today's leftovers

• GPL Had Better be a Contract

  Software Freedom Conservancy announced today that they are suing Vizio, which makes TVs, for violations of GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. Their website has a copy of a signed complaint, the legal document you file with a court to get a lawsuit started.

  Upshot: It looks like SFC’s suing for breach of contract. They’re claiming explicitly that GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 are contracts, that Vizio breached those contracts, and that they should be held accountable under contract law.

  The main remedy SFC requests—the thing they’re asking the court to do for them—is to order Vizio to give them full corresponding source code, as agreed under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. That’s called “specific performance”. It’s a remedy under contract law. Not property law or intellectual property law, like copyright law.

• Open access switch picks up pace in Australia and New Zealand

  Australian and New Zealand universities have notched up open access deals with two major academic publishers inside a week after Springer Nature unveiled a “transformative agreement” with the Council of Australian University Librarians (Caul).

  The three-year “read and publish” arrangement covers the article processing charges that authors normally pay to move their work in front of paywalls. Researchers will be able to make their articles freely accessible if they are accepted for publication in more than 2,000 journals, provided that their universities subscribe to those journals.

• OK Lenovo, we need to talk!

  I’ve been wanting to publicly comment on Lenovo’s statement on Linux support for a while, as there’s much to say about it, and my failing attempt at finding a suitable replacement for my venerable T510 gave me an excuse to document my love-hate relationship with Lenovo all at once.

  This is of course my own personal views and ideas, and does not reflect the Haiku project’s position on the topic, nor that of Haiku, Inc. But I feel they deserve to be brought here due to history and the direct and indirect effect it might have had on the project, including previous failed attempts at commercial applications using it.

  While Lenovo is still above many other manufacturers on some aspects, and on others domains, well, nobody does any better anyway, they purport to perpetuating the IBM legacy, so I think (sic) they should be held up to the standard they claim to follow. Yet the discussion about repair and documentation pertains to almost every vendor.

• sh(1): make it the default shell for the root user

  This changes also simplifies making tiny freebsd images with only sh(1) as a shell

• #13 It begins…

  Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 01 to October 08.

• CUDA-Python Reaches "GA" With NVIDIA CUDA 11.5 Release, __int128 Preview

  NVIDIA has made available CUDA 11.5 today as the latest version of their popular but proprietary compute stack/platform. Notable with CUDA 11.5 is that CUDA-Python has reached general availability status. NVIDIA CUDA 11.5 was posted today along with updated device drivers for Windows and Linux systems. Some of the CUDA 11.5 highlights include:

• AMD GPU Driver Looks To Make Use Of Intel's New Buddy Allocator Code In The Linux Kernel - Phoronix

  Thanks to the nature of open-source, AMD engineers for the "AMDGPU" kernel graphics driver are looking to make use of Intel's new i915 buddy allocator code they introduced as part of all their video memory management changes as part of their discrete graphics bring-up. As part of Intel's bring-up of device local memory support for their dedicated GPU enablement and adding the notion of memory regions and other changes, they added a buddy allocator implementation for allocating video memory. This is an implementation of the well known buddy system for dividing of memory into equal parts (buddies) and continuing equal splitting that until able to satisfy the memory request.

Programming Leftovers

• Ruby Lands "YJIT" As A Speedy, In-Process JIT Compiler - Phoronix

  YJIT is a JIT compiler for Ruby that leverages the lazy Basic Block Versioning (LBBV) architecture. YJIT has been in the works for a number of years. Most exciting for end-users and developers is that YJIT yields an average speed-up of around 23% compared to the current CRuby interpreter for realistic benchmarks.

• Release: rebuilderd v0.15.0

  rebuilderd 0.15.0 very recently released, this is a short intro into what it is, how it works and how to build our own integrations!

• Eclipse OpenJ9 0.29 Released With Full AArch64 Linux Support, More Mature JITServer Tech

  The newest feature release to Eclipse OpenJ9 is now available, the high performance Java Virtual Machine originating from IBM J9. Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.29 was released today, one day after the GraalVM 21.3 release and one month after the OpenJDK 17 debut. But in the case of OpenJ9 v0.29 it continues to target just OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11.

Security, Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub), and Microsoft FUD

• Intel Makes ControlFlag Open-Source For Helping To Detect Bugs In Code - Phoronix

  Last year Intel announced ControlFlag as a machine learning tool for helping to uncover bugs within code. ControlFlag promised impressive results after being trained on more than one billion lines of code and at the end of 2020 was already being used internally on Intel's code-bases from firmware to software applications. We hadn't heard anything more about ControlFlag this year... Until today. Intel has now made ControlFlag open-source for helping to autonomously detect more programming bugs.

• Developers: Intel's automated debugging tool ControlFlag is now open source [Ed: Intel has once again outsourced a project, this time ControlFlag, to Microsoft's proprietary software]

  Now available via GitHub, ControlFlag taps machine learning to automatically identify bugs in software and firmware code, saving developers the time-consuming task of manually debugging the programs they write.

• Newly Found npm Malware Mines Cryptocurrency on Windows, Linux, macOS Devices [Ed: Microsoft is shipping malware and a Microsoft partner, Sonatype, blames the recipients]

  Sonatype’s automated malware detection system has caught multiple malicious packages on the npm registry this month. These packages disguise themselves as legitimate JavaScript libraries but were caught launching cryptominers on Windows, macOS and Linux machines.

• These hackers dodge Windows and target Linux as they look to steal phone data [Ed: ZDNet has resorted to shamelessly quoting and relaying talking points from Microsoft-connected operatives, basically painting Windows with back doors as "OK" and Linux guilty for things that have nothing to do with Linux]