• The European Patent Office (EPO) Grants Patents in Error, Insiders Are Complaining That It’s the Management’s Fault
• The European Patent Office Will Never Hold Its Destroyers Accountable
• With Liars Like These…
• IAM, Patently-O and Watchtroll (the Patent Trolls’ Lobby) Try to Stop Patent Oppositions/Petitions (PTAB)
• The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is Ending Software Patents One Patent at a Time
• Academics and Think Tanks for Patent Maximalism
• Links 17/4/2018: Linux 5.x Plans and Microsoft’s ‘Embrace’
• Links 16/4/2018: Linux 4.17 RC 1, Mesa 18.0.1 RC, GNOME 3.28.1

• OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong [iophk: "This new article is a bit of revisionism as OLPC was killed by Microsoft and Intel"]

• DOSBox Part 2: Creating, Handling, and Booting from Floppy Images

  Continuing on from the previous tutorial, we move on to boot DOS systems from floppy images. Many floppies contained games or other software that would have automatically booted once the system started (using the autoexec.bat script). This can be simulated by using a floppy image which is simply a file that represents an entire floppy disk drive.

• Weekly Roundup 2018 – Weeks 14 & 15

  Many thanks for your patience! This is turning into a bi-weekly roundup lately, but we’ll try to get it back on track very soon.

  Team leader elections are happening: Donald and Filip continue to lead Atelier, Papoteur leads Docteam, Yuri leads i18n and the process is underway for all teams. We’ll know the make-up of the Council in the coming days – thanks to Marja for the updates. After that, we’ll be finding out the new composition of the Board. All should be in place by early May.

  The Great Plasma Update is almost there: it includes updates of the KF5, Plasma, KDE applications, LXQT and the underlying QT stacks. It’s currently waiting for the LXQT stack to be fixed. It’s a massive number of packages. We’re hoping it will be moved into updates within the week. Once that’s done, Mageia 6.1 will happen soon after.

• Manjaro Download now hosted at OSDN

  After a period of testing in close cooperation with OSDN’s CEO Shuji Sado, Manjaro is proud to announce that all our Official and Community ISOs and torrents have found a new home on OSDN‘s Japan-based servers, using their just recently launched File Storage service.
  Sofar we are extremely happy with transfer rates and stability and, above all, OSDN’s truely outstanding personal, highly competent and friendly support.

  Current download links to our install media can of course be found on the Download Page as usual.

 

• 8 Best Android Drawing Apps To Unleash Your Creativity | 2018 Edition

• An Early Look at Zircon, Google Fuchsia New Microkernel [iophk: "C++"]

   

  Zircon manages the following resources: processor time, memory, I/O, interrupts, and signaling and waiting. Resources are used from user land through handles. Handles have rights associated to them which convey privileges to perform actions such as duplicating, transferring, reading, writing, executing, etc. Drivers in Zircon are implemented as ELF libraries which are loaded into processes. A device manager process, devmgr, keeps track of drivers and devices, manages the discovery of drivers, and administers access to devices. Devices may implement Protocols, using C ABI, such the PCI protocol, the USB protocol and so on.

• Red Hat Set to Host Largest Red Hat Summit to Date, May 8-10 in San Francisco

  Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the agenda and keynote speakers for Red Hat Summit 2018, one of the industry’s premier enterprise open source technology conferences. The 14th annual Red Hat Summit is expected to welcome thousands of attendees from around the world to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, May 8-10. Event details and registration are live at https://www.redhat.com/en/summit/2018.

• Events on the horizon: Previewing 41 events (Charlotte Venture Challenge, Red Hat Summit & more)

  Plenty of technology and life science events are on tap for May, and we suggest you pencil them into your calendar.

  If you’re interested in events coming up in the immediate future, check out our separate roundup of April events happening in the Triangle and in other metros throughout North Carolina. These columns accompany our interactive calendar, along with a separate list of  Triangle meetups.

