• FOSS vs FRAND is a collision of worldviews

  Of late there have been a number of interventions sponsored by the world’s largest and most profitable tech patent holders to muddy the waters about open source and FRAND licensing of patents in standards by arguing contentious minutiae like the intent of the authors of the BSD license. This is happening because of the clash of industries I wrote about in 2016, with companies fundamentally based on extracting patent royalties unable to imagine any other way of doing business so mistaking the issue of FRAND as being about license compliance rather than as it being an obstacle to the very purpose of open source in commercial software — collaboration with others.

• Motivations and pitfalls for new "open-source" licenses

  One of the bigger developments of the last year has been the introduction of licenses that purport to address perceived shortcomings in existing free and open-source software licenses. Much has been said and written about them, some of it here, and they are clearly much on the community's mind. At FOSDEM 2019, Michael Cheng gave his view on the motivations for the introduction of these licenses, whether they've been effective in addressing those motivations, what unintended consequences they may also have had, and the need for the community to develop some ground rules about them going forward.

  In the past year we have seen several unusual new licenses, the Server Side Public License (SSPL), the Commons Clause license addendum, the CockroachDB Community License, and the Confluent Community License among them. All either perturb the historical copyleft norm of "you must distribute derivative works under the same license" by extending the scope past what's covered under the definition of a derivative work, or they exclude some historically permitted form of activity such as building similar works or making money. These developments have been of concern to many; talks at FOSDEM and the immediately-following Copyleft Conference with titles like "Redis Labs and the tragedy of the Commons Clause", "Who wants you to think nobody uses the AGPL and why", and "What is the maximum permissible scope for copyleft?" leave little room to doubt how many people are mulling over them.

• Ender 3: Open Source 3D Printer Reviewed By A 3D Printing Noob

  3D printing has been all the rage lately with both professionals and prosumers accomplishing incredible things from printing patient organs for surgery practice to printing robotic arms and quad-copters. As with all things, there has been a trickle-down effect that’s led to even the most inexperienced being able to obtain this revolutionary technology.

  Here we will explore my adventure from having never touched a 3D printer to assembling and operating my own Creality Ender 3.

In the first part of this series, we looked at advances in leveraging the power of relational databases "at scale" using Apache Spark SQL and DataFrames. We will now do a simple tutorial based on a real-world dataset to look at how to use Spark SQL. We will be using Spark DataFrames, but the focus will be more on using SQL. In a separate article, I will cover a detailed discussion around Spark DataFrames and common operations.

I love using cloud services for my machine learning, deep learning, and even big data analytics needs, instead of painfully setting up my own Spark cluster. I will be using the Databricks Platform for my Spark needs. Databricks is a company founded by the creators of Apache Spark that aims to help clients with cloud-based big data processing using Spark.

Also: Scaling relational databases with Apache Spark SQL and DataFrames

• Linux Foundation Adds a Project for Building Data Best Practices

  The Linux Foundation today added a new project, called DataPractices.org, which acts as a template for data best practices. The project will offer open coursework for data teamwork in an effort to create a vendor-neutral community to establish these practices and increase data knowledge.

  The project was initially created by data.world, a data catalog platform for data and analysis, as a data practices manifesto. The manifesto contains the values and principles that create an effective, modern, and ethical approach to data teamwork. According to Brett Hurt, data.world co-founder and CEO, the main goal of the project is to “raise the level of data literacy across the ecosystem.”

  Data teamwork, said Hurt, is a method for bringing together “your data practitioners, subject matter experts, and other stakeholders by removing costly barriers to data discovery, comprehension, integration, and sharing.” He added that this method enables companies to “achieve anything with data, faster.”

  Under the Linux Foundation, DataPractices.org will continue and further the work started by data.world’s manifesto. The manifesto is up on the Linux Foundation’s website (and available to sign) and contains a number of values and principles.

• The Kodi Foundation Officially Joins Forces with The Linux Foundation

  Ever since the first line of its code was written, there was the idea of creating Kodi (known as XBMC back in the day) based on open-source principles. This means that the source code of this application is available for anyone to access, see, review, and edit as they see fit. And now, the Kodi Foundation has joined the Linux Foundation in a not-as-surprising move as these organizations share the same core values.

  In a freshly-published blog post, Kodi’s development team explains the reasons why it has joined the Linux Foundation as an Associate Member. This move will allow Kodi’s team to work with similar organizations, spread their reach, and to improve their own software in the long run. The Linux Foundation has both corporate members and individual supporters, with companies like Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Intel, IBM, Oracle, Samsung, and many others on board.

• Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Kingsoft Cloud as Gold Member

  The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which sustains open source technologies like Kubernetes® and Prometheus, today announced that Kingsoft Cloud has joined the Foundation as a Gold member.

  Kingsoft Cloud, a unit of Kingsoft Group, is a leading global cloud computing service provider. According to recent research from IDC, Kingsoft is among the top three cloud computing companies in China. The company offers a broad portfolio covering cloud server, physical cloud host, relational database, object storage, load balancing, VPN, CDN, cloud security, cloud DNS, and more, as well as cloud-based solutions for the government and enterprises in vertical industries.

  “By joining CNCF, we look forward to contributing to a more holistic integration of open source technologies across real-world business scenarios,” said Liu Tao,General Manager for Product Center of Cloud Computing and Partner of Kingsoft Cloud. “Becoming a Gold member will not only increase our power to innovate with cutting-edge technologies, but the practical experience Kingsoft Cloud brings can help the CNCF community deploy its projects across commercial application scenarios.”

NetworkManager 1.16 has been released two days after the launch of the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment and promises lots of exciting new features and improvements, starting with support for the new WireGuard protocol implemented in the Linux kernel for creating secure IPv4 and IPv6 VPNs (Virtual Private Networks).

"Unlike other VPN solutions NetworkManager supports, WireGuard tunneling will be entirely handled by the Linux kernel. This has an advantages in terms of performance, and also removes the needs of a VPN plugin," explained developer Lubomir Rintel in a recent blog article.