• Two New Open Source Projects From SAP: Dan Lahl

  In this episode of Let’s Talk, Daniel Lahl, Vice President (Product Marketing) – SAP talks about the two new Open Source projects at SAP.

• A Special Offer for SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems Early Adopters

  In my blog, “Is time running out for your SAP Linux support?”, I talked about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 11 SP4 soon reaching its March 31, 2019 end date for General Support. This date has passed. To maintain support you have a choice of either upgrading to a currently supported version or adding Long Term Service Pack Support (LTSS). But if you’re an early adopter of SAP HANA on IBM Power Systems, then it’s not just a matter of upgrading the Linux OS. You need to migrate your data from Big Endian to Little Endian format. Also, your data is still probably in an SAP HANA 1.0 database so you’ll also need to migrate to SAP HANA 2.0. All of this can take significant time and effort.

• Rounding out the list of Red Hat Summit keynotes [Ed: A summit led by Microsoft CEO's (first in the list); Red Hat sold out.]

  For the last few months, we’ve been sharing the exciting and thought-provoking keynotes that you can look forward to at Red Hat Summit 2019. From hybrid cloud, containers and cloud-native app platforms to management, automation and more, customers, partners and technology industry leaders from around the world will come together for a high-energy week of innovation, education and collaboration.

  In our 14th year, we’re bringing you inspirational, educational and actionable content, industry-shaping news, and innovative practices from customers and partners from across industries. With just fours week to go, we’re proud to announce the last round of partners and customers who will be taking the stage in Boston, May 7-9.

• Leadership of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 Transitions to Red Hat

  OpenJDK is an open source implementation of Java, one of the most widely-used programming languages for building enterprise-grade applications. In its role as steward of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 update releases, Red Hat will work with the community to enable continued innovation in Java.

  Red Hat has been a member of the OpenJDK community since 2007 and is one of the largest contributors to the project. Red Hat’s long-time Java technical lead, Andrew Haley, was appointed as project lead for OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 in February 2019. He has been an active member of the OpenJDK governing board for seven years and, in this capacity, helps to guide the future direction of Java and OpenJDK.

  In addition to its work within individual OpenJDK communities, Red Hat leads the upstream development of Shenandoah, a high-performance garbage collector that is now part of OpenJDK 12.

• Survey says: Enterprise open source is inventing the future of software

  We don’t need to ask if enterprises are using open source. They are, and we know because we’re helping many of them with their open source journeys. But how do they think about open source, why do they choose it, and what do they intend to do next? Well, those are questions we wanted to pose to IT leaders—so we did. Today we’re excited to share our findings in a first-ever report conducted by Illuminas and sponsored by Red Hat, "The State of Enterprise Open Source."

• Red Hat survey finds we're living in an open-source world [Ed: But Red Hat sold itself to a proprietary software company and had considered Microsoft also]

  Some people still insist open source and Linux are fighting a war against the evils of proprietary software. Actually, we won that war years ago. The latest Red Hat State of Enterprise Open Source report, based on 950 interviews with worldwide enterprise IT leaders, makes that crystal clear. Only a mere 1% of enterprises dismiss the importance of open-source software.

  [...]

  Historically, businesses turn to open source software because it's cheaper: 33% of enterprise users count it's lower total cost of ownership (TCO) as open-source's chief benefit (but "enterprise open source is increasingly used not because it's cheaper -- though it often is -- but because it's genuinely better software." And 29% turn to open source because it gives them access to the latest innovations. For example, big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are all built almost entirely on open-source software.

  Right behind those, when asked what open source's top benefits were, respondents pointed to better security, higher quality software, access to support, and the power to customize software.

  Yet another reason to embrace open source, according to a New York-based IT leader, was: "For us, this is our way to become more agile. That's our biggest push. We don't want dependency upon these proprietary companies. We want those shackles to be broken." Simultaneously, "We still want support because we're not ready to take off the guardrails."

  On the other hand, security remains a concern: 38% of those surveyed identified security as the top barrier. That's because, unless you keep on top of open-source code, you may miss security patches and fixes. The most well known such case was when Equifax exposed 143 million Americans' credit data, thanks to not updating Apache Struts.

Today, CentOS turns 15 years old. It’s had hard times and good times, and gone through a number of big changes over those years. We feel that we’ve landed in a really great place, over the last 5 years, as part of the Red Hat family of projects, and we’re very excited about what’s coming with CentOS 8, and the years to come.

Right now, we want to look back at how we got where we are now. We did that by going back and talking with some of the people that were involved in those early years, as well as some that joined the project later on.

We started by talking with Greg Kurtzer, who was the original founder of the project. In this interview, he told us about the motivations for starting the project, as well as some of the community challenges that were faced in those first years.

Also: CentOS Celebrating Its 15th Birthday As They Prepare For CentOS 8.0

• Flatpak Linux App Sandboxing Gets New FUSE-Based System-Wide Installation Method

  Flatpak 1.3.2 is now available and it contains a major change in how installation of Flatpak apps is done system-wide as a user. The developers decided to rewrite the setup process of a Flatpak app due to the fact that the previous method caused unnecessary I/O and used more disk space. The new setup process relies on a custom FUSE file system.

  "The new setup uses a new custom fuse filesystem which the user writes to, and then when this is done we can safely revoke any access to this from the user, meaning the files can be directly imported into the system repository without needing to make a copy," explains Alexander Larsson in the GitHub announcement page.

• Flatpak 1.3.2 Released - Now Makes Use Of A Custom FUSE File-System

  Red Hat's Alexander Larsson released Flatpak 1.3.2 as the newest development release for this widely-used Linux application sandboxing/distribution tech. Flatpak 1.3.2 builds upon last month's Flatpak 1.3 unstable release with more low-level changes to enhance the security and reliability of Flatpaks.

  A big change was made with Flatpak 1.3.2 affecting how system-wide installations are done as a user. Up to now Flatpak relied upon a process involving a temporary user-owned directory and copying from there, but that method involved unnecessary I/O and temporarily using more disk space.