• curl up 2018 summary

  The event that occurred this past weekend was the second time we gathered a bunch of curl enthusiasts and developers in the same physical room to discuss the past, the present and the future from a curl perspective.

  Stockholm, Sweden, was the center of gravity this time when Goto 10 hosted our merry collective. Spring has finally arrived here and as the sun was out a lot, it made it a lovely weekend weather wise too. As a bonus, the little coffee shop on the premises was open all through both days. Just for us!

  [...]

  Several people asked me about next year already. I certainly hope we can run another curl up in 2019, but I don't know yet where this should happen. Ideally, I would like to move it around to different countries to give different people the ability to show up easier, but I also value having a local "host" that can provide the room and facilities for us.

• Speak at Open Source Summit NA: Submit Your Proposal by April 29

  Submit a proposal to speak at Open Source Summit North America taking place August 29-31, in Vancouver, B.C., and share your knowledge and expertise with 2,000+ open source technologists and community members. Proposals are being accepted through 11:59pm PDT, Sunday, April 29.

• Linus Torvalds Wants Linux Kernel 5.0 To Be “Meaningless” And “Unpredictable”

  If you follow Linux kernel development closely, you must be knowing that major version transitioning, i.e., jump from Linux 2.0 to 3.0 and 3.0 to 4.0, has taken place in the past at every two million Git objects. This made perfect sense to make a transition to Linux v5.0 at 6 million Git objects landmark.

  [...]

  The announcement post also contained some information on Linux 4.17-rc1 release. He mentioned that apart from dropping many older and outdated architectures, the kernel development team is also adding support for a new architecture: nds32 (Andes Technology 32-0bit RISC architecture).

  Interestingly, this release is also historic as for the first time the team has removed more lines than it added. Again, that’s due to dropping a number of architectures.

• FOSSology Turns 10 – A Decade of Highlights

  FOSSology turns ten this year. Far from winding down, the open source license compliance project is still going strong. The interest in the project among its thriving community has not dampened in the least, and regular contributions and cross-project contributors are steering it toward productive and meaningful iterations.

  An example is the recent 3.2 release, offering significant improvements over previous versions, such as the import of SDPX files and word processor document output summarizing analysis information. Even so, the overall project goal remains the same: to make it easier to understand and comply with the licenses used in open source software.

  There are thousands of licenses used in Open Source software these days, with some differing by only a few words and others pertaining to entirely different use universes. Together, they present a bewildering quagmire of requirements that must be adhered to, but only as set out in the appropriate license(s), the misunderstanding or absence of which can revert rights to a reserved status and bring about a complete halt to distribution.  

• Xen Project Contributor Spotlight: Stefano Stabellini

  I started contributing to Xen Project in 2008. At that time, I was working for Citrix in the XenServer product team. I have been contributing every year since then, that makes it 10 years now!

• How to update ONLYOFFICE Document Server to version 5.1

• Porting L4Re and Fiasco.OC to the Ben NanoNote (Summary)

• Rebasing Diverged Branches

• Running minikube v0.26.0 with CRIO and KVM nestign enabled by default

• Tips for troubleshooting DNS

• How to Install Joomla 3 on CentOS 7

• How Netflix does failovers in 7 minutes flat

• What developers need to know about security

  DevOps doesn't mean that everyone needs to be an expert in both development and operations. This is especially true in larger organizations in which roles tend to be more specialized. Rather, DevOps thinking has evolved in a way that makes it more about the separation of concerns. To the degree that operations teams can deploy platforms for developers (whether on-premises or in a public cloud) and get out of the way, that's good news for both teams. Developers get a productive development environment and self-service. Operations can focus on keeping the underlying plumbing running and maintaining the platform.

