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Openwashing and Manipulation in Free/Open Source Software

Filed under
OSS
  • Securitize Makes Its Core Protocol Open Source [Ed: Protocols can maybe be "open", but this isn't about source code; pure openwashing]
  • Highway Care launches two open source work zone safety initiatives [Ed: This isn't "open source"; they just throw in the term like a marketing label which is meaningless.]
  • Getting the F... acebook out of Kea: Zuck's open-sourcerers retrain load balancer as a server [Ed: Openwashing mass surveillance, espionage and censorship is a longtime tradition at Facebook even if all the core things are proprietary software and do malicious things]

    Antisocial media giant Facebook has published the source code for the latest version of DHCPLB, adding server functionality to the tool that was first developed by FB engineers for hardware provisioning and load balancing.

    The updated open-source DHCPLB can be downloaded from GitHub.

    At Facebook, the tool has already replaced an older implementation of the provisioning stack based on Kea, an open-source DHCP server project managed by the nonprofit Internet Systems Consortium (ISC).

    "With this version, we've seen better throughput and are able to iterate faster than we could with our previous solution," Pablo Mazzini, a production engineer at Facebook, wrote in a blog post today. "In fact, we are now handling the same volume of traffic with 10 times fewer servers."

  • EOS Releases Its Open Source iOS Wallet App and Chrome Extensions[Ed:"Open Source iOS" means you must use proprietary software with back doors to run it; how "open" is it really then? Same for Chrome, which is also proprietary and surveillance-centric. Another fine example of "open source" you cannot use until you pay Apple for a DRM-laden surveillance platform with back doors and worse.]

    The release of EOS open source iOS wallet app will allow developers to provide support for “inter-application transaction signing on native mobile devices”.

  • Why Some Android Phones Don't Have the Play Store [Ed: Play Store is proprietary software and those who assumed that AOSP being "open" is good enough are missing the Big Picture]
  • [Repeat] Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain [Ed: Chrome is proprietary software with DRM (EME) and Chromium helps distract from this.]
  • Why a "closed" open source project may be just what a community needs [Ed: Adobe's Mac Asay, who tried working for Microsoft (and failed), is still promoting the proprietary software model for 'FOSS' (his employer pays media to syndicate his ramblings, it's paid-for agenda up on display).]
  • Twilight of the open tech era [Ed: Open Source is dying. proprietary software giants take over the term and use that for openwashing of their surveillance businesses, lock-in included.]

    Today's tech giants achieved success and scale by promoting their openness, but the industry's open doors are shutting, one by one.

    Why it matters: Being "open" allowed tech innovators and companies to claim a sort of moral high ground. Without it, they are increasingly vulnerable to legal and regulatory restraint and popular disaffection.

  • Vendors Argue over AWS’ Open Distro for Elasticsearch [Ed: Amazon uses AWS to make FOSS de facto proprietary]

    AWS announced the release of their Open Distro for Elasticsearch back in March. However, the release has not come with support from all members of the community. While AWS states that they have released Open Distro in order to ensure that Elasticsearch remains fully open source, other members of the tech community claim this is another move by Amazon to further solidify their strong customer base.

    The Open Distro for Elasticsearch is, according to AWS, a value-added distribution of Elasticsearch licensed fully under the Apache 2.0 license. This release leverages the open source code from Elasticsearch and Kibana. According to Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, "this is not a fork; we will continue to send our contributions and patches upstream to advance these projects."

  • US might have control of Open Source [Ed: The media must stop promoting the lie that GitHub is the same as all code; some clueless recruiters, 'analysts' etc. take that seriously and treat anything not on GitHub (Microsoft) as not existing. Meanwhile see that Microsoft still dominates news search results for “open source”, in effect killing it because all these results actually promote proprietary software such as GitHub (yes, it’s proprietary and nasty). Dependabot is another EEE move of Microsoft. Microsoft now relies on various sellouts and turncoats to help slow down the exiters' momentum. The corporate media that receives Microsoft money (so-called 'ads', a form of bribery for media companies) pretends that GitHub "Sponsors" is some sort of Microsoft charity rather than Microsoft asking the public for money.]

