IBM/Red Hat/Fedora Leftovers

• HPE, Intel, Red Hat Team On 5G Open Source Initiative

• IBM awards its second $50,000 Open Source Community Grant to internship and mentorship program Outreachy

  Last October, the open source community at IBM awarded a first-of-its-kind quarterly grant to promote nonprofits that are dedicated to education, inclusiveness, and skill-building for women, underrepresented minorities, and underserved communities in the open source world. Our Open Source Community Grant identifies and rewards future developers and open source leaders and creates new tech opportunities for underrepresented communities.

• IBM selects Outreachy for second $50K open source community grant

  The award will help the organization provide paid remote work to underrepresented groups hit especially hard during the coronavirus pandemic, officials said.

• Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD": 20200404: What I did this week

  The research group does a lot of experimental work, but it is also where the Open Source Brain project is based. Given my computing background, and experience with FOSS in Fedora, a large component of my role is to work on the development of the Open Source Brain platform, and liaise with MetaCell who do most of the core development. Along with that, I get to work on modelling and other research projects. I was looking to work in a group that included experimentalists. I think that it is important for me to develop as an independent researcher in neuroscience. [...] We're nearing the Fedora 32 release, so I worked on the bits remaining for the new CompNeuroFedora lab image. Based on the discussion at the NeuroFedora meeting, I passed all the information needed to set up a page for the lab to the Websites team. The general package updates continue. I just updated Brian2 to the new version this morning and pushed an update with a test case. The test case takes one through the tutorial, so if one is looking to learn how to use Brian2, this is a good way of doing it while contributing to NeuroFedora. Another few bugs were fixed and updates pushed too. I've got to work on packaging a few new tools that are on the list. On the Fedora-Join front, we've had a few more folks join the community to help out. It was lovely chatting with new folks and discussing where and how they'd like to work with the community. Needless to say, lots of cookie giving has occurred in the IRC channel. I've also been thinking about the lack of a process for Community Changes in Fedora. Why isn't there something similar to the Change process that we use for dev changes? I finally filed a ticket with the Council. It's being discussed on the council-discuss mailing list. I've also asked Mindshare and CommOps to weigh in this morning. Please feel free to jump in and discuss how we should go about this. A change process that focusses on community is important, in my book. The Git forge discussion continues on the -devel mailing list, so I've been keeping up with that. I would prefer Pagure myself, and I do understand the CPE team's view even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

• Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux for telco edge computing use cases

  Amongst the common reasons why service providers are deploying mobile edge computing are to improve network security, increase scalability, lower costs and increase revenue with new services. Digital Service Providers and the associated telco partner ecosystem rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a foundation for responding to customer requirements and seizing new opportunities, particularly as they deploy 5G and edge services. As Stefanie Chiras explains, the vendor sees its Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the innovation engine for edge, providing consistency from the data center all the way to the edge with tools like Image Builder. 5G is changing the world, and edge is changing 5G. It believes that RHEL is the intelligent OS service providers and telco ecosystem can count on to provide that consistent, scalable foundation for innovation where customers can develop once, deploy and deliver anywhere.

• Linux Beat IBM, Will Open-Source Software Beat Waymo And Tesla? [Ed: "Linux Beat IBM"? Huh? I don't think they know what "Linux" is and what "IBM" does? Forbes is absolutely hilarious.]

  Open Source has disrupted many markets. Is the Autonomous Vehicle Market next ?

• Will A Small Open-Source Effort From Japan Disrupt The Autonomous Space ? [Ed: Forbes... the Breitbart of tech. Very poor and shallow, weak and wrong on many facts]

  A small team in Finland built linux and changed the landscape of corporate computing. Will a small team in Japan do the same for the autonomous vehicle space ?

