, an open source framework for running algorithms on the quantum computers that will be available in the near future. A common problem researchers face when designing quantum algorithms for today’s quantum computers – the 50 to 100 qubit Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices – is in working within the limitations and nuances of the hardware.

• Google wants to make programming quantum computers easier

• Google Adds Kubernetes to Rebranded Cloud Marketplace

  Google's goal is to make containers accessible to everyone, especially the enterprise, according to Anil Dhawan, product manager for the Google Cloud Platform. When Google released Kubernetes as open source, one of the first challenges that the industry tackled was management, he said. Google's hosted Kubernetes Engine takes care of cluster orchestration and management. A bigger challenge to getting apps running on a Kubernetes cluster can be a manual, time-consuming process. GCP Marketplace provides prepackaged apps and deploys them onto any cluster, Dhawan noted. Google makes the process safer by testing and vetting all Kubernetes apps listed on GCP Marketplace. That process includes vulnerability scanning and partner agreements for maintenance and support.

• Is Google Replacing Android with Fuchsia? Maybe, But Not for a Long Time

  Today Bloomberg is reporting that Google’s new Project Fuchsia operating system might actually be a successor to Android. Since this will likely fuel speculation, we thought we’d weigh in with our completely uninformed educated guesses as well. For those who haven’t read our previous explainer on Project Fuchsia (recommended reading), it’s a completely new operating system in the very early stages of development. It’s meant to be a universal operating system, capable of running on everything from smart speakers and smartphones to desktop computers. The idea would be an operating system that can literally run the same code on every single smart device—the holy grail of operating systems.

• As EU tightens screws on Android, Google focuses on a Fuchsia future

  Google plans to replace Android with Fuchsia beginning with a smart speaker in 2021, says Bloomberg. Fuchsia could help Google sidestep Android-related legal threats from Oracle and the EU, which just slapped Google with a $5.1 billion fine. A Bloomberg report based on information from undisclosed sources within Google claims the company is planning to use its emerging Project Fuchsia OS as a replacement for Android, embedded Linux, and Chrome OS in devices ranging from smart speakers to phones, and eventually laptops. The first Fuchsia based smart speakers are expected in 2021.

• Samsung Plans to Launch Foldable-Screen Phone Early Next Year

  Samsung Electronics Co. is planning to introduce a foldable-screen smartphone early next year, according to people familiar with the matter, as the world’s largest phone maker eyes a splashy device to help re-energize its slumping handset business.

 

• Samsung’s Long-awaited Foldable Screen Smartphone Arriving In 2019: Report

• 8 Best Android Emulators For 2018 To Experience Android On Your PC

  Android Emulators are seemingly becoming more popular as Android’s popularity keeps growing. From developers testing apps to gamers playing on a large screen, users yearn for experiencing Android operating system with a mouse and keyboard, coupled with high specifications of the PC.

• How To Add Animated GIF As Your Android Home Button?

• How to get an animated GIF as your home button on Android [Root]

Fedora: Some Fedora 29 Plans, Report for Fedora App, and Flatpak Outline

• Fedora 29 Aims To Better Support FPGAs

  A rather late self-contained feature proposal for the in-development Fedora 29 is to better support FPGAs. Given the growing number of devices appearing with onboard FPGAs thanks to machine/deep learning, AI, and other workloads that can be accelerated on FPGAs, Fedora 29 is aiming to better support them. The support will be focused on FPGAs with good upstream kernel support and utilizing the FPGA manager framework that is vendor-neutral.

• [Week 9] GSoC Status Report for Fedora App: Amitosh

  You can now subscribe to a particular calendar from the Fedora app!. No more missed meetings. We also take care of converting the date and time to the local timezone so that you get the reminders at the correct time. Subscribing to a calendar automatically syncs all events for a calendar on FedoCal to the device calendar. If the device calendar syncs with a sync provider such as Google calendar, you will get the notification in all synced devices. If a meeting is deleted or removed, the reminder will dismissed as well.

• Flatpak – a look behind the portal

  There are several principles that have guided the design of the existing portals. Keep the user in control To achieve this, most portals will show a dialog to let the user accept or deny the applications’ request. This is not a hard rule — in some cases, a dialog is just not practical. Avoid yes/no questions Direct questions about permissions tend to be dismissed without much thought, since they get in the way of the task at hand. Therefore, portals avoid this kind of question whenever possible and instead just let the user get on with the task. For example, when an app is requesting to open a file on the host, we just present the user with a fille chooser. By selecting a file, the user implicitly grants the application access to the file. Or he can cancel the file selection and implicitly deny the applications’ request. Don’t be annoying Nothing is worse than having to answer the same question over and over. Portals make use of a database to record previous decisions and avoid asking repeatedly for the same thing. [...] If you want to explore how portals work, or just need to double-check which files an app has access to, flatpak has tools that let you do so conveniently.

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