• State of Functions-as-a-Service on Kubernetes (OpenShift Commons Briefing)

  FaaS, or serverless as some call it, is a promising compute paradigm suitable for event-driven scenarios. In this briefing, Red Hat’s Michael Hausenblas and Brian Gracely reviewed the current open source offerings for FaaS on Kubernetes (Apache Open Whisk, kubeless, OpenFaaS, etc.) and discussed the pros and cons, on an architectural level and a user experience (UX) point of view. They also covered the topic FaaS vs. containers from a developers as well as an operators perspective.

• Istio Dark Launch: Secret Services

  “Danger is my middle name” is great for spies and people of mystery, but when it comes to deploying software, boring is better. By using Istio with OpenShift and Kubernetes to ease your microservices into production, you can make deployment really, really boring. That’s good.

• A look at VDO, the new Linux compression layer

  Probably not - there is no such thing as ‘too much storage’. For a long time, we have used userland tools like gzip and rar for compression. Now with Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO), all required pieces for a transparent compression/deduplication layer are available in the just-released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5. With this technology, it is possible to trade CPU/RAM resources for disk space. VDO becoming available is one of the results of Red Hat acquiring Permabit Technology Corporation in 2017. The code is available in the source RPMs, and upstream projects are getting established.

• Anticipating Some Near-Term Aspects in SLM Corporation (SLM), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• Form 4 RED HAT INC For: Apr 13 Filed by: Alexander DeLisa

• Street Analysts View On Flex Ltd. (FLEX), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• GNOME Terminal 3.28.x lands in Fedora

  Brave testers of pre-release Fedora builds might have noticed the absence of updates to GNOME Terminal and VTE during the Fedora 28 development cycle. That’s no longer the case. Kalev submitted gnome-terminal-3.28.1 as part of the larger GNOME 3.28.1 mega-update, and it will make its way into the repositories in time for the Fedora 28 release early next month.

• Fedora 28 : GoLang first example .

• Fedora 28 Upgrade Test Day 2018-04-19

• Top Badgers of 2017: Fabio Valentini

• Bodhi 3.6.0 released

• Minds aims to decentralize the social network

  Decentralization is the buzzword du jour. Everything – from our currencies to our databases – are supposed to exist, immutably, in this strange new world. And Bill Ottman wants to add our social media to the mix.

  Ottman, an intense young man with a passion to fix the world, is the founder of Minds.com, a New York-based startup that has been receiving waves of new users as zealots and the the not-so-zealous have been leaving other networks. In fact, Zuckerberg’s bad news is music to Ottman’s ears.

• Top 5 Open Source Projects For Programmers and Developers

  Are you serious as a software developer? Want to reach heights and explore your knowledge of software development. Then, you are at the right place and reading the right article. As a developer or a fresher, you can self-learn lot of technologies by contributing to the open source projects which allow everyone to tweak and submit code.

  With this, you can boost your resume and generate opportunities for higher levels. There are many advantages while you contribute to the open source projects.

• Best open source ecommerce software

  So, why go open source? If you want total control and absolute customisation, open source software lets you inspect, copy and alter that software to make the perfect package for you.

  It's ideal for businesses not wanting to be locked into a massive vendor that calls all the shots.

• Research on the sustainability of participation in FSFE

  I’m a sociologist and I currently work as a researcher at IT University of Copenhagen, where I am responsible for “Infrastructuring SuStainable Playbour“ (ISSP): a project I received funding for from the EU/H2020 framework, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action – Individual Fellowship fund.

  This project investigates the sustainability of collaborative spaces, as commons, and it focuses on participants’ continuous contribution to the maintenance and development of such ‘places’.

  The research involves three case studies, and I think that the community of volunteers and supporters contributing to FSFE constitutes a very interesting case to focus on: FSFE is an enduring non-profit organization that, since more than 15 years, is working for raising awareness and promote Free Software at different levels and in different ways. FSFE is also a distributed network of people, who contribute their time and effort to this goal and, as such, is vital to the organization.

• MoJ creates open source analytics platform

  The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has begun to use a new analytical platform for data in its decision making.

