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OSS Leftovers

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  • The IT Pro Podcast: Does open source have a place in public sector IT?

    While there are some unique problems facing public sector IT, many of them are universal. From mitigating the tech skills gap and dealing with legacy kit and contracts, to allocating budget effectively and choosing a cloud strategy, the sheer vastness of government means there are many lessons to learn – including whether moving to open source can be the answer to many of the headaches facing IT leaders today.

    In the latest episode of the IT Pro Podcast, Jane and Adam are joined by Adrian Keward, chief technologist, public sector at Red Hat to discuss the challenges facing public sector today, and some of the solutions that are being found.

  • Boost Note: Open-Source Note Taking App's New Version Is Out Now

    Programmers are known for taking lots of notes, which come from all sorts of ideas. To ensure that they are able to save the notes in an organized and structured manner, a solution specifically designed for the developers is available with Boost Note, an intuitive and stylish markdown editor for the developers. Developed by a company called 'BoostIO', Boost Note is available as a fully open-source desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux.

  • 10 Best Open Source Accounting software in 2020

    Open Source Accounting software that available online are only a handful with good capabilities, however, enough to start and perform day to day accounting stuff. You can use them to manage invoices, billing, transaction records, a note of incoming and outgoing funds to manage your personal or enterprise finances. Well, also take one thing into cognizance that few opensource accounting solutions are only available of Linux users.

    Thus, if you are planning to download and start using one then no need to surf dozens of online pages, here is the list of best open source accounting software to manage your financials.

  • How the open-source movement in India has progressed | The Hindu Parley podcast

    Open Source has been part and parcel of software programming in India for a while now. Free sharing has been an ideal for long. But have Big Tech proprietary firms co-opted the open-source platforms along the way?

  • What is the state of ‘open source’ in India today?

    Venkatesh Hariharan: When we started the campaign for more OS in 2000, we had political, cultural and economic reasons to believe it was important. Politically, we wanted to ensure more diversity in the kind of players that existed in the market with twin objectives: that we were independent from a technology standpoint and that software was localised to Indian languages. From a cost perspective, if we were dependent on multinational companies for core technology like operating systems, that would have been a drain on the exchequer. So that was the logic. Today, some of the largest e-governance projects and start-ups in India are running on OS. The early days when we had to campaign for people to use OS is over; now we are in a new era where OS is the new normal.

    [...]

    VH: We’re living in an era where data is abundant and I look at the commonality between code and data. The ideals of the OS movement were about collaboration and the shared ownership of knowledge. And within that context, the proliferation of data and the fact that it’s only a few players who are able to monetise that data means that we now need to move to an era where it’s not just a few platforms that benefit from our data, but that individuals are able to leverage and are empowered with their own data. So, in a sense, I see a commonality with the OS movement in that even a college student sitting in Sweden or any other part of the world should be able to write an operating system that can be used in any part of the world. Now, we should be able to build systems where individuals can take control of their data and be in control of how other people monetise it and leverage it for loans, etc.

  • commercetools: how GraphQL works for front-end developers

    GraphQL is a layer that sits on top of REST APIs, any application or data store — and it makes the process of data retrieval and extraction across multiple APIs easy.

    Say you’re a developer for a retailer tasked with rendering a page for a product. You’ve already built a catalogue of 300 REST APIs and now need your product detail page to access data including product description, price and similar item information.

  • Open source community lagging in diversity

    Tech companies that build diverse and inclusive workforces are more successful than companies that don’t, according to a recently released report from the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs (UNTIL) in Finland.

    The report, “Inclusion and Diversity: Tech It or Leave IT”, found that companies which invest in and recruit women and minority staff at every level of their organisation function better, produce products that are appealing to more people and earn higher revenues.

  • SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: ALBERT

    Google is open-sourcing a “lite” version of their BERT natural language processing (NLP) pre-training technique. ALBERT is an updated version of BERT that improves 12 NLP tasks, including the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD v2.0) and the SAT reading comprehension RACE benchmark.

