FOSDEM 2018 Real-Time Communications Call for Participation

Top Bank, Legal and Software Industry Executives to Keynote at the Open Source Strategy Forum

Copyleft is Dead. Long live Copyleft!

As you may have noticed, we recently re-licensed mgmt from the AGPL (Affero General Public License) to the regular GPL. This is a post explaining the decision and which hopefully includes some insights at the intersection of technology and legal issues.

Crowdsourcing the way to a more flexible strategic plan

Trust the community. Opening a feedback platform to anyone on campus seems risky, but in hindsight I'd do it again in a heartbeat. The responses we received were very constructive; in fact, I rarely received negative and unproductive remarks. When people learned about our honest efforts at improving the community, they responded with kindness and support. By giving the community a voice—by really democratizing the effort—we achieved a surprising amount of campus-wide buy-in in a short period of time. Transparency is best. By keeping as many of our efforts as public as possible, we demonstrated that we were truly listening to our customers and understanding the effects of the outdated technology policies and decisions that were keeping them from doing their best work. I've always been a proponent of the idea that everyone is an agent of innovation; we just needed a tool that allowed everyone to make suggestions. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Crowdsourcing our first-year IT initiatives helped us create the most flexible and customer-centric plan we possibly could. The pressure to move quickly and lay down a comprehensive strategic plan is very real; however, by delaying that work and focusing on the evolving set of data flowing from our community, we were actually able to better demonstrate our commitment to our customers. That helped us build critical reputational capital, which paid off when we did eventually present a long-term strategic plan—because people already knew we could achieve results. It also helped us recruit strong allies and learn who we could trust to advance more complicated initiatives.

Reform is a DIY, modular, portable computer (work in progress)

Want a fully functional laptop that works out of the box? There are plenty to choose from. Want a model that you can upgrade? That’s a bit tougher to find: some modern laptops don’t even let you replace the RAM. Then there’s the Reform. It’s a new DIY, modular laptop that’s designed to be easy to upgrade and modify. The CAD designs will even be available if you want to 3D print your own parts rather than buying a kit. You can’t buy a Reform computer yet. But developer Lukas Hartmann and designer Ana Dantes have developed a prototype and are soliciting feedback on the concept.

New neural network teaches itself Go, spanks the pros

While artificial intelligence software has made huge strides recently, in many cases, it has only been automating things that humans already do well. If you want an AI to identify the Higgs boson in a spray of particles, for example, you have to train it on collisions that humans have already identified as containing a Higgs. If you want it to identify pictures of cats, you have to train it on a database of photos in which the cats have already been identified.

Ubuntu Drops Unity for GNOME in Artful Aardvark Release

Ubuntu 17.10 brings the biggest changes in years

Canonical releases a new version of the popular Ubuntu operating system every six months. Quite frankly, most of those updates are kind of boring, with incremental changes from one build to the next. But Ubuntu 17.10 launches on October 19th, and it’s actually kind of a big deal.

Finally, Ubuntu 17.10 All Flavors Download Links

How to Upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10 From a Previous Release

How to: Upgrade Ubuntu 17.04 to Ubuntu 17.10

Kubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark is released

Kubuntu 17.10 has been released, featuring the beautiful Plasma 5.10 desktop from KDE. Codenamed “Artful Aardvark”, Kubuntu 17.10 continues our proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

WPA vulnerability (KRACK Attack) fixed

MAAS KVM Pods

OpenStack is the dominant solution in the IaaS space, fueled by the need for reliable, scalable and interoperable private cloud infrastructure to accommodate cloud native applications. Through OpenStack’s open APIs, tenants can easily deploy elaborate virtual (overlay) networks, integrate with a variety of storage backends, even leverage modern hypervisor-like machine containers (LXD) for bare metal performance. Although the tooling allows a full fledged OpenStack deployment on just a single machine, the intrinsic efficiencies that OpenStack’s design promises, materialize at a certain scale — typically at least 12 servers.

DevOps for NFV: OPNFV Infrastructure and Continuous Integration

In this article series, we have been discussing the Understanding OPNFV book. Previously, we provided an introduction to network functions virtualization (NFV), discussed the role of OPNFV in network transformation, and looked at how OPNFV integrates and enhances upstream projects. We continue our series with in-depth insight into the OPNFV DevOps toolchain, hardware labs, continuous integration (CI) pipeline, and deployment tools (installers) from chapters 6 and 7 of the book.  

A Chat with Chef about the DevOps Movement and Habitat Builder

Last week at our annual user conference, Node.js Interactive, we announced several new members to the Node.js Foundation. One of the members that joined is Chef. Chef works with more than a thousand companies around the world to deliver their vision of digital transformation. We sat down with the team at Chef to talk about how Node.js fits within the DevOps movement, why they joined the Node.js Foundation, and also about a new offering from the group called Habitat Builder.

Why Use Docker with R? A DevOps Perspective

There have been several blog posts going around about why one would use Docker with R. In this post I’ll try to add a DevOps point of view and explain how containerizing R is used in the context of the OpenCPU system for building and deploying R servers.

Docker on Docker at DockerCon EU 17

Docker Inc. the company behind the open-source Docker container technology doesn't just build docker, it also used the same technology to power its own services.

Introducing Narabu, part 1: Introduction

Narabu is a new intraframe video codec, from the Japanese verb narabu, which means to line up or be parallel. Let me first state straight up that Narabu isn't where I hoped it would be at this stage; the encoder isn't fast enough, and I have to turn my attention to other projects for a while. Nevertheless, I think it is interesting as a research project in its own right, and I don't think it should stop me from trying to write up a small series. :-)

3 Simple, Excellent Linux Network Monitors

Mailutils Version 3.3 available

Mailutils version 3.3 is available for download. See the NEWS file, for information about changes in this version.

Now You Can Play Rubik’s Cube Puzzle In Terminal

Rubik’s Cube game needs no introduction, right? It is a 3-D combination puzzle game invented by Ernő Rubik, a Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture, in 1974. It is one of the best puzzle game invented so far to enhance the problem-solving skills of the kids and adults. If you’re one Rubik’s Cube lover, you don’t need to buy it online or from a shop. You can play it right from the Terminal. A fellow Developer has created an utility called “NRubik”. It is an N-Curses based, virtual Rubik’s Cube written in Python. If you’re a hardcore CLI user who lives on Terminal all day, NRubik will certainly make your time useful.

VirtualBox 5.2 Debuts Officially with Support for Exporting VMs to Oracle Cloud

To everyone's surprise, Oracle announced today the final release of the VirtualBox 5.2 open-source and cross-platform virtualization software for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows, and Solaris. VirtualBox 5.2 is a massive update bringing a revamped and more modern graphical user interface (GUI) based on recent Qt5 technologies, as well as powerful new features that will help you with all of your virtualization tasks. One of these new features is the ability to finally export and store virtual machines into the cloud. Oracle has made it possible to export VMs to its Oracle Cloud (OPC) public cloud service, allowing users to easily deploy virtual machines across multiple VirtualBox installations. Imagine you no longer have to export a VM to an external drive to import it on another computer, just download it from the Oracle Cloud.