Nothing restricts you to Zorn OS’s collection of installed software – its Software Center allows you to expand it with everything but the kitchen sink.

Although it might be presented as a solid alternative to Windows, Zorin OS is also worth a look for everyone tired of trying to grasp with some distributions’ approach to organization. It’s uncomplicated in its use, beautiful to look at and fast. What’s not to like?

The TIOBE Programming Community has released an index indicating the popularity of programming languages in which it recognised C as the programming language of the year 2019.

OK, it was not at the top - Java is still King - but was a number two above Python – which is a little surprising.

C is considered the red-headed stepchild of programming these days and most people consider Python emerged as the most productive and popular language in recent times and, apparently, the language had a good year due to the Internet of Things.

C is really good with small devices that are performance-critical with limited resources. It is a feature-rich programming language, including direct access to machine level hardware APIs. There are lots of C compilers, deterministic resource use and dynamic memory allocation.

• MIR: A lightweight JIT compiler project

  For the past three years, I’ve been participating in adding just-in-time compilation (JIT) to CRuby. Now, CRuby has the method-based just-in-time compiler (MJIT), which improves performance for non-input/output-bound programs.

  The most popular approach to implementing a JIT is to use LLVM or GCC JIT interfaces, like ORC or LibGCCJIT. GCC and LLVM developers spend huge effort to implement the optimizations reliably, effectively, and to work on a lot of targets. Using LLVM or GCC to implement JIT, we can just utilize these optimizations for free. Using the existing compilers was the only way to get JIT for CRuby in the short time before the Ruby 3.0 release, which has the goal of improving CRuby performance by three times.

  So, CRuby MJIT utilizes GCC or LLVM, but what is unique about this JIT?

  MJIT does not use existing compiler JIT interfaces. Instead, it uses C as an interface language without losing compilation speed. Practically the same compilation speed as with the existing JIT interfaces is achieved by using precompiled headers and a memory filesystem.

• Red Hat Developer's MIR Is A Lightweight JIT Compiler

  Not to be confused with Ubuntu's Mir display stack or Rustlang's MIR, the new MIR effort by Red Hat developer Vladimir Makarov is a new project focused on providing a lightweight JIT compiler.

  MIR in this context is the Medium Internal Representation (Rustlang's is the Mid-Level Internal Representation) and is striving to be a lighter-weight JIT compiler than the JIT interfaces offered by GCC or LLVM.

  Initially, MIR is aiming to suit the just-in-time needs of CRuby and/or MRuby and from there expand out. This IR is strongly-typed, based on the concept of modules, and you can get to MIR through LLVM IR as one of the options.

• DocKnot 3.03

  DocKnot is the software that I use to generate package documentation and web pages, and increasingly to generate release tarballs.

  The main change in this release is to use IO::Uncompress::Gunzip and IO::Compress::Xz to generate a missing xz tarball when needed, instead of forking external programs (which causes all sorts of portability issues). Thanks to Slaven Rezić for the testing and report.

  This release adds two new badges to README.md files: a version badge for CPAN packages pushed to GitHub, and a Debian version badge for packages with a corresponding Debian package.

For example, why have so many organizations like Linux Foundation and the FSFE simultaneously eliminated their elections, shifting the balance of power towards certain corporations like Google? Why are messages about corporate influence routinely censored from the mailing lists of open source groups who claim to be both transparent and independent of the corporations funding them? Voting and censorship are both human rights issues. If we can't get these things right in an organization of professionals, how can there be any hope for the developing world?

This is a series of blog posts explaining different ways to contribute to KDE in an easy-to-digest manner. This series is supposed to run parallel to my keyboard shortcuts analysis so that there can be content being published (hopefully) every week.

The purpose of this series originated from how I feel about asking users to contribute back to KDE. I firmly believe that showing users how contributing is easier than they think is more effective than simply calling them out and directing them to the correct resources; especially if, like me, said user suffers from anxiety or does not believe they are up to the task, in spite of their desire to help back.

