Qt Creator 4.7 Beta2 released

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.7 Beta2! It is roughly 2 weeks after the Beta1 release, and 2 weeks before our planned release candidate, so we want to give you the opportunity to fetch an updated work-in-progress snapshot in between. If you haven’t yet read about the improvements and new features that are coming with 4.7 (or if you have forgotten), I would like to point you to the blog post for the first beta.

OSS: C.H. Robinson, Instaclustr, Machine Learning and Koderize

• At C.H. Robinson, open source adoption brings iterative, fast development — almost too fast

  In 2014, C.H. Robinson, a third-party services and logistics firm, faced a roadblock: How do you remove bottlenecks in the technology development pipeline? Engineering teams with eight to 10 people aligned with a module or product worked to build out a functionality, such as an order management capability, according to Vanessa Adams, director, architecture and application development at C.H. Robinson. But individual teams were often held up by other product groups whose work they relied on.  At one point, 12-15 teams were required to meet most development deliverables and milestones, Adams told CIO Dive. In an effort to minimize the number of development dependencies, C.H. Robinson began exploring the idea of allowing people to work in other product areas rather than making them wait in line in the prioritization loop and hope project timelines synced up.  [...] With open source, legal departments have to approve contributions to open source projects, procurement departments have to understand there may not be a place to send an invoice and managers have to learn giving back to the open source framework on work time is part of the process. It's a long term shift that can take months, if not years, to execute, McCullough said.

• Kafkaesque: Instaclustr creates Kafka-as-a-Service

  Instaclustr has announced Kafka-as-a-Service in bid to provide an easier route to the real-time data streaming platform An open source player from the start, the e-dropping Instaclustr specifies that this release follows an ‘early access programe’ that saw a handful of Instaclustr users deploy the Kafka-as-a-Service solution to manage high volume data streams in real-time.

• Why are so many machine learning tools open source?

   

  Open source and machine learning go together like peanut butter and jelly. But why? In this article, Kayla Matthews explores why many of the best machine learning tools are open source.  

• New adventures – old challenges

  I’ve also spent a lot of time on promoting free and open source software. I’ve spoken at conferences, gone to hackathlons, spoken at the university, and arranged meetups. All this culminated in foss-north which I’ve been organizing for the past three years. The conclusion from all of this is that there is an opportunity to focus on this full time. How can free and open source software be leveraged in various industries? How does one actually work with this? How does licensing work? and so on. To do so, I founded my own company – koderize – a while back and from now on I’m focusing fully on it.

Kernel (Linux) Systems Boot, Linux Foundation (AGL and ONAP), GNU/Linux Jobs, and ONF

• A broad overview of how modern Linux systems boot

   

  For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, today I feel like writing down a broad and simplified overview of how modern Linux systems boot. Due to being a sysadmin who has stubbed his toe here repeatedly, I'm going to especially focus on points of failure.

• Separation Architecture Supports Automotive Grade Linux

  Green Hills Software now offers INTEGRITY Multivisor secure virtualization and advanced development tools for Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) on 64-bit automotive grade SoCs. For the first time, AGL applications can be added to automotive systems meeting the highest ISO 26262 safety levels through the INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS). As a result, OEMs can confidently run AGL-based infotainment and connected car applications in secure partitions alongside safety-critical and security-critical functions including instrument clusters, rear-view camera, ADAS, OTA, gateway and V2X. The results are lower system costs, more scalable platforms, shorter development times and lower ASIL certification costs.

• Second ONAP Open Source Network Automation Release Ships

  The Linux Foundation announced the second software release from the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project, a unified platform for end-to-end, closed-loop network automation Announced last week, ONAP Beijing stems from the melding of two different open source networking automation projects under the direction of The Linux Foundation in March 2017. ONAP focuses on automating virtual network functions in software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) implementations.

• Linux Projects Driving Demand for IT Pros With Open Source Skills

• ONF Announces New Reference Designs

  Driving Formation of a New Supply Chain To support operators’ impending deployment of these Reference Designs, a number of tier-1 vendors have joined the efforts as ONF partners to contribute their skills, expertise and technologies to help realize the RDs. Adtran, Dell/EMC, Edgecore Networks and Juniper Networks are actively participating as supply chain partners in this reference design process. Each brings unique skills and complementary competencies, and by working together the partnership will be able to expedite the production readiness of the various solutions.

• ADTRAN Partners with Open Networking Foundation (ONF) in Reimagined Strategic Plan

Games: BATTLETECH, Xenosis: Alien Infection, League of Legends

• Harebrained Schemes making 'good progress' on the Linux version of BATTLETECH

  While the Linux version of BATTLETECH [Official Site] sadly didn't release with the latest patch, the developer did give it a clear mention.

• Top-down sci-fi adventure 'Xenosis: Alien Infection' has been fully funded

  As a huge fan of Xenosis: Alien Infection, the top-down survival adventure game from NerdRage Studios, I'm really happy to see it get funded. With around 15 hours left on the Fig campaign, they're sitting pretty at 148% funded with around $37K. That's not bad at all and while it doesn't look like they will hit any interesting stretch-goals, the game itself is great anyway. Check out their latest sneak-peak:

• Riot changes stance on anti-cheat tech, some Linux users will be able to play League again

  For League of Legends players on Linux, using GPU pass-through technology means they no longer have to say goodbye to Summoner's Rift. Last week Riot Games implemented new anti-cheat technology for the game. This targets all instances of virtualization, or software that acts as if it's hardware, in an attempt to stop users from ruining the game experience for others. Through virtualization, players can create accounts run by bots. This generally results in a ruined experience for anyone in a game with such an account due to the bots playing worse than a human teammate would. Unfortunately for some, the anti-cheat technology also inadvertently locks out users on Linux and other open-source software, like Wine.