  A private beta version is now being used by more than 50 analysts, and as the basis for a number of new tools.

• Apache Subversion 1.10.0 released

  Version 1.10 of the Subversion version-control system is out. Improvements include a new interactive resolver for merge conflicts, better path-based authorization, LZ4 compression, and more; see the release notes for details.

• Microsoft Creates Its Own Version of Linux For The First Time, Launches Azure Sphere OS

• Microsoft Announces Linux-Powered "Azure Sphere" IoT Platform

• Windows 10 apps on an open-source OS? ReactOS gains experimental support for latest Windows software [Ed: Developing using FOSS to help run proprietary software]

  ReactOS is a free and open-source, Windows-compatible OS that looks similar to Windows XP -- now with experimental support for Windows 10 software.

• Microsoft releases its first Linux product

  Well, it's finally happened. Microsoft has released a product containing its own Linux kernel: Azure Sphere. It's not MS-Linux or Linux Windows, but it's still remarkable.

  Azure Sphere is a software and hardware stack designed to secure edge devices. It includes microcontrollers, "Azure Sphere Security Service" and, the really interesting component, the Linux-based Azure Sphere operating system.

• Google Search Navigator – Enhance Keyboard Navigation In Google Search

  I am halfway through the “mastering google search” task. Yeah, I can now easily find cat images on Internet without having to search “how to find cat images on Internet” using google. In the pursuit of enhancing my google search skills(!), today I stumbled upon a browser extension named “Google Search Navigator”. It offers some keyboard shortcuts to improve your google search. Google has already provided an experimental Keyboard shortcuts for navigating search results. Unfortunately, It seems like Google has removed this feature as of 2017-07-31. Luckily, a developer has created this extension to enhance keyboard navigation in Google search. This plugin is free and open source. So, you can get the code freely on GitHub link provided at the end of this guide.

  In this guide, we will see how to use “Google Search Navigator” extension to improve your google search experience via some Keyboard shortcuts.

• Free DJ Software Mixxx 2.1 Released With New And Improved Skins, Overhauled Effects System, More

  Mixxx, the free and open source DJ software, has seen a new release today. Version 2.1 was in development for more than two years, and it brings new and improved controller mapings, updated Deere and LateNight skins, overhauled effects system, and much more.

• Using mtqq to create a notification network: mosquitto, mqttwarn, hare, and hared

  As you read this post, keep in mind that my particular use case of notification on ssh login is not for everyone. It may not appeal to you. In fact, you might find this to be an absolutely ridiculous thing to do. I respect that. I suggest that somewhere within your network there is at least one type of error condition, one urgent situation, one thing that you would like pushed to your cellphone / pager / etc. It might be a failed HDD for example.

• Specification and Verification of Software with CafeOBJ – Part 1 – Introducing CafeOBJ

  Software bugs are everywhere – the feared Blue Screen of Death, the mobile phone rebooting at the most inconvenient moment, games crashing. Most of these bugs are not serious problems, but there are other cases that are far more serious:

• Bits from the release team: full steam ahead towards buster

  We are about halfway through the buster development cycle, and a release update was overdue.

• Debian 10 "Buster" Should Be Out Around Mid-2019, Debian 12 Is "Bookworm"

  The Debian release team has put out their latest information concerning the upcoming Debian 10 "Buster" release.

  The Debian Release Team is currently planning for a transition freeze on 12 January 2019, a soft-freeze on 12 February 2019, and a full freeze around 12 March 2019. With that said, they are thinking the official Debian 10.0 "Buster" release will happen around the middle of next year.

  Beyond that, for Debian 11 "Bullseye" meanwhile they are hoping to introduce more automated quality assurance (QA) testing with continuous integration, auto packaging tests, etc. Based on past release timing, Debian 11.0 will likely be out in 2021.

• Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2018

  Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

• My LTS work in March

  So in March I resumed contributing to LTS again, after 2 years of taking a break, due to being overwhelmed with work on Reproducible Builds... Reproducible Builds is still eating a lot of my time, but as we currently are unfunded I had to pick up some other sources of funding.

• Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #155

• Make a name for your family in 'SAELIG', as it's now on Linux

  SAELIG [Steam] is a hard game to properly describe, with it pulling in elements from many games. It has features found in simulation and building games as well as RPGs, it's also now on Linux.

  We last wrote about the possibility of it arriving back in June of last year, where the developer laid out their intentions. Some in our comments were sceptical of it coming, so it's good to see another developer deliver!

• 3D precision platformer 'Super Lovely Planet' added Linux support recently

• GOG is having a big sale of its most wishlisted games

  The DRM-free store is having a pretty good sale with a lot of its most-wanted titles being significantly discounted.

• Your villagers in Rise to Ruins can now grow old and die

• Roguelike narrative card game 'Cultist Simulator' to release with Linux support on May 31st

  Cultist Simulator [Official Site] looks like a very interesting narrative crafting digital card game, where dangers are many.

  It's being developed by Alexis Kennedy, creator of Fallen London and Sunless Sea and it's another game funded on Kickstarter, where they managed to get £82K in funding. I must admit this took me by surprise, since I completely missed any mention of it before.

• RTS game 'Balanced Annihilation' has fresh release out

  For those interested in more traditional RTS games on Linux, Balanced Annihilation [Official Site] is another one to take a look at that was updated recently.

• The co-op space exploration game 'PULSAR: Lost Colony' just had a huge update

  PULSAR: Lost Colony is a space exploration game where you and friends (or AI) can team up to play a unique role on board a spaceship. It just had a pretty huge update!

  This big update, has revamped all the character art to give them a much improved look, along with a new appearance menu and more unlockable cosmetic items. They also added two entirely new playable races: The Sylvassi and Humanoid Robots.

• 2D combat game Jump Gunners just added AI and a new Horde mode

• Humble Store is running a sci-fi week with some good Linux titles on offer

• OnePlus 5 and 5T now receiving Android Oreo 8.1

• Thousands of Android apps potentially violate child protection law

• Android P's flagrant iPhone X imitation shows how little Google is innovating

• The trust gap: Android's persistent update problem

• Nokia 1 review: Android Go has a lot of potential

Nextcloud, the open source file sync and online collaboration technology, has announced it will be supplying the German federal government with a private, on-premises cloud platform as part of a three-year contract.

The Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund), which manages IT services for the federal government, has been running a pilot of 5,000 users with Nextcloud since October 2016 and after a tender for a private cloud was won by Computacenter, the Nextcloud technology will now be rolled out to 300,000 users in ministries and other federal agencies.

• Kdenlive: Video Editing in France and Spain

  The Kdenlive team, creators of KDE's non-linear video editor, will be holding their next sprint at the Carrefour Numérique in the Cité des Sciences in Paris next week.

  The sprint will run from the 25th to the 29th of April, and two days will be open to the public. On Friday, 27th of April, from 4pm to 6pm the event will be open to anyone interested in getting involved. You can meet the team and learn how you can contribute to the project. On Saturday, 28th of April at 2.45pm, there will be a public presentation. You can discover Kdenlive as used by professional editors and learn about the new features.

  Just in case you can't make it to Paris, but can get to the south of Spain: directly after the sprint, the team will fly to Seville to participate in the Libre Graphics Meeting.

• Modern Akonadi and KMail on FreeBSD

  For, quite literally a year or more, KMail and Akonadi on FreeBSD have been only marginally useful, at best. KDE4 era KMail was pretty darn good, but everything after that has had a number of FreeBSD users tearing out their hair. Sure, you can go to Trojitá, which has its own special problems and is generally “meh”, or bail out entirely to webmail, but .. KMail is a really great mail client when it works. Which, on Linux desktops, is nearly always, and on FreeBSD, iswas nearly never.

