• ActiveState Developer Survey Examines Open Source Challenges

• Report: Developers are not clear on how to get involved in the open-source community

  After 20 years, the open-source community is stronger than ever. However, a recent report found developers while they had more time and know-how to contribute to open-source projects. According the report, respondents don’t quite know where to begin and start to question their skills and time.

  Additionally, developers say they are either too intimidated to contribute, lack the resources, or do not get enough time to contribute from their company.

  DigitalOcean’s CURRENTS A Seasonal Report on Developer Trends in the Cloud: Open Source Edition is based off of more than 4,300 international developers, and focuses specifically on how companies are using open source and why they support the community.

• Developers: Want fulfilling work? Here are the 10 most satisfying coding languages

  Developers choose a programming language for a project based on a number of factors, including what components that project needs, and what languages they are most comfortable with. However, developers are much more satisfied working in some languages than others, according to a Tuesday report from ActiveState.

  Adding a new programming language to the workplace was ranked as the largest challenge for developers, with 56% ranking this difficult or very difficult, the report found. This was followed by dependencies (24%), environmental configuration (20%), and reproducible builds (18%).

• The 10 most popular platforms developers use to code projects

  On a typical day, the largest portion of developers (37%) spend only 2-4 hours programming, according to a Tuesday report from ActiveState. Of the 1,400 developers and IT professionals surveyed, 14% said they spend one hour per day programming, 31% spend 5-7 hours, and 19% spend 8+ hours doing coding work daily.

  When starting new software projects, 26% of developers surveyed said they start a new project quarterly, the report found. Another 23% start new projects monthly, while 17% said rarely. Fewer in the field said they begin a new software project twice a year (14%), weekly (12%), annually (7%), or daily (1%), according to the report.

• "Every non-free program is an injustice": Richard Stallman on the Free Software Movement

  In the September–October 2018 issue of the New Left Review, Rob Lucas interviews software engineer and free-software advocate Richard Stallman, who is best known for spearheading the development of the GNU/Linux operating system in the 1980s. Stallman began his career at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in the 1970s, which at the time was animated by a spirit of open collaboration and creative exploration. But when the lab began to develop proprietary software and partner with telecommunications companies, Stallman saw the “injustice” of non-free software and struck out on his own.

• RICHARD STALLMAN TALKING TO THE MAILMAN: Interview by Rob Lucas

  I grew up in Manhattan, born in 1953. I was a behavioural problem—I couldn’t go to a public school without getting in trouble—and started working with computers at an early age. In 1969, during my last year of high school, an IBM lab let me come and use their computers. In 1970 I had a summer job there. They gave me a project to do, implementing a certain algorithm to see how well it would work. I finished that in a few weeks, so they let me spend the rest of the summer being paid to write whatever I felt like. I went to Harvard to study physics, and carried on programming there. Towards the end of my first year I started visiting computer labs to look at their manuals, to see how the computers differed. When I visited the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, they didn’t have much by way of a manual, because they had developed their own time-sharing system. The administrator there decided to hire me more or less straight away. So although I graduated from Harvard in 1974, I had actually been an employee at MIT for three years. Harvard’s computer was a lot better to play with than IBM’s, but it didn’t have a lot of memory, whereas MIT’s computer at the AI Lab had plenty. Not only that, they let me change the time-sharing system; in fact, that was my job—they hired me to work on that system. I added lots of features to lots of different programs—whatever I thought of, or people suggested to me, that seemed like a good idea, I would implement and then people would use it. And this was absolutely delightful—and gratifying to make things that people used and appreciated—so I kept working there. From that point on, I did programming using the machine at MIT.

• Innovative biography of RMS returns to GNU Press Shop

  In 2002, Sam Williams wrote Free as in Freedom, a biography of Richard M. Stallman. In its epilogue, Williams expressed hope that choosing to distribute his book under the GNU Free Documentation License would enable and encourage others to share corrections and their own perspectives through modifications to his work.

  Free as in Freedom (2.0) is Stallman's revision of the original biography. While preserving Williams's viewpoint, it includes factual corrections and extensive new commentary by Stallman, as well as new prefaces by both authors written for the occasion. It is a rare kind of biography, where the reader has the benefit of both the biographer's original words and the subject's response.

• GNU Spotlight with Mike Gerwitz: 8 new GNU releases!

  gama-2.01
  gcc-6.5.0
  gvpe-3.1
  help2man-1.47.8
  mes-0.18
  mtools-4.0.19
  parallel-20181022
  units-2.18

  For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

  To download: nearly all GNU software is available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the URL https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

• Normalizing Filenames and Data with [GNU] Bash

  Yeah, that many years. Almost 13 years of writing about shell scripts and lightweight programming within the Linux environment. I've covered a lot of ground, but I want to go back to something that's fairly basic and talk about filenames and the web.

  It used to be that if you had filenames that had spaces in them, bad things would happen: "my mom's cookies.html" was a recipe for disaster, not good cookies—um, and not those sorts of web cookies either!

  As the web evolved, however, encoding of special characters became the norm, and every Web browser had to be able to manage it, for better or worse. So spaces became either "+" or %20 sequences, and everything else that wasn't a regular alphanumeric character was replaced by its hex ASCII equivalent.

• Podman: A more secure way to run containers

  The Linux kernel has an interesting security feature called audit. It allows administrators to watch for security events on a system and have them logged to the audit.log, which can be stored locally or remotely on another machine to prevent a hacker from trying to cover his tracks.

  The /etc/shadow file is a common security file to watch, since adding a record to it could allow an attacker to get return access to the system. Administrators want to know if any process modified the file.

• Embedded Videos In Microsoft Word Can Be Used To Run Malicious Code

• Security updates for Wednesday

We’re expecting the release of Linux Mint 19.1 to arrive just before the Christmas holidays and, like your nearest and dearest, it’ll be bringing a few surprises with it.

The Linux 19.1 release will include the Cinnamon 4.0 desktop environment by default and this, Mint’s devs say, will “look more modern” than it does not.

How? By using a new panel layout.