This time I’ll be explaining how the localization workflow looks like for contributing to KDE; this should also immediately enable you to translate your favorite third-party Plasma widgets (if the project supports it), and generally allow you to translate any PO file with your preferred localization software. I will also explain a bit about CAT tools in general and how professional translation is done since it’s my field of expertise, but that will serve only as optional reading for those interested.

Don’t get scared with how lengthy this blog post is: by the end of this text, you should be perfectly fine to start working with localization, that’s the point. The localization process is quite straightforward, I simply put a lot of explanations in-between so you don’t have many (or better yet, any!) doubts about how stuff works.

This article should be timely in that a new Plasma version, 5.18, will be released in about two weeks. Contributions to the stable branch would be quite appreciated in the following days!

Are you new to the Internet of Things and wonder what IoT devices can do for you? Or do you just have a spare Raspberry Pi hanging around and are wondering what you can do with it? Either way, there are plenty of ways to put that cheap little board to work.

Some of these projects are easy while others are much more involved. Some you can tackle in a day while others will take a while. No matter what, you’re bound to at least get some ideas looking at this list.

If you are an Evernote fan, you probably have been missing it on Linux desktop. There is the web version available but you cannot use it offline if you are not a premium user.

Linux (almost) always has a way around. So, there are some third party applications that let you use Evernote on Linux. There are also some alternative applications to Evernote available on Linux.

A native Linux client for Evernote has been requested for a long time and the good news is that it should finally be coming to Linux in the year 2020.

• Part 4: Set Up SPF and DKIM with Postfix on CentOS/RHEL Mail Server

• Installing latest syslog-ng on openSUSE, RHEL and other RPM distributions

• Streaming audio from Plasma to a Chromecast

• curl ootw: -m, –max-time

• curl cheat sheet refresh

• Use Wireshark at the Linux command line with TShark

• Ansible Automation Tool Installation, Configuration and Quick Start Guide

• Stadia will soon have 4K on the web, support for additional Android phones, 120 new games, and more

• The 5 Best Farming Games on Android and iOS

• Top 5 Smartphone Features for Android and iOS in 2020

• Galaxy M40 Android 10 release nears as it picks up key certification

• Here's when your Huawei phone will receive Android 10 & EMUI 10

• You can now customize your Android 10 gesture experience with gesturePlus

• Firefox Nightly for Android to get a major update next week

• Revamped Firefox browser for Android set to arrive on the nightly branch tomorrow

• Google Chrome on Android may soon add ability to copy images directly to your clipboard

• Are companies releasing too many Android phones?

• Android users should delete these 30 'dangerous' camera apps now, experts warn

As you probably know, my go-to video editor is Kdenlive, which I've used many times before, to great success, creating dozens of unfunny clips, all of them available on my Youtube channel. But then, I've recently had less luck with the program, having tested both 2018's beta and last year's 19.08 stable edition, and neither really impressed me.

I came across bugs and crashes, and overall, it felt like the application has taken a nosedive. While older versions ought to keep working fine for quite a while longer, I wouldn't like to be in a position where my artistic spread of majestic wings is curtailed for any reasons. Hence, alternatives, hence testing. And thus, I came across an old-new title, OpenShot, a free, cross-platform video editor. Funnily, I've seen it many times before, but never really used in properly. This article shall remedy that.

• AMD Zen 3 "Family 19h" Enablement Beginning With The Linux 5.6 Kernel

  With the upcoming Linux 5.6 kernel cycle will be the first of many patches to come surrounding AMD Zen 3 "Family 19h" support.

  So far there haven't been any AMD Family 19h patches to the Linux kernel besides k10temp driver support. But queued up ahead of the weekend were a couple changes relating to Zen3/19h beginning to collect in ras/core for the Linux 5.6 merge window kicking off in the next week or two.

• AMD Zen 3 Microcode Spotted in the Linux Kernel

  AMD Zen 3 microcode has recently been spotted in the Linux kernel, months ahead of the expected launch of this new line of processors.

  The discovery was shared on Twitter by @KOMACHI_ENSAKA, who says the new code is linked with EDAC, or Error Detection and Correction.

