• Facebook relicenses several projects

  Facebook has announced that the React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js projects will be moving to the MIT license. This is, of course, a somewhat delayed reaction to the controversy over the "BSD+patent" license previously applied to those projects.

• Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js

  Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons.

  This decision comes after several weeks of disappointment and uncertainty for our community. Although we still believe our BSD + Patents license provides some benefits to users of our projects, we acknowledge that we failed to decisively convince this community.

• Cloud Native Open Source License Choices

  One of the most common questions regarding open source licensing today concerns trajectories. Specifically, what are the current directions of travel both for specific licenses as well as license types more broadly. Or put more simply, what licenses are projects using today, and how is that changing?

  We’ve examined this data several times, most recently in this January look at the state of licensing based on Black Duck’s dataset. That data suggested major growth for permissive licenses, primarily at the expense of reciprocal alternatives. The Apache and MIT licenses, for example, were up 10% and 21% respectively, while the GPL was down 27%. All of this is on a relative share basis, of course: the “drop” doesn’t reflect relicensing of existing projects, but less usage relative to its peers.

  [...]

  One such community with enough of a sample size to be relevant is the one currently forming around the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Founded in 2015 with the Kubernetes project as its first asset, the Foundation has added eleven more open source projects, all of which are licensed under the same Apache 2 license. But as a successful Foundation is only a part of the broader ecosystem, the real question is what are the licensing preferences of the Cloud Native projects and products outside of the CNCF itself.

  [...]
  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the influence of the CNCF itself, Apache strongly outperforms all other licenses, showing far greater relative adoption than it has in more generalized datasets such as the Black Duck survey. Overall in this dataset, approximately 64% of projects are covered by the Apache license. No other project has greater than a 12% share. The only other licenses above 10%, in fact, are the GPL at 12% and MIT at 11%. After that, the other projects are all 5% or less.

Speak the word “mainframe” to many millennial techies, and the first things that likely come to mind are in the form of grainy sepia photos of floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall computers with big spinning tapes. But that’s far from the reality of the modern mainframe.

Imagine instead up to 240 10-core, 5.2ghz processors, 32TB of RAIM (redundant array of independent memory), hardware-based encryption, and fully hot-swappable hardware components. Those are the specs of the newly released IBM z14 – a single machine that could replace the computing resources of an average corporate data center with room to spare.

With their lacklustre approach to free software, German public services remain behind other European member states, says the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). When asked, the current governing parties’ say they support free software, but their statements are contradicted by the lack of action, the advocacy group says.

In early September, the FSFE published its analysis of the free software policies put forward by the main political parties on the ballot, in preparation for Germany’s parliamentary elections on 24 September. This analysis (in German) is far more detailed than an earlier report generated by the Digital-O-Mat, a web portal set up to focus on political parties’ positions on 12 digital topics.

New release: ISA² interoperability test bed software v1.1.0

• Puppet Acquires Distelli, Boosting Its Cloud Automation Offerings

  Puppet, the open source company that markets cloud-native software management tools, has acquired startup Distelli. Based in Seattle, Distelli offers a software as a service platform used by developers to build, test, and deploy code written in any language to any server, including cloud platforms. This is an obvious good match, as both platforms enable developers to manage infrastructure and applications across the entire software delivery process to make app development quicker.

  "Today, a company's success is predicated on how quickly and successfully it can deliver new experiences to customers through software," Puppet's CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, said in a statement. "Automation makes world-class application delivery straightforward for every enterprise, not just for companies born in the cloud. Together with Distelli, we are bringing a comprehensive solution for orchestrating and automating the entire software delivery lifecycle, from infrastructure, all the way up through containers."

• Mozilla Adds Tracking Protection to Firefox for iOS, Focus Gets Multitasking

  Mozilla released on Thursday new updates for its Firefox for iOS and Firefox Focus for Android apps adding new features like tracking protection and multi-tasking, along with various other improvements.

  Firefox for iOS has been updated today to version 9.0, a release that's available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices running iOS 10.3 or later. It comes with support for Apple's recently launched iOS 11 operating system, as well as tracking protection, which is enabled by default in the private browsing mode to automatically block third-party trackers in an attempt to increase browsing speed.

• 35 Top Open Source Companies [Ed: Easy to see that this list will be a 'scam' when the company listed in number one is Adobe. It has even listed Black Duck as "Open Source Company". It’s PROPRIETARY and ANTI-FOSS.]

• Open Source Summit in Los Angeles: Day 1 in 5 Minutes

  Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles was packed with keynotes, technical sessions, and special presentations, including a conversation with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. In case you couldn't make it, CodePop.com's Gregg Pollack has put together some short videos recapping highlights of the event.