• Medellín WordPress User Group Celebrates Open Source CMS Platform’s 15th Anniversary

  Medellín is well known for its innovative technology scene, with many active software and information technology user groups. One of those is the user group centered around open source content management software WordPress. A year ago the user group hosted Colombia’s first Wordcamp function, supported by the global WordPress community, and the user group recently gathered to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the first WordPress open source software release that took place May 27, 2003.

  WordPress is an free, open source software platform that allows amateur and professional users to create websites without writing programming code. Over the years it has grown into a powerful platform robust enough to run enterprise websites in many cases. For example, Finance Colombia runs on WordPress software.

• Training: Embedded Linux and Security training day – Reading

  Providing detailed hands-on training, it is targeted at embedded engineers looking for an introduction to key embedded Linux and Security topics.

• Amazing solar panel device that could change the world goes open source

  An innovative and simple solar panel efficiency device has just gone open source in order to get renewable energy to those who need it most.

  When you picture solar power, you might think of the enormous Ivanpah solar power plant in California (the largest in the world) or huge tracts of land in other sun-drenched parts of the globe.

  But not everyone has access to such enormous grids and particularly in remote villages in developing nations, there is only a need for a single or small group of solar panels that could maintain maximum efficiency to sustain a family or the village itself.

• Meet the man in charge of Arduino

  I went to visit the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea – a school that was started just six months before I went to visit them – and they asked me if I knew someone who could teach electronics to designers and to ask this question to my colleagues at the Politecnico.

  I went back and they said “No! Teaching electronics to designers? For us?” Those were guys working on highly sophisticated FGPAs, so they didn’t care about designers. I thought about Massimo – he had a real passion for electronics and he worked as a CTO for an internet provider at that point in time. I said, “Massimo, you could be the right person for this type of engagement – they’re designers, you love design, and you know electronics.” I introduced Massimo to the school and they hired him. That’s how the story started. When he was teaching at the Design Institute of Ivrea, they started the Arduino project as a way to standardise the electronics projects the students were doing. I introduced Massimo to the school and they invented Arduino, so I’m sort of the great-grandfather to some extent.

• pinp 0.0.6: Two new options

  A small feature release of our pinp package for snazzier one or two column vignettes get onto CRAN a little earlier.

  It offers two new options. Saghir Bashir addressed a longer-standing help needed! issue and contributed code to select papersize options via the YAML header. And I added support for the collapse option of knitr, also via YAML header selection.

  A screenshot of the package vignette can be seen below. Additional screenshots of are at the pinp page.

• OpenMP 5.0 Public Draft Released

  The public draft of the OpenMP 5.0 SMP programming standard is now available for review ahead of the specification's expected stable release before the end of 2018.

  OpenMP 5.0 is expected to succeed the OpenMP 4.5 parallel programming standard in Q4'2018, but for ironing out any last minute issues and allowing more compiler developers to begin implementing the standard, the public draft is now available.

• When Does Kubernetes Become Invisible And Ubiquitous?

  The sign of a mature technology is not just how pervasive it is, but in how invisible and easy to use it is. No one thinks about wall sockets any more – unless you happen to need one to charge your phone and can’t find one – and that is but one example of a slew of technologies that are part of every day life.

  Since Google first open sourced the Kubernetes container controller, inspired by its Borg and Omega internal cluster and container management systems, more than four years ago, we have been betting that it would become the dominant way of managing containers on clouds both public and private. The irony is that the people in charge of Google’s infrastructure were not initially all that enthusiastic in giving away such intellectual property, but the Kubernetes and open source enthusiasts correctly predicted that Google would get tremendous cred with the open source community and help create a Google-alike containerized private cloud environment and also possibly spread Google’s approach to rival clouds as well as helping its own Cloud Platform expansion by giving Kubernetes to the world.

• Crictl Vs Podman

  As people continue to adopt CRI-O as a new container runtime for Kubernetes I am hearing questions from administrators who are confused whether they should use Crictl or Podman to diagnose and understand what is going on in a Kubernetes node. This is not one or the other — these tools are complementary, and this article attempts to explain the tools and examine when it is best to use each of these tools. If you take away one thing from this post, remember that Crictl checks the front entrance, while Podman examines the foundation.

  First things first. For those people who aren’t familiar with it, CRI-O is a lightweight, Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant, container runtime for Kubernetes. It is designed to run any OCI-based container, it is optimized for Kubernetes and committed to being stable and conformant with the Kubernetes container runtime interface with each Kubernetes release. CRI-O is also now fully supported in OpenShift, Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes container platform. For more information on CRI-O check out the CRI-O community web site and blog.

• BlueData Announces BlueK8s Open Source Kubernetes Initiative

  Kubernetes (aka K8s) is now the de facto standard for container orchestration. Kubernetes adoption is accelerating for stateless applications and microservices, and the community is beginning to evolve and mature the capabilities required for stateful applications. But large-scale distributed stateful applications – including analytics, data science, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) applications for AI and Big Data use cases – are still complex and challenging to deploy with Kubernetes.