  By the looks of things, the Linux kernel is updated to support the AMD Family 19h processors, which represents the new Zen 3-based chip family.

  As the leaker notes, AMD 17h series can still be used, as they’re already supported – Family 17h is the existing AMD Zen 2 series.

The music scene is where I’m happiest in life. As an amateur musician, I spend a lot of time improving my technique, practicing, practicing, and practicing. I also love listening to professional musicians. Linux is my other passion. Linux is endowed with bountiful globs of open source multimedia software. I love testing out new multimedia software early in its development, or introduce myself to popular software that’s mature and laden with tons of features. The choice is bamboozling.

I’ve covered the vast majority of free and open source music players for Linux, but there’s always more to look at. This week, I’ve been exploring LXMusic. It’s a minimalist music player for LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment. The project aims to be the default music player of LXDE, but it runs on any desktop environment.

LXMusic is written in the C programming language, and uses GTK+, a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. LXMusic is based on xmms2, using xmms2d, a daemon through which XMMS2 clients playback and manage music.

• How to Save a Seaborn Plot as a File (e.g., PNG, PDF, EPS, TIFF)

• How To Publish Your Own Python Package

• How to Use Chart.js with Django

• Is there anything safe in python?

• PyDev of the Week: Sebastián Ramírez

• Python class to create SQL database, table and submit values

• Link together the Tkinter user interface and database Input class

• How To Save Linux Command Output To An Image Or A Text File

• How to Install Deepin Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Linux

• How to Protect Your Server with Fail2ban on CentOS 8

• Schedule Jobs in Linux With ‘at’ Command

• Tuptime – A CLI Utility To Find Linux System Uptime

• Using Markdown to Create Responsive HTML Emails

• Tower Of God: One Wish, a nice casual match-3 game released recently

  A genre Linux surprisingly doesn't have a huge selection in is Match 3 puzzle games, thankfully if you love these casual games a new one is out with Tower Of God: One Wish.

• The charming platformer & space shooter hybrid A.N.N.E to get a huge 1.0 update in May

  Gamesbymo have announced that A.N.N.E, the crowdfunded mixture of metroidvania style platforming with space shooter elements will get a big 1.0 update on May 20. See Also: Some previous thoughts here.

  While it hasn't received much attention after being released on Steam last year, following a Kickstarter campaign in 2013, they have been making progress on it. Slow progress though, as it sounds like they don't have much money left as written in the announcement they "had to get back to a barebone team" but it's not all bad news. The good news is that a big content update was announced and it will be out on May 20, although they're not sure if that will also end Early Access.

• RetroArch to have the emulation 'Cores' as DLC when it releases on Steam, plus big updates

  The team behind RetroArch, the open source and cross platform frontend/framework for emulators (and a lot more like open source game engines), have stated their plans for handling the various emulators it works with for the Steam release.

  While there's now no exact date for the Steam release, after being delayed from last year, work has continued on preparing for it. Part of this is dealing with the legal situation, since the application is licensed under the GPL, there are certain rules they have to follow.

• Recent updates to Littlewood added a lot of bugs and a nervous looking Sea Monster

  Probably one of the most charming games I've ever played, Littlewood, just constantly gets bigger and more sweet with each update.

  What is Littlewood? A game set after the world has been saved, there's no fighting here as it's time to rebuild. It's a peaceful and relaxing little building, crafting and farming sim from developer Sean Young. Currently in Early Access, each month seems to bring in a huge new update.

  December, for example, added in a massive update focused on Fishing. You can now meet Captain Georgie (who appears to be some sort of Monkey) and go out on their boat for some rare fish. It can take a while to be able to do this though, you need Level 30 in Fishing before they let you go.

• OpenRA for classic Westwood RTS games has a new build in need of testing

  What is OpenRA? It's an open source game engine that recreates and modernizes the classic Command & Conquer real time strategy games including Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Dune 2000 and with Tiberian Sun in progress. It's awesome!

• Obversion, a puzzle game from a former Google developer releases next week

  Former Google developer Adrian Marple quit to become an indie developer, with the puzzle game Obversion being their first title which is releasing next week.

