• Where's the beef? Wendy's chooses an open source WCMS

  Wendys.com sells 1.5 million burgers a day via its website and app. At that scale, when it came time to update the back-end software supporting it, choosing a WCMS wasn't as simple as running the Frosty machine.

  Earlier this year, the fast-food giant sought a simpler design but far more complex data tracking for personalization, said Michael Mancuso, the company's head of digital analytics who also heads up Wendys.com. In this Pipeline podcast episode, he discusses the process for choosing a WCMS.

  Spoiler alert: Wendy's didn't weigh technology analyst reports that rank the market leaders. Acquia, the open source WCMS platform vendor, eventually beat out 24 other prospective vendors. (The vendor actually ranks well in such industry reports.)

• Google Open-Sources BERT: A Natural Language Processing Training Technique

  In a recent blog post, Google announced they have open-sourced BERT, their state-of-the-art training technique for natural language processing (NLP) applications. Google has decided to do this, in part, due to a lack of public data sets that are available to developers. BERT also includes a new bidirectional technique which improves its effectiveness in NLP. To reduce the amount of time required for developers and researchers to train their NLP models, Google has made optimizations in Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) which reduces the amount of time it takes to train a model to 30 minutes vs a few hours using a single GPU.

  [...]

  In addition to new techniques included in BERT, Google has made enhancements to Cloud TPUs which allow developers and researchers to quickly experiment, debug and tweak models. These investments allowed Google to exceed the capabilities of existing pre-training models.

• ARM’s original operating system goes open source

  In today’s increasingly digital world, learning to code has become an integral part of STEM curriculums. Schools are using Raspberry Pi and other ARM-based hardware as a low-cost means of introducing students to coding.

  Following the recent news that RISC OS, the original ARM operating system, is going open source, TechRadar Pro sat down with the Director of RISC OS Developments, Richard Brown to learn more about how the operating system is being used in schools and other hardware projects.

• Will Cloud Computing Kill Open Source Development? [Ed: Stupid headline, stupid article. There is no such thing as cloud, it's just servers and most of these run FOSS, so they're not competition to or incompatible with FOSS. The article is actually about a company going proprietary.]

  Redis changed the licensing of some of their enterprise modules to be licensed under the Apache 2.0+ Common Clause. These modules cannot be used as stand-alone commercial SAAS. This was specifically aimed at cloud providers.

  The surrounding controversy has raised an issue that has been lurking in the open source community for a while. The best case for open source has been with software infrastructure, rather than software application projects. If cloud computing companies become the infrastructure providers for software, their market control might allow them to take over open-source projects, and sell those software services at a lower price point than companies who market open source services.

  If this scenario comes to pass, is there any future for open source companies?

• Open Source at 20: What's Next? [Ed: FOSS is 35 years old, not 20. Stop setting to clock to when Free software came under attack.]

  As the open source movement reaches the two-decade milestone, thoughts turn to the movement's achievements and future goals.

  The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is celebrating its 20th Anniversary in 2018. To mark the occasion, cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean surveyed over 4,300 developers on the movement's health, as well as on how enterprises and employees are approaching and using open source technologies.

  [...]

  Open source is continuing to move toward increased corporate stewardship, advised Chris Kelly, director of engineering marketing and engagement at Salesforce. "We’ll continue to see more production-critical projects from companies being released as open source as a way to build industry consensus, accelerate hiring and [create] a gateway to their products," he predicted.

• Sony has added the Xperia XZ2 and XZ3 to its Open Devices program

• Sony's Open Devices program now supports the Xperia XZ2 and XZ3

Every day, I use high-quality software that is developed and maintained by people who do not ask for payment, who respect my freedoms, and who are generous with their time and energy.

In this season of giving thanks, I encourage those of you who also use and appreciate the work of open source and free software maintainers to express your gratitude. Here are ten ways to do that...

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are some of the hottest buzzwords around, especially in the open source community. It seems that every month brings a new machine learning system, each focused on a different application.

The good news is that since academics developed many of these frameworks, they are often open source by default. Even Google's own neural network software library, TensorFlow, is (at least for now) open source.

The bad news is that many of these frameworks are designed for high-end applications and require a lot of experience to deploy effectively. If you want to spend years building image recognition software from scratch, for instance, and want to stick to open source software, there are plenty of options available. Good luck with that PhD.

For the rest of us, taking advantage of recent advances in machine learning and AI requires that they come in an easy-to-use package and have real-world applications.

Luckily, there is at least one area where open source machine learning and AI systems are making a real impact: content management systems (CMSes), the software that sits behind websites and manages the content on them.

• Google, Amazon and Facebook Embrace Open Source Software As Future

  Open source coding lets users collaborate on software code, giving them the ability to store and edit code independently. It is designed to make projects built with its software publicly accessible, and has been the key to success for companies like Airbnb and Uber, which have made their fortunes by offering services, rather than the software itself.

  “The previous generation of developers grew up in a world where there was a battle between closed and open source,” said GitHub's Ben Balter, a researcher with the web-based hosting service for source code and open source software projects. “Today, that is no longer true.”

• AWS Developing New Services Amid Open-Source Tensions

  Companies that manage open-source software have a message for cloud computing providers like Amazon: pay up, share your code or stop using our technology for free.

• AWS develops new services amid open-source pushback

  Last month, MongoDB changed its licensing to put the Community Server software under a SSPL license, which lets cloud providers offer MongoDB as a service but only if they open source all of the related code or create a commercial agreement.

• Urvika Gola: Attending ReactConf’18 in Henderson, Nevada

  Day 2 of React Conf, started with talking about how performance is integral to UX. Code Splitting, a concept were instead of sending the whole code in the initial payload, we send what’s needed to render the first screen and later, lazily loading the rest based on subsequent navigation. A most common problem while implementing code splitting can be ‘what do you display to the user if the view hasn’t finished loading?’ Maybe a spinner, loader, placeholder…?? But lot of these degrades the UX. Then came Concurrent React into the picture, Concurrent React can work on multiple tasks at a time and switch between them according to priority. Concurrent React can partially render a tree without committing the result and does not block the main thread.

• OpenStack Rebranding Infrastructure Team as OpenDev

  OpenStack is one of the largest open source efforts in the world, with a large infrastructure that is used to build, develop and test the cloud platform. The infrastructure effort is now being rebranded as OpenDev as OpenStack continues to evolve.

  In a session, at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Germany last week, Clark Boylan team lead for the OpenStack Infrastructure team outlined how things are set to change as OpenStack moves beyond its core project to embrace a broader group of Open Infrastructure efforts.

  "We basically act as beta testers for the infrastructure and make sure things work," Boylan. "If it works for us, it'll probably work for you too."