Today in Techrights

• EPO is Just Like Some Cruel Political Party and Not a Patent Office
• Digitalisation and Digital Technologies as a Ploy to Justify Illegal Software Patents
• The Fall of the UPC – Part X: How We Shall Catalogue UPC Lies
• Major Revelation: Microsoft Blackmail Against LAMP (GNU/Linux and Free Stacks for Servers) Goes At Least 16 Years Back, Predating the Novell Patent Deal
• IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 04, 2020
• IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 03, 2020
• Links 4/4/2020: Sparky 5.11, Firefox 74.0.1, POCL 1.5
• Links 3/4/2020: Ubuntu Beta, GNOME 3.36.1, ExTiX LXQt Mini, NetBSD 8.2 Released

Sharing, Collaboration and 'Open Source' Tackling Covid-19

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute working on open-source ventilator designs

  Researchers at Worcester (Mass.) Polytechnic Institute (WPI) are touting a design for turning inexpensive bag valve mask (BVM) resuscitators into automated ventilators to aid the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. The WPI team is designing the ventilators from readily available, manual BVM resuscitators so that they can fill the gap between the number of ventilators available and the number needed when COVID-19 is expected to peak, according to a news release. Anyone with a 3D printer and a background in electronics and mechanical engineering may be able to produce the ventilators for a local hospital, as the researchers intend to make designs of multiple devices and components publicly available. The researchers also believe a manufacturing company can use the designs to make the ventilators quickly and at scale.

• Will EEs Be the Heroes of the Global Ventilator Shortage?

  As the coronavirus continues to spread, hospitals around the world face a severe shortage of ventilators that alleviate respiratory distress. New York could be short by about 15,000 ventilators to treat the most severe cases, according to The New York Times. In these uncertain times, even carmakers are starting to make ventilators and face masks to help out during the crisis. A quick search of ventilators shows that there are many makers around the world who try to build a basic ventilator using readily available materials or 3D-printed parts. Some of these projects are open source to solicit help from experts and enthusiasts all over the world. In this article, we’ll briefly look at some of these open-source projects. Some of the projects we assessed in this article include OpenLung BVM Ventilator, the Low-Cost Open Source Ventilator or PAPR, the Rice OEDK Design (or ApolloBVM), and OxyGEN, among others. We’ll also take a look at the general challenges that a low-budget open-source ventilator project might face.

• UF researchers develop low-cost, open-source ventilator

  As the need for ventilators grows as hundreds of thousands of patients are expected to need treatment for COVID-19, a University of Florida professor is working to help meet the demand. UF Professor of Anesthesiology Dr. Samsun Lampotang and a team of UF researchers have developed a ventilator that can be made using items from the hardware store. As a UF mechanical engineering student decades ago, Lampotang helped respiratory therapist colleagues build a minimal-transport ventilator that became a commercial success. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit and he heard the desperate international plea for thousands of more ventilators, he set out to build a prototype using plentiful, cheap components that could be copied from an online diagram and a software repository.

• Triple Eight develops open-source ventilator prototype

  After nearly two weeks of around-the-clock development, Triple Eight Race Engineering has revealed a low-cost ventilator prototype in an effort to help fight the global coronavirus pandemic. Following the ill-fated Australian Grand Prix, the Brisbane-based racing team led by Roland Dane suspended its racing operations after government guidelines on social distancing were introduced. With the Supercars season on hold, Dane challenged a group of six engineers to conceptualise and develop a ‘worst-case scenario’ ventilator in the event of the virus worsening. It took the group of engineers just four days to design and produce the first proof of concept, slowed only by a lack of readily available electrical componentry.

• Council on Foreign Relations: Time to Open-Source Ventilators

• Rice University's open-source emergency ventilator design plans freely available

  The plans for Rice University's ApolloBVM, an open-source emergency ventilator design that could help patients in treatment for COVID-19, are now online and freely available to everyone in the world. The project first developed by students as a senior design project in 2019 has been brought up to medical grade by Rice engineers and one student, with the help of Texas Medical Center doctors. The device costs less than $300 in parts and can squeeze a common bag valve mask for hours on end.