Open source software has been around for a long time. But calling it open source only began in 1998. Here's some history:

Christine Peterson came up with the term "open source software" in 1997 and (as she reports at that link) a collection of like-minded geeks decided on February 3, 1998 to get behind it in a big way. Eric S. Raymond became the lead evangelist when he published Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source" on February 8th. Bruce Perens led creating the Open Source Initiative later that month. Here at Linux Journal, we were all over it from the start as well. (Here's one example.)

• Apache Cassandra at 10: Making a community believe in NoSQL

  Ten years ago this month, when Lehman Brothers was still just about in business and the term NoSQL wasn't even widely known, let alone an irritant, Facebook engineers open-sourced a distributed database system named Cassandra.

  Back then, the idea that huge numbers of companies would need a scalable database was almost laughable – and that grip of traditional relational database systems is reflected in the mythical moniker given to what would become one of the first of many databases designed to run on a cluster of machines.

  Named after the Greek figure who was cursed to utter the truth but was never believed, Cassandra might seem an odd choice for a system whose raison d'être is believability – but it delivered a nice dig at the stalwarts of the RDBMS world… and their trust in a false Oracle.

• Google Launches Jib, Automated Container Packaging for Java Apps

  Google has released software that could automate the packaging of a Java program so that it can be run in the cloud-native environment.

  Jib is an open-source Java “containerizer,” one that handles all the steps of packaging your application into a container image, according to Appu Goundan and Qingyang Chen, two Google engineers who co-wrote a blog post announcing the new technology.

  Created over two decades ago at Sun Microsystems, Java was introduced as a “write once, run anywhere” programming language, where all the code would be packaged in a JAR file, and run by a Java Virtual Machine on any platform. The requirements for running code anywhere have expanded with the introduction of containerization, however. Few shops are Java-only these days, and many are turning to containerization for true application portability,

• WSO2 Summer 2018 Release Brings Agility to Secure Microservices Integration

• New Operations in Mexico Extend WSO2’s Reach Across Latin America

• How Open Source Became The Default Business Model For Software

• 10 Best Kodi Addons You Should Install In 2018 | Legal Addons

  Kodi is one of the most popular media player software which enables you to access videos, music, and pictures via the internet or local storage on a host of platforms. Managed by XBMC foundation, Kodi is an open source software. However, its reputation has been soiled by labeling it as a piracy bearer, and that is why many ask “Is Kodi legal?” You can read more about Kodi and whether it is legal or not here.

• Summer of Code: Plan for the grand finale

  To get that done, I have to polish up my smack-openpgp branch which has grown to a size of 7000 loc. There are still some minor quirks, but Florian recommended to focus on the big picture instead of spending too much time on small details and edge cases.

  I also have to release pgpainless to maven central and establish some kind of release cycle. It will be a future challenge for me personally to synchronize the releases of smack-openpgp and pgpainless.

• Collaborative World Shaping: Why Open-Source Tech Matters in a For-Impact Future

  How many lives could be saved if there was a way to vastly cut down inefficiency and through bureaucracy, by problem solving at a global scale? Could technology help us reach more individuals in need more meaningfully, substantially helping people affected by disasters – in less time?

  The technology is already out there – but not enough people know about it.

  In 2017, Hurricane Irma—the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean—made landfall; with widespread, “catastrophic” damage, disaster relief organizations were overwhelmed. “A lot of traditional means of crisis response are very top down, and they didn’t really kick in — we saw headlines about how the Red Cross didn’t show up to shelters,” said Greg Bloom, a community organizer and civic hacker who knew he had to step in to assist.

• The First Open-Source Smart Contract Platform to be Started by Rootstock

  RSK Labs, formerly known as Rootstock, an Argentinian startup building the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin.RSK Labs CEO Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar on Bitcoin Smart Contracts Sidechain and Crypto Industry Challenges.

  Even though at this point of time the 2-way peg security of the RSK blockchain is still relying on a group of third parties called ‘Federation’, in the future the developers promise to bring a “trustless” automatic peg. How fast this happens to some degree depends on the overall miners support.

  The company says its goal is to add value and functionality to the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling Ethereum-like smart-contracts, near instant payments and higher-scalability, and this past January after almost two years of development its mainnet dubbed Bamboo was finally launched.

• Creality’s Ender 3 3D Printer is Now Fully Open Source

  Creality3D, founded in 2014, is a 3D printer manufacturer based in China, offering more than 20 products. Their popular Ender 3 was recently voted “Best 3D Printer Under $200” by All3DP (review here).

  Now, the company is making their most popular 3D printer, the Ender 3, completely open source.

  This makes it the first Open Source Hardware Association certified 3D printer in China. This means not just a few files have been shared, but all hardware, CAD files, board schematics and firmware files are available. You can find the updated versions on the company’s GitHub page.

• Charité's researchers integrate open-source platform into the 'Human Brain Project'

  Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) are pleased to announce that 'The Virtual Brain' neuroinformatics platform has joined the EU's Flagship 'Human Brain Project'. With financial support from the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Charité's researchers are now integrating their open-source platform into the 'Human Brain Project'. This will provide participating researchers with a research infrastructure that promotes efficiency and reproducibility. The researchers will focus on refining the theoretical underpinnings of the computer models used, developing efficient simulation technology, and working on neuroinformatics solutions that enhance the reproducibility of studies.