  Marple said "the journey through the levels of Obversion is a coalescence of striking environments, philosophical quotes, geometric satisfaction, and intricately woven puzzles" and that if you've played games like Portal you should feel right at home.

• DragonEvo, a trading card game mixed with RPG elements you can play in your browser

  Oh how I do love deck-building, card games and strategy stuffs. If you do too, you might want to take a look over at DragonEvo. Fully cross-platform, as DragonEvo is not a traditional desktop game. It's browser-based, meaning you can play it on most things that have something resembling Firefox or Chrome.

  While we don't usually cover many browser-based games, DragonEvo stands out as it's actually quite good and it certainly has some unusual mechanics with how you play cards. Strategy is the key to victory, careful planning and card placement—not a random generator.

• GNU World Order 336

  Listener feedback

• Dominique Leuenberger: openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/03

  This has been a busy week when looking at the snapshots. Tumbleweed has received 6 fully tested snapshots that were published (0110, 0111, 0112, 0113, 0114 and 0115).

• Open Mainframe Project Continues to Grow with Launch of Polycephaly and New Members

  The Open Mainframe Project (OMP), an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, continues to see rapid growth with a new project , Polycephaly, and the addition of new members.

  The project  (formally zJenkins) is based on IBM IBM Dependency Based Build (DBB) using Groovy script to build z/OS applications with Jenkins and Git, and three academic institutions from China: Beijing Institute of Technology, South China University of Technology, and Xidian University.

• The BSC coordinates the manufacture of the first open source chip developed in Spain

  In collaboration with the Centro de Investigación en Computación of the Mexican IPN, Centro Nacional de Microelectrónica of the CSIC and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).

  Lagarto, which is built with TSMC’s 65-nanometer transistors, is the first open source instruction set architecture (ISA) chip developed in Spain, coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The chip, which has performed better results than expected, is a key step in the center's strategy to become a benchmark in the open source hardware technologies’ field developed in Europe.

• Next release will be LibreOffice 7

  Congratulations! Next release will be LibreOffice 7 instead LibreOffice 6.5. Look at that message in marketing mail list.

• UVM Gets $1 Million From Google For Open Source Research

  Open source software can be shared and modified but UVM said the concept is about more than software. The school says the aim of the project is to broaden understanding of how people, teams and organizations thrive in technology-rich settings, particularly in open-source projects and communities.

• UVM gets $1M from Google for open source research

  The unrestricted gift is to support open-source research. Open source is a type of computer software, where source code is released under a license, and the copyright holder grants users the rights to study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.

• Is open source culture the answer to our technology woes?

  For that, open source culture is likely to be the most effective, if not the only, therapy. Open source means to be open about the source of knowledge that enables anyone to make something. With regard to technology, one important element of that source, but certainly not the only one, is represented by the code used to generate a given piece of software, AKA the source code.

  But you would be mistaken to think that the ability to read and write code is a necessary requirement to access this alternative technological world. In fact, open source should be understood in its broader sense of open knowledge. Should one wish, everyone can contribute in many ways such as by sharing, translating and editing instructions, creating tutorials and engaging with the ethical issues at stake in our technological society. Contrary to how things were 30 years ago, open source software is today as user-friendly and good-looking as any other proprietary and close-source counterpart. The ability to read and write code is certainly useful, but not necessary when using open source alternatives.

• Open source: Vatican wartime archives ready for new batch of scholars

  After decades of anticipation, the Vatican archives are ready to welcome, starting March 2, scores of scholars wishing to study documents related to the wartime pontificate of Pope Pius XII.

• How open-source code could help us survive natural disasters

  In November 2019, while on a trip to Australia to discuss the power of technology to make a difference in the aftermath of natural disasters, I saw firsthand the devastation caused by historic bushfires raging throughout the country.

  Sadly, devastating bushfires are still burning on the continent, putting more and more lives at risk and destroying entire communities. As the fires persist, the smoke in Sydney and elsewhere has rendered the air quality “hazardous.” There’s been a national spike in hospital visits, many to treat breathing problems.

  Unfortunately, Australia is not alone in being ravaged by natural disaster.

• Textbooks are pricey. So students are getting creative.

• HP remotely disables customer’s printer until he joins monthly subscription

  Just because you buy a product doesn't mean you actually own it; that's the new normal that the advancement of technology has been slowly establishing over the past decades. Corporations look after themselves by using copyright protections such as digital rights management, DRM, but in this process, consumers' rights are often restricted to an absurd degree.

  For example – as Ryan Sullivan has discovered and then shared on Twitter – HP will disable ink cartridges in your (or, it would seem, their) printers if you stop paying a monthly subscription for a service that's known as HP Instant Ink.

• Microsoft's Rust-Based Project Verona Reaches Open Source on GitHub [Ed: Microsoft is openwashing things in its proprietary software platform, GitHub]

• webcompat.com: Project belt-on.

  So last week, on Friday (Japanese time), I woke up with a website being half disabled and then completely disabled. We had been banned by GitHub because of illegal content we failed to flag early enough. And GitHub did what they should do.

  Oh… and last but not least… mike asked me what Belt-on meant. I guess so let's make it more explicit.

• The open source licence debate: what we need to know [Ed: ComputerWeekly should know that GitHub is proprietary software and does not speak for “Open Source”, it's entrapping it]

  Chief operating officer (COO) for GitHub Erica Brescia noted that, from her perspective, she is seeing an “increasing tension” between open source projects and those that are building services on top of open source, such as cloud vendors with their database services.

• Mattermost co-founder survived tough times to launch game-changing collaboration platform

  One of the co-founders of the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator once termed the struggles of entrepreneurs to launch a business the “trough of sorrow.” As he was trying to run an independent video game business, entrepreneur Ian Tien suddenly found himself waist deep in that trough.

  Tien (pictured) had built his business on a messaging app that quickly went south after being acquired by a large company.

  “It started crashing and losing data, and we were super-unhappy,” Tien recalled. “Rather than go to another platform, we realized we had 10 million hours of people running messaging in their own video games. Why don’t we build this ourselves?”

  The result was Mattermost Inc., an open-source, online self-hosted messaging service that has attracted attention from investors and recognizable customers, such as Uber Technologies Inc., Airbus and the U.S. Department of Defense.

• Unifying open standards and open source with agile technology

  Broadband installations globally have eclipsed the one billion mark to date. These connections are largely based upon a traditional model of modified existing central office architectures, complemented by copper or fibre access and a relatively simple edge network connecting a handful of devices in the home via wired or Wi-Fi connections.

  However, a new digital era is fast emerging, where new technologies such as 5G, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), a proliferation of devices driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), and a significantly more sophisticated and complex connected home have compounded matters and applied significant pressures to the network architecture and its ability to scale to meet the challenges and opportunities of this new world.

• What's in Your Containers? Try an Open Source Tool to Find Out

  As most security pros know, application containers -- Docker, rkt, etc. -- and the orchestration elements employed to support them, such as Kubernetes, are used increasingly in many organizations.

  Often the security organization isn't exactly the first stop on the path to deployment of these tools. (If it was in your shop, consider yourself one of the lucky ones.) Instead, usage tends to emerge from the grass roots. It starts with developers using containers on their workstations to streamline unit testing and environmental configuration; builds traction as integration processes adapt to a more "continuous integration" approach facilitated by containers; and ultimately gains acceptance in the broader production landscape.

  [...]

  "Anchore Engine is an open source tool for performing deep inspection of container images," said Ross Turk, Anchore VP of marketing. "These images can contain a whole lot: operating system packages, language libraries, credentials and secrets, and configuration that affects how the resulting containers are executed. Anchore Engine flattens and unpacks the image, layer by layer, and inventories what's inside."

  This information is valuable not only because it provides information on what software may need to be updated in the event of security patches or updates, but also because it gives you visibility into the implementation of applications and services before, after, or during their release into the production environment. It can inform software architecture reviews, threat modeling, conversations about secrets management, audit activities and design reviews, among other things.

• What's Ahead for Open Source and Financial Services in 2020

  It should not come as a surprise that software companies like to try their hand in many different industries, and it was only a matter of time before the most popular ones decided to start offering financial and banking services. Google’s recent announcement that it will start to offer “smart checking accounts” comes right on the heels of Facebook’s Libra currency announcement, and we anticipate that this trend will just continue. The biggest reason is that banking continues to happen where customers are already shopping, and/or where social networking occurs – ultimately serving to streamline the customer experience and to permit spending and lending to happen faster and in places the customer already spends a significant amount of time.

• SD Times Open Source Project of the Week: Khronos Vulkan

  Khronos Vulkan, which just released its 1.2 update, is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and computing API.

  Vulkan targets high-performance realtime 3D graphics applications such as video games and interactive media across all platforms.

  The new version includes improved performance, enhanced visual quality and easier development.

  Last year, Google’s Stadia launched with a host of AAA titles that use HLSL on Vulkan: Destiny 2, Red Dead Redemption II, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and the Tomb Raider games

• LSD welcomes Knowledge Focus to Planet Open Source

  Today, LSD Information Technology (LSD) is announcing the merger of Knowledge Focus into its fold as of 1 January 2020. The strategic integration is the result of a shared vision to unify and further strengthen competencies across key open source solution spaces. With this merger, LSD hopes to explore new opportunities with their combined superpowers and will continue to deliver market-leading open source solutions.

  Stefan Lesicnik, CEO of LSD Information Technology, said on the merger: "We are really excited to no longer compete with the great team from Knowledge Focus, but rather, as colleagues, to work with them and deliver great customer solutions based on open source Elastic Stack and Kafka. Knowledge Focus' open source experience with Elastic and Kafka, combined with the LSD expertise around DevOps, Openshift and Kubernetes, provide instant combined value for strategic solutions for our clients."

• Wine industry collab develops open source platform

  A University of Adelaide and industry collaboration has developed a digital platform to help grapegrowers optimise their irrigation and crop management.

• flexiWAN Offers Escape From SD-WAN Black Box

  Israeli startup flexiWAN has introduced open source SD-WAN software that, it believes, can give telcos a competitive edge by enabling them to customize services to suit their own needs.

  The company says its approach, based on modular software elements, addresses a growing problem in the SD-WAN market -- namely that service providers are struggling to differentiate because they're all selling similar services based on the same set of inflexible systems, says flexiWAN's co-founder and CEO Amir Zmora.

• Inspecting TLS-encrypted traffic with mitmproxy

  Mitmproxy is a free, open-source tool whose killer feature is the ability to inspect Transport Layer Security (TLS)-encrypted mobile phone app traffic. The tool is superior to Wireshark when it comes to examining TLS-encrypted network traffic, and its zero-dollar price point beats out the not-cheap Burp Suite. The only downside (upside for some) is that mitmproxy is primarily a command line tool, unlike the swish Burp Suite GUI.

• Value Of Open Source Strategy Is To Attract Right Developers: Sudhir Tiwari, ThoughtWorks

• CDMO Speeds its Line with Open-Source L4 Serialization System

  Sovereign Pharmaceuticals, LLC is a CDMO specializing in small-batch prescriptions drugs, packaging solid and liquid products in their Ft Worth, TX, facility. They handle a variety of bottle sizes—from 50 cc up to 950 cc and from 1 oz to 16 oz—for a number of drugs and indications. Dealing with several virtual companies for clients, they spend a lot of time educating them about regulatory requirements.

  In 2016, the company sought a serialization solution to meet the DSCSA enforcement date in Nov. 2018. While they were driven by regulations, meeting the deadline appeared it would be a challenge. “We tried one solution and our customers tried three other solutions and none of them were going to meet the deadline,” says Ryan DeSario, Serialization Supervisor at Sovereign.

• Open Source Luminary Marc Fleury Enters Crypto Arena with Announcement of New Crypto Asset Class and Continuous Token Offering Sale

• Open source pioneer Dr. Marc Fleury launches Two Prime & new crypto asset class

  Open source pioneer Dr. Marc Fleury today launches Two Prime, a fintech firm that focuses on the financial applications of crypto to the real economy. Two Prime’s Chief Executive Officer Fleury and Chief Operating Officer Alexander S. Blum are bringing abundance to the crypto industry by introducing a new breed of cryptocurrency with safeguard mechanisms that use real assets. Two Prime’s ultimate goal is to bring about the next phase of crypto’s financial applications and reinvigorate the crypto market by introducing traditional tools and models to the space.

• Open-Source Guru Fleury’s Crypto Firm to Debut Asset Token

  Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency firm Two Prime, headed by an entrepreneur who sold a previous tech business for $350 million, is set to introduce a digital token invested in a basket of blockchain-based holdings.

  The FF Accretive Token, registered in Hong Kong, will use the proceeds from its initial issuance to make crypto-related investments in a structured portfolio of cryptocurrencies, debt and equities with the goal of generating accretive cash flow, according to a company release. Instead of releasing all the coins at once like most initial coin offerings, Two Prime will issue the tokens continuously into the market based on demand.

• Open-source Nextcloud rebrands itself, ready to compete with GSuite and Office 365

  For years now Nextcloud has been considered by many, mostly more tech-savvy users, especially those in the free and open-source community, as a fairly viable alternative to Dropbox – although one that just “isn't there” yet.

  Not only in terms of user-friendliness – for one thing, Nextcloud is self-hosted – but more importantly, there have been complaints about its functionality and even reliability.

  However, there was always one pretty major advantage that recommended it over a proprietary service like Dropbox: Nextcloud is free and open-source, meaning that there are no “secret ingredients” in its code, which allows users full control of the data they sync, share, and host while using it.

  Nextcloud has announced taking a big step forward in the hope of growing into much more than just a Dropbox alternative.

  The product has changed its name to Nextcloud Hub to reflect the addition of new features to its integrated mail client, calendar and contacts, audio and video team chat, and real-time collaborative document editing – a competitor to Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365.

• European public services rely on Bareos for backups

  European public services make up about half of all customers that pay for support services on Bareos, a backup solution available as open source. The software is used by universities across the continent, national and state archives, and municipalities small and large, reports Bareos, the 8-year-old company based in Cologne (Germany) that is the main developer of the eponymous software solution.

• My FOSS Story

  Being a FOSS maintainer has given me a lot of interesting experiences. Some bad, some good. I've tried to express some of those experiences in this article with the goal of helping everyone understand each other better. This article doesn't necessarily generalize because these experiences are told through my perception of the world. For example, my individualist perspective on life greatly colors how I perceive FOSS. Namely, it's largely a personal endeavor for me, rather than a more altruistic attempt at improving a public good. A different perspective could greatly change how one experiences FOSS.

  My hope is that others will use these experiences to reflect on their own and perhaps the experiences of others. I think this process can lead to greater empathy and an overall better experience for everyone.

  In this article, I listed a lot of behaviors that I considered negative. Not everyone will see them as negatively as I do. That's okay and expected. More to the point, I am certainly guilty of committing some of those negative behaviors myself. We are not perfect and we will never be able to be purely empathetic 100% of the time. This is a game of inches and my hope is that we can do better, even if it's just a little bit.

• The new standard in on-premises team collaboration: Nextcloud Hub

  During a keynote presentation in Berlin, Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek announced the availability of a new product from Nextcloud. Nextcloud Hub is the first completely integrated on-premises content collaboration platform on the market, ready for a new generation of users who expect seamless online collaboration capabilities out of the box.

• Nextcloud Hub Announced For Offering On-Premises Content Collaboration Platform

  Nearly four years since forking from ownCloud, Nextcloud continues taking on the likes of Dropbox, Google Docs, and Microsoft 365 -- especially more so now with their introduction of Nextcloud Hub. Nextcloud Hub is a completely integrated on-premises content collaboration platform.

• Open source fights cancer, Tesla adopts Coreboot, Uber and Lyft release open source machine learning

  It's hard to a growing company these days that doesn't take advantage of machine learning to streamline its business and make sense of the data it amasses. Ridesharing companies, which gather massive amounts of data, have enthusiastically embraced the promise of machine learning. Two of the biggest players in the ridesharing sector have made some of their machine learning code open source.

  Uber recently released the source code for its Manifold tool for debugging machine learning models. According to Uber software engineer Lezhi Li, Manifold will "benefit the machine learning (ML) community by providing interpretability and debuggability for ML workflows."

• JetBrains Mono is a free, open source monospace font

  JetBrains Mono is a new font designed especially for coders and developers. The lowercase characters are taller than the ones in other monospace fonts, improving readability.

• Best fonts for programming: JetBrains Mono typeface is easy on the eyes

  What typeface do you program with? JetBrains released a new open source typeface that is designed with coding in mind. JetBrains Mono aims to minimize eye strain, improve code readability, reduce noise, and balance whitespace with ligatures. Besides its practical usage, it’s also just plain beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. See what it looks and add it to your IDE.
  Long hours staring at a screen is a recipe for eyestrain. Dark mode and display-altering software such as f.lux help take some of the strain away.

  What typeface is best for coding? When designing a typeface with the intention of coding, the distinction between characters, spacing, height, and line thickness are all components that need consideration.

• FOSDEM 2020 RTC Devroom schedule announced

  The schedule for the RTC devroom at FOSDEM 2020 in Brussels, Belgium has recently been announced. The devroom is on Sunday, 2 February 2020. We have 18 great presentations scheduled this year. Please share the link and come to support them.

• This Beaten-Down Software Stock Has a New CEO: Time to Buy?

• Cloudera taps former head of the company it merged with to be its new CEO

  Data software company Cloudera named Rob Bearden as its new CEO on Monday. Bearden was previously the CEO of rival Hortonworks, which merged with Cloudera last year in a stock swap that valued the combined companies at $5.2 billion.

  Shares of Cloudera rose 3% in extended trading following the announcement.

  Bearden is a familiar face for many of the company's employees. Now he's keen to eke out more savings from the integration of the two companies and bring in more revenue from customers.

• MariaDB goes bigly on cloud-native smart apps

  MariaDB Corporation is upping its cloud-native playbook.

  At the same time, MariaDB is aiming to up its approach to so-called ‘smart’ applications., so before we define the parameters at play here, let’s look at the news.

  The database company’s mysteriously named MariaDB Platform X4 is new to the table and is described as a cloud-native open source database for developers to build modern applications using smart transactions and cloud-native data storage.

  We know that modern applications (that aspire to be smart) require access to vast amounts of data — and that data needs to be optimised for analytical queries and Machine Learning (ML) models.

  In this way, transactions can be augmented with data insights, turning them into smart transactions.

• How can CIOs avoid vendor lock-in and stop repeating past mistakes?

  Percona’s own research supports this — around 89% of respondents to the Open Source Data Management Software Survey were using more than one open source database in their applications. The most popular public cloud services make heavy use of open source in their cloud deployments, and host many open source implementations. The growth of software containers based on Docker is also increasing the consumption of open source.

• Linux Foundation's DENT Project Focuses on Disaggregated Network Switches

• LF Energy teams with Alliander for an open source bootcamp for energy professionals in Arnhem

  LF Energy, a nonprofit, vendor-neutral initiative from The Linux Foundation, whose mission is to accelerate the energy and electricity sectors’ worldwide decarbonization goals through open-source technology, announced it is partnering with Dutch distribution system operator, Alliander, to host a free Open Source Bootcamp for Energy.

• IOTech Announces Edge Xpert "Fuji" v1.6 the Latest Release of its Open Edge Software Platform for Industrial IoT Systems

  Edge Xpert is IOTech's product quality and enhanced implementation of the Linux Foundation's EdgeX Foundry™ the leading open source edge computing platform.

• Akraino Edge Stack R2 Enables Use Cases for Telco & AI Edge, Connected Car, & AR/VR

• Akraino Edge Stack Gains NFV, Mixed Reality Blueprints