• WPI Researchers Developing Open-Source Designs to Speed Creation of Low-Cost Ventilators

  A team of researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is creating designs to turn inexpensive and readily available manual, hand-held, bag valve mask (BVM) resuscitators into automated ventilators that could be used to fill the deep gap between the number of life-saving ventilators available and the much larger number that will be needed when COVID-19 is expected to peak. The WPI researchers are going to make designs of multiple devices and their components publicly available so anyone with a 3D printer and a background in electronics and mechanical engineering could use them to produce ventilators for their local hospitals. A manufacturing company also could use the designs to produce ventilators quickly and at scale. “I just wanted to do something to help,” said Gregory Fischer, professor of robotics engineering and mechanical engineering, and director of the PracticePoint Medical Cyber-Physcial Systems R&D Center, who spearheaded the idea. “A lot of people are trying to contribute, and this is an area where we can make an impact. We’re taking things that are used every day in emergency medicine and finding a way to turn them into safe, reliable, and readily replicable ventilators that can save patients’ lives. And we’re sharing those designs with the world.”

• For Open-Source Ventilators, Making Them Is the Easy Part

  Last week, when Eric Humphreys heard about the impending need for ventilators to treat the huge influx of Covid-19 patients, he sprang to action. Humphreys used to be an EMT, and he remembered the bag valve mask resuscitators used in ambulances—called by the trademarked name of the leading provider, “Ambu bag”—and thought maybe he could create something like it. He didn’t have much else to do during the shutdown. Humpreys is a lifelong maker, working as the director of creative design technology at a production company called Standard Transmission. The company is best known for concocting the intricate Christmas window displays at Macy’s. Working in the now depopulated 20,000-square-foot headquarters in Red Hook, Brooklyn, he began building a DIY breathing machine. “I literally used Christmas parts,” he says. The point of a ventilator is to pump air into the lungs of patients who can’t breathe for themselves. The Ambu bag requires an EMT to manually press down on the plastic bladder, forcing the air into the patient. Humpreys rigged a machine to do the pumping. It took him only a couple of days to produce something that mimicked the action of an EMT on an Ambu bag.

• Globally Scalable Open Source Ventilator Initiative

• Indian engineers at MIT to develop open-source, low-cost ventilator for US

  One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the COVID-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can cost around $30,000 each. Now, a rapidly assembled volunteer team of engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and others, centered at MIT, is working to implement a safe, inexpensive alternative for emergency use, which could be built quickly around the world.

• Hyderabadi in global open source ventilator project

  Amateur radio operators are once again playing a crucial role in times of despair, with some of them, including Hyderabad’s Ashhar Farhan, now in the process of developing an electronic control system for an open-source low-cost ventilator. The device was designed by researcher Sem Lampotang and his team at University of Florida using components like PVC pipes and lawn-sprinkler valves. The idea is to create a bare-bones ventilator that could serve in the event of a ventilator shortage anywhere in the world during the Covid-19 pandemic.

• Medtronic Makes Plans for a Ventilator Open-Source - Nasdaq [Ed: openwashing lies]

• Professional Ventilator Design Open Sourced Today By Medtronic [Ed: This is a lie and Bob Baddeley helps Medtronic spread false claims from its openwashing press release (above)]

• Runaway Soldering Irons, Open Source Ventilators, 3D Printed Solder Stencils, And Radar Motion | Hackaday

  Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams sort through the hardware hacking gems of the week. There was a kerfuffle about whether a ventilator data dump from Medtronics was open source or not, and cool hacks from machine-learning soldering iron controllers to 3D-printing your own solder paste stencils. A motion light teardown shows it’s not being done with passive-infrared, we ask what’s the deal with Tim Berners-Lee’s decentralized internet, and we geek out about keyboards that aren’t QWERTY.