• Qt 5.12 schedule proposal & proposal for release process change

• Qt 5.12 Will Likely Ship In November, Might Drop Alpha/Beta Tags

  With Qt 5.11 already due to ship at the end of next month, Qt developers have begun discussing the follow-on Qt 5.12 release to ship in late 2018.

  Qt Release Manager Jani Heikkinen has been structuring the Qt 5.12 schedule. At this point the tentative soft branching is in the middle of August, the Qt 5.12 feature freeze would be around 20 August, and the final release would be planned for the end of November.

• BotsAndUs build a social robot on Ubuntu

While some IoT devices can be evaluated from a purely software standpoint (perhaps reverse engineering the mobile application is sufficient for your needs), a lot more can be learned about the device by interacting with all the interfaces available (often including ones not intended for access, such as debug and internal interfaces).

It's been almost two years since the April 21, 2016 release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system series, which already received four of five scheduled maintenance updates, the last one being Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS, launched last month on March 1, 2018.

While Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS brought up-to-date kernel and graphics stacks from the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) release, there's been a lot of changes happing in Ubuntu since the initial release and we bet that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users would want to know what they get if they'll upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS later this month.

• Security updates for Monday

• How one woman is helping others overcome "hacking [sic] abuse"

  "It is extremely rare for victims who have been threatened by their attackers to actually have compromised devices, Galperin said. "Because if an attacker has compromised their device they usually want to keep quiet about it so they can keep getting the information."

• 2.6 Billion Data Records Compromised in 2017, Gemalto Reports [Ed: Marketing disguised as research from Gemalto today. Just hoping you forgot about their NSA breach.]

• Survey finds frequent critical vulnerabilities in serverless open-source applications [Ed: Competing over who can bash FOSS the most/best to attract businesses, helped by complicit 'journalists']

• Large scale data breaches provide drive for DevSecOps investments [Ed: So-called ‘journalists’ as agents (PR) of Sonatype based on a press release that stigmatises FOSS]

• Application breaches jump 50pc as DevOps security bites

  The firm published the findings from its 5th annual DevSecOps Community Survey of 2,076 IT professionals which shared practitioner perspectives on evolving DevSecOps practices, shifting investments and changing perceptions.

• Survey finds data breaches are catalysts for DevSecOps investments

• Developers Outnumber Security Pros 100:1 as Breaches Grow

  Breaches related to open source components in applications have soared by 50% since 2017, according to a new study from Sonatype urging developers to adopt DevSecOps practices.

• Windows servers running IIS 6.0 targeted by crypto-mining hackers [sic]

  First identified by two researchers in China in March 2017, the CVE-2017-7269 vulnerability allows hackers [sic] to install a malware strain on the IIS 6.0 service.

• GitHub has a Huge List of Open Source Mac Apps

• Microsoft's chip push continues with Azure Sphere: Securing gadgets with chips and Linux [Ed: Microsoft is googlebombing "Linux" again]

• Microsoft will use Linux to secure internet of things devices

• Microsoft unveils secure MCU platform with a Linux-based OS

• Microsoft Turns to Old Enemy Linux to Solve Vexing Tech Threat [Ed: Linux is not an "old enemy" to Microsoft; Microsoft still attacks Linux using bribes, patent blackmail and a lot more, sometimes directly but more often indirectly (because that might interfere with EEE)]

• Pivotal IPO could bring about new open source offerings

• Capital One: Open Source in a Regulated Environment

• Open Source Integration Company WSO2 Launches Office in Sydney, Australia

  WSO2, the leading open source integration provider, today announced the official opening of the company’s new office in Sydney, Australia. The move expands WSO2’s support for the thriving hub of global and local enterprises in Australia that increasingly are adopting technology to support new digital business models for enhancing customer experiences, creating new revenue streams, and optimizing business operations.

One of the earliest mobile operating systems, Palm OS is still alive in the form of webOS. It’s current owner LG is making it open source, once again.