today's leftovers

• ASUS is releasing encrypted kernel sources for the ZenFone Max Pro M1, Max Pro M2 and Max M2

• zenwalk current ISO for 13 12 2018

• openSUSE Tumbleweed 20181211overview | Fast! Integrated! Stabilized! Tested!

• Deepin 15.8 Version 2 Run Through

  Yesterday, 14 December 2018, Deepin released 700mb of updates, and it fixed all the bugs of Deepin 15.8 and it is awesome now.

• Cumulus Linux, NetQ available for Lenovo RackSwitch

  Cumulus Networks has made its Linux-based network operating system available for Lenovo's ThinkSystem top-of-rack switches. Cumulus also introduced this week a version of its network troubleshooting software, called NetQ, for the open hardware.

OSS Leftovers

• #RecruitmentFocus: Open source skills in high demand

  The unemployment rate in South Africa rose to 27.5% in the third quarter of 2018, while the demand for skills remains high - leaving an industry conundrum that is yet to be solved. According to SUSE, partnerships that focus on upskilling graduates and providing real-work skills, as well as placement opportunities - could be exactly what the industry in looking for.

• Stable: not moving vs. not breaking

  There are two terms that brings a heavy controversy in the Open Source world: support and stable. Both of them have their roots in the “old days” of Open Source, where its commercial impact was low and very few companies made business with it. You probably have read a lot about maintenance vs support. This controversy is older. I first heard of it in the context of Linux based distributions. Commercial distribution had to put effort in differentiating among the two because in Open SOurce they were used indistictly but not in business. But this post is about the adjectivet stable…

• Cameron Kaiser: A thank you to Ginn Chen, whom Larry Ellison screwed

  Periodically I refresh my machines by dusting them off and plugging them in and running them for a while to keep the disks spinnin' and the caps chargin'. Today was the day to refurbish my Sun Ultra-3, the only laptop Sun ever "made" (they actually rebadged the SPARCle and later the crotchburner 1.2GHz Tadpole Viper, which is the one I have). Since its last refresh the IDPROM had died, as they do when they run out of battery, resetting the MAC address to zeroes and erasing the license for the 802.11b which I never used anyway. But, after fixing the clock to prevent GNOME from puking on the abnormal date, it booted and I figured I'd update Firefox since it still had 38.4 on it. Ginn Chen, first at Sun and later at Oracle, regularly issued builds of Firefox which ran very nicely on SPARC Solaris 10. Near as I can determine, Oracle has never offered a build of any Firefox post-Rust even to the paying customers they're bleeding dry, but I figured I should be able to find the last ESR of 52 and install that. (Amusingly this relic can run a Firefox in some respects more current than TenFourFox, which is an evolved and patched Firefox 45.)

• Protecting the world’s oceans with open data science

  For environmental scientists, researching a single ecosystem or organism can be a daunting task. The amount of data and literature to comb through (or create) is often overwhelming. So how, then, can environmental scientists approach studying the health of the world’s oceans? What ocean health means is a big question in itself—oceans span millions of square miles, are home to countless species, and border hundreds of countries and territories, each of which has its own unique marine policies and practices. But no matter how daunting this task may seem, it’s a necessary and vital one. So in 2012, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and Conservation International publicly launched the Ocean Health Index (OHI), an ambitious initiative to measure the benefits that oceans provide to people, including clean water, coastal protections, and biodiversity. The idea was to create an annual assessment to document major oceanic changes and trends, and in turn, use those findings to craft better marine policy around the world.

Openwashing Leftovers

• CableLabs Intros Open Source LPWAN Server

  CableLabs is excited to announce a new open source project called LPWAN Server. The LPWAN Server provides new capabilities to bring IoT LPWAN wireless technologies together. Before we go into more details on the LPWAN Server, let us first get some background into this space. In my previous blog post, I discussed the Internet of Things (IoT) as a growing industry comprised of a massive number of devices that connect to each other to benefit our lives. For example, a soil moisture sensor can help a farmer determine when to water their crops rather than potentially wasting water through a legacy timed-based approach. In that blog post, CableLabs announced the release of an open source LoRaWAN solution, LoRa Server.

• Instaclustr releases three open source projects for Apache Cassandra database users

  Yesterday, Instaclustr released three open source projects easing Cassandra-Kubernetes Integration and LDAP/Kerberos Authentication. These three projects include a Cassandra operator for Kubernetes, LDAP authenticator, and Kerberos authenticator plugins.

• 8 ways the tech world will change in 2019: DevOps, Kubernetes, open source fragmentation, and more

  We’re beginning to see an inflection point with Open Source. For example, Oracle is taking a more commercial approach to Java, which will cause fragmentation for Java developers. Additionally, some database companies have changed their licensing terms and Open Source models, which will cause issues for cloud players who were previously benefiting from the software. In 2019, developers will be challenged to determine which Open Source platform to move to that matches all their needs and works cohesively with their current technology – without threat of changing.

• Winding Tree completes its Hackathon, the first ever B2B open source hack in the travel industry

• Elastic Is A Unique Company With A Unique Valuation

• Facebook contributes to MLPerf and open sources Mask R-CNN2Go, its CV framework for embedded and mobile devices

• Facebook retires its open source contribution to Nuclide, Atom IDE, and other associated repos

• Sports Direct Partners with Open Commerce Platform Reaction Commerce

• ActiveState Celebrates Strong Year of Open-Source Languages Leadership

The Last Independent Mobile OS

The year was 2010 and the future of mobile computing was looking bright. The iPhone was barely three years old, Google’s Android had yet to swallow the smartphone market whole, and half a dozen alternative mobile operating systems—many of which were devoutly open source—were preparing for launch. Eight years on, you probably haven’t even heard of most of these alternative mobile operating systems, much less use them. Today, Android and iOS dominate the global smartphone market and account for 99.9 percent of mobile operating systems. Even Microsoft and Blackberry, longtime players in the mobile space with massive revenue streams, have all but left the space. Then there’s Jolla, the small Finnish tech company behind Sailfish OS, which it bills as the “last independent alternative mobile operating system.” Jolla has had to walk itself back from the edge of destruction several times over the course of its seven year existence, and each time it has emerged battered, but more determined than ever to carve out a spot in the world for a truly independent, open source mobile operating system. After years of failed product launches, lackluster user growth, and supply chain fiascoes, it’s only been in the last few months that things finally seem to be turning to Jolla’s favor. Over the past two years the company has rode the wave of anti-Google sentiment outside the US and inked deals with large foreign companies that want to turn Sailfish into a household name. Despite the recent success, Jolla is far from being a major player in the mobile market. And yet it also still exists, which is more than can be said of every other would-be alternative mobile OS company.