• Nonprofit releases open source tool for making 3D print reusable protective masks

  A nonprofit initiative aims to put an end to the protective mask shortage that both healthcare workers and the public are facing during the coronavirus pandemic by providing them with tools to make the gear at home. Mask Maker released the first medically-approved design for 3D printed protective masks in an open source program that is available online. The masks can be created using commonly available materials and hobbyist grade 3D printers for a cost of about $2.00 to $3.00 per unit for materials – and they can be manufactured in just a few hours. The finished product is reusable and is equivalent of 300 disposable masks over a two month period.

• American architects mobilise to make coronavirus face shields for hospital workers

• How Coronavirus can make open-source movements flourish and fix our healthcare systems

  Birds can be heard chirping loud, as Mark Turrell (CEO at Orcasci, Founder of unDavos) talks to the Data Natives online community from his garden. A squirrel might even jump on his head at any moment, he warns. In this idyllic scene from his home quarantine it might not seem so at first sight, but the entrepreneur, author and contagion expert is worried. And that says a lot, coming from a man who also used to be a spy in Libya and Syria. “We are living in a very unusual time”, he says. Turrell was in Davos this year when the coronavirus crisis broke loose in Wuhan. He became alarmed when he learned that the Chinese government had closed Wuhan. “A city of 16 million people, to just shut it down, that is weird”, he tells. “And then I saw, this virus has properties that will make it extremely hard to suppress and extremely hard to defeat.”

• bjarke ingels group and more architects 3D print face shields for coronavirus medical staff

  showing the power of collaboration, a number of well-known architects have come together to help produce protective visors for hospital workers on the frontline of coronavirus (COVID-19). what began as an initiative by cornell university, led by jenny sabin, has now reached architecture studios across the US in a matter of days. the likes of BIG and KPF are now utilizing their firm’s 3D printers to mass-produce face shields and combat the shortage faced by medical staff.

• Why isn't the government publishing more data about coronavirus deaths?

  Studying the past is futile in an unprecedented crisis. Science is the answer – and open-source information is paramount

• [Repeat] Lesson of the Day: ‘D.I.Y. Coronavirus Solutions Are Gaining Steam’

  As the number of cases of Covid-19 grow across the globe, health care workers are facing a serious shortage of critical equipment and supplies needed to treat the coronavirus — from exam gloves to ventilators. From Ireland to Seattle, makers and engineers are creating open-source versions of much-needed medical equipment. In this lesson, you will learn about do-it-yourself makers who are collaborating to fight the gravest public-health threat of our time. In a Going Further activity, you will consider how you might contribute to the D.I.Y. movement.

• Three state prison staff test positive; KU partners on open-source plastic mask design

• Bangladesh's Daffodil University using open-source AI for COVID-19 test with x-ray images

  Researchers at Daffodil International University in Bangladesh are using an open-source Artificial Intelligence technology that can diagnose COVID-19 by using chest x-ray images. The university’s Department of Public Health, AI Unit, and Daffodil Group’s Cardio-Care Specialized and General Hospital have jointly launched the system with a 96 percent success rate, according to the researchers. The Directorate General of Health Services has cautiously welcomed the initiative saying that more analysis is needed before the technology can be put to use. The researchers started working on the technology two and a half months ago after the novel coronavirus emerged in China and a lack of testing kits began straining the public heathcare system the world over, Assistant Professor Sheikh Muhammad Allayar, head of the university’s Department of Multimedia and Creative Technology, told bdnews24.com.

• Color is launching a high-capacity COVID-19 testing lab and will open-source its design and protocols

  Genomics health technology startup Color is doing its part to address the global COVID-19 pandemic, and has detailed the steps it’s taking to support expansion of testing efforts in a new blog post and letter from CEO Othman Laraki on Tuesday. The efforts include development of a high-throughput lab that can process as many as 10,000 tests per day, with a turnaround time of within 24 hours for reporting results to physicians. In order to provide the most benefit possible from the effort of standing this lab up, Color will also make the design, protocols and specifics of this lab available open-source to anyone else looking to establish high-capacity lab testing. [...] Color has also made efforts to address COVID-19 response in two other key areas: testing for front-line and essential workers, and post-test follow-up and processing. To address the need for testing for those workers who continue to operate in public-facing roles despite the risks, Color has redirected its enterprise employee base to providing, in tandem with governments and employers, onsite clinical test administration, lab transportation and results reporting with patient physicians.