    BERT was first open sourced by Google at the end of 2018, and since then, natural language research has reached a new paradigm of leveraging large volumes of existing text to pretrain model parameters, the company explained.

  • Google Open-Sources ALBERT Natural Language Model

    Google AI has open-sourced A Lite Bert (ALBERT), a deep-learning natural language processing (NLP) model, which uses 89% fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art BERT model, with little loss of accuracy. The model can also be scaled-up to achieve new state-of-the-art performance on NLP benchmarks.

  • [Older] Is the open-source technology Zeek, one of the most trusted but underappreciated tools in security?

    Think back to the mid-1990s. If you’re old enough, you remember the emergence of Mosaic, the first web browser, which was released in 1993 and precipitated the explosion that came to be known as the “dot com” boom. Internet traffic grew exponentially as it was transformed from a DARPA-funded defence and academic network used by few businesses into the platform that drove e-commerce, global communication and the disruption of many industries.

  • The Talospace Project: Firefox 72 on POWER

    Firefox 72 builds out of the box and uneventfully on OpenPOWER. The marquee feature this time around is picture-in-picture, which is now supported in Linux and works just fine for playing Trooper Clerks ("salsa shark! we're gonna need a bigger boat!"). The blocking of fingerprinting scripts should also be very helpful since it will reduce the amount of useless snitchy JavaScript that gets executed. The irony of that statement on a Blogger site is not lost on me, by the way.

    The bug that mashed Firefox 71 (ultimately fallout from bug 1601707 and its many dupes) did not get fixed in time for Firefox 72 and turned out to be a compiler issue. The lifetime change that the code in question relies upon is in Clang 7 and up, but unless you are using a pre-release build this fix is not (yet) in any official release of gcc 9 or 10. As Clang is currently unable to completely build the browser on ppc64le, if your extensions are affected (mine aren't) you may want to add this patch which was also landed on the beta release channel for Firefox 73.

  • Curl Boosted By Donation

    Curl, an open source project that is widely used to transfer data, has been given a donation of $10K by indeed.com, the self-proclaimed #1 job site. The donation was made through Open Collective and is the largest single donation the project has ever received.

    [...]

    Open Collective brings transparency to giving and receiving funds for Open Source and enable us to see that this is the fourth donation of 10K USD made by indeed.com - the others being to webpack, pytest and ESLint.

    Stenberg's blog post acknowledges curl's other sponsors. They fall into two categories - financial backers and those who provide time and effort - notable here is wolfSSL which employs Daniel and allows him to spend paid work hours on curl.

    [...]

    So the good news is that curl has not only gained valuable funding but may also in future benefit from membership of the Linux Foundation.

  • OSI co-founder leaves initiative over new license

    “Legally, our license can only protect the code that WE wrote. Our software is being licensed by a DEVELOPER to run their app (the currency, chat, or social network they just built) on top of Holochain. We are trying to say: The only valid way to use our code is if that developer’s END-USERS are the sole authors and controllers of their own private crypto keys,” Brock wrote.

    Perens has expressed concerns on how the license will actually be used and how it will impact users and software freedoms in practice. Now that it looks like the OSI might approve the practice, he is looking to make an exit.

    In an email thread about the Cryptographic Autonomy License, he wrote:

    “Well, it seems to me that the organization is rather enthusiastically headed toward accepting a license that isn’t freedom respecting. Fine, do it without me, please. I asked Patrick to cancel my membership, and I would have unsubscribed from OSI lists, including this one, if your server was working. I own an interest in 10 Open Source companies and manage a 50 Million dollar portfolio investing in them. That will keep me involved enough.”

    In an interview with The Register, Perens expressed more concerns with how the license is used and written. He believes the license requires users to have access to a lawyer in order to understand it, which is not the way he believes licenses should be developed for open source.

    “Most people who develop open source don’t have access to lawyers,” he told the Register. “One of the goals for open source was you could use it without having to hire a lawyer. You could put [open source software] on your computer and run it and if you don’t redistribute or modify it, you don’t really have to read the license.”

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.