    It is starting to look like Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump has control of open source code and can freeze out whichever country fails to give him enough respect.

    For a while, Open Source has been touted as a way for developing countries to come up with their software, but now with Trump’s trade war, it looks like they were all suckered into signing up for US control.

    Restricted access to US technology is shaping up to have a big impact on Huawei. According to Abacus News, some Chinese software developers are wondering if the ongoing trade dispute between the US and China might soon affect them.

  • GitHub says Chinese developers are safe from export restrictions [Ed: For now. That's just the PR people speaking. And Microsoft has an extensive history lying and breaking promises/assurances. OSI doesn't care about Microsoft entryism and is part of the problem (taking Microsoft money and staff). FSF is mostly asleep at the wheel, hoping the problem will magically go away. It won't.]
  • Salesforce Empowers Developer Community with Open Sourced Lightning Web Components [Ed: Salesforce is openwashing by releasing a bunch of "components" with a source to accompany these. It's still proprietary software (the whole).]
  • Salesforce Lightning Web Components Framework Now Open Source
  • Salesforce Open Sources Lightning Web Components JavaScript Framework
  • Salesforce Open Sources Lightning Web Components to Improve DevOps Performance
  • Salesforce open sources Lightning Web Components
  • Salesforce: Open Sourcing Lightning UI Components Will Benefit Ecosystem Partners
  • Developers: Salesforce open sources framework so you can build apps on any platform
  • Open Source Xamarin.Forms 4.0 Simplifies Mobile App Creation [Ed: Microsoft is still openwashing its proprietary frameworks and IDE using Mono and Xamarin, whose CEO it put in charge of GitHub. Dark times.]
  • You Can Now Auto-Update Your GitHub Repos to Avoid Code Vulnerabilities [Ed: Read as, Microsoft will start modifying code you put in GitHub, which is incidentally in NSA PRISM and proprietary software will do this, like Windows Update.]
  • GitHub introduces Dependabot-powered automated security fixes [Ed: This means that without user intervention Microsoft and the US government (and US spy agencies) can tamper with code and binaries people download, e.g. to add back doors under the guise of (national) "security"]
  • Build like an open source community with GitHub Enterprise [Ed: Microsoft is now upselling GitHub while looking to spy on private code and, as the last paragraph shows, it uses FUD ("IP") to sell this, using typical scare tactics like Black Duck's. GitHub is proprietary software and Microsoft uses it not to spread FOSS but rather to promote its proprietary offerings and malicious agenda. Only people who refuse to accept reality have not yet decided to delete GitHub.]

    Customers will be protected for their use of GitHub. Specifically, from claims alleging that GitHub products or services, including any open source components we reuse in our products or services, infringe third-party IP rights.

  • Logz.io lands $52M to keep growing open source-based logging tools [Ed: Nothing to celebrate here; Logz.io is into surveillance and licks Microsoft's boots, helping the company's surveillance agenda. The funding comes from dodgy companies, too.]
  • Logz.io Raises $52 Million in Series D Funding Led by General Catalyst
  • Oracle looks to holy trinity of open positives [Ed: Again openwashing Oracle where almost everything is proprietary software]

    Oracle may not always be viewed positively in open source circles, the company’s approach to Java and wider open platform still draws headlines a decade after it took up a position of stewardship over the Java platform and language in line with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

    Looking to highlight more positive angles in terms of Oracle’s open universe this month is the company’s David Cabelus in his position as senior principal product manager for developer services.

    Cabelus notes the continued adoption of DevOps and Kubernetes and says that the notion of simplified and combined deployment is what spawned the Open Service Broker API project, which provides a consistent model for exposing cloud services to applications and application deployment tooling.

More in Tux Machines

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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.