• Color to launch COVID-19 testing lab, open-source infrastructure to bolster national response to pandemic

  Color today announced it is launching a high-throughput CLIA-certified COVID-19 testing laboratory integrated with public health tools. The testing facility, based in Burlingame, CA, will begin processing clinical samples to support public health efforts over the coming week, with a near-term goal of performing 10,000 tests per day and a lab turnaround time of 24 hours. Color's lab is operating at cost as a public good. The lab's initial testing is backed by philanthropic support from industry leaders and private donors. In addition to increasing capacity for patients, Color is also supporting access to testing for public sector essential personnel and healthcare workers on the front lines of the crisis.

• COVID-19: Creatives Join Forces to Make Open-source Garments to Fight Disease

  Creatives in the fields of design, fashion and communication of Antwerp have formed a collaboration to fight against the coronavirus. They’re tackling the urgent demand from healthcare workers for protective isolation gowns and coveralls. Are you interested in producing protective garments with these patterns? Are you a virologist or medical protective wear specialist and willing to help them refine requirements? Belgium—Creatives tegen Corona, CtC for short, a temporary collaboration between various Antwerp-based creatives, have united their skills and network in support of the healthcare workers in the battle against the worldwide COVID-19 epidemic. The collaboration began after members began hearing about the urgent demand from healthcare workers in their own circles. They got together to test and prototype various models of protective isolation gowns and overalls.

• Don Bosco Tech engineers developing open-source ventilators to help COVID-19 patients

• Mozilla will fund open source COVID-19-related technology projects

  Have you come up with hardware or software that can help solve a problem that arose from COVID-19 and its worldwide spread? Mozilla is offering up to $50,000 to open source technology projects that are responding to the pandemic in some way.

• Open-source program to assess and map COVID-19 hazard risk

  Most of the COVID-19 maps that I see are usually into choropleth maps at the country scale, which means that they assume a uniform distribution in each geographical unit. There are some other maps using a point symbology. However, the problem is that usually those points overlap each other. The approach adopted on the other hand, increases the spatial resolution and granularity of information that is conveyed to the people. Most of the other COVID-19 maps/applications usually focus purely on confirmed cases/ deaths, while not paying much attention to the quantification of potential risks. For example, if you look at some of the most current maps, you will see that populous countries like India and Nigeria do not yet have a big problem, while their large populations alone increase their risk.

• Tencent Open-sources Another AI-powered Tool to Help Conduct Preliminary Self-evaluation Regarding COVID-19 Infection

  Tencent Holdings Limited ("Tencent", 00700.HK), announced today to deepen collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO). As part of the agreement, Tencent will provide technology support to combat the pandemic and open-sources another AI-powered tool today to assist the global fight against the coronavirus outbreak. The COVID-19 self-triage assistant, which is now available on Github for developers around the world, enables preliminary self-evaluation regarding infection of the disease and provides tips on its prevention. Prior to this tool, Tencent open-sourced a COVID-19 live updates module last Friday that has answered six billion pandemic-related queries in China over the past two months.

• The open source response to Covid-19

  The coronavirus pandemic has exposed shortcomings and fragility in many of our largest and most important institutions. Some leaders have been slow to grasp the nature and severity of the threat, citizens in many countries feel that some aspects of their government’s response or preparedness have been lacking. Faced with untracked spread in the population, generalized lockdowns aiming to suppress the spread of the virus are exacting heavy economic tolls. Companies in many sectors are warning of imminent bankruptcy, seeking bailouts, and many have already embarked on large scale layoffs, resulting in a rise in unemployment unprecedented in its sharpness. Central banks are warming up the printing presses, stepping in with all manner of bailouts, designed to avert specific outcomes that they see as being particularly damaging and therefore worth the cost of avoiding.