Mozilla Remains Confident Despite Dip In Revenue

As far as revenue is concerned, 2018 saw a 20% decline on the previous year, dropping from USD 562,279,000 to USD 450,860,000. Royalties, the fees which Mozilla receives received from companies like Google, Baidu and Yandex for including their search engines in Firefox and which represents 95% of Mozilla's revenue went down, in percentage terms, slightly more than the total revenue. Relying so much on Royalties puts Mozilla in a vulnerable position since it relies on keeping on good terms with the Goliaths of the industry, in particular Google with which it is in direct competition for browser traffic. Mozilla has plans for augmenting its revenue with paid-for services and has recently launched its first two branded products. Firefox Premium for Enterprises was launched, in the US only, in September 2019. Its Basic service is Free, so there is no suggestion of paying to use Firefox, but for a fee starting at $10 per supported installation, enterprise users can benefit from private bug submission, critical security bug fixes, or even "concierge bug entry with guaranteed response time". A Service Level Agreement Management tool is another benefit on offer.

Graphics: Mesa, Intel and AMD

• Mesa 19.3 To Arrive With Open Source OpenGL 4.6 And Several New Vulkan Extensions Supported By Intel And AMD Radeon Drivers

  The upcoming quarterly update to Mesa 3D Graphics Library, which brings the version to Mesa 19.3, is expected to pack a lot of benefits, including support for the latest Open Source OpenGL v4.6, and several new Vulkan extensions. The Mesa 19.3 update could land as soon as this week itself, and experts argue it is by far the biggest or most significant improvement before the current year ends. Linux desktop users have been eagerly awaiting the critical component additions to the Mesa 3D Graphics Library, as the update was severely challenged and hence delayed, due to ‘blocker’ bugs.

• Intel Revises The Shared Virtual Memory Support For Their Linux Graphics Driver

  In their journey towards the Intel Xe GPUs expected to launch initially next year in the form of Ponte Vecchio, just about one month ago Intel posted patches implementing Shared Virtual Memory support for their Linux graphics driver. Those SVM patches have now been revised for further review in potentially making it for Linux 5.6 should everything look good. Shared Virtual Memory support allows a single address space to handle threads operating on both CPU backed and GPU discrete memory. SVM is important for OpenCL, oneAPI, and other modern pointer-based programming models. Intel's SVM support is built atop the Linux kernel's Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) infrastructure.

• AMD's GPU Performance API Library 3.5 Drops ROCm/HSA Support

  Released on Friday was a new version of AMD's GPU Performance API "GPUPerfAPI" project under the GPUOpen umbrella. This is the AMD library used by CodeXL, Radeon Compute Profiler, and others for tapping GPU performance counters and to help in analyzing performance/execution characteristics for Radeon hardware. But this new GPUPerfAPI 3.5 release comes with a rather surprising change.

Your open source gift giving guide for 2019

The holiday season is upon us, and that means you'll be giving gifts to family and friends. But what do you do when those gifts are going to fans and users of open source software? Fortunately, you don't have to fret, as there are plenty of options available that are sure to please your Linux and open source friends. And just because your recipients are supporters of open source, it doesn't mean that every gift you hand out must be released under the GPL or be powered by the Linux operating system. In fact, you have plenty of options. Here are my picks for the best open source gift options of the year.