Celebrating the FSF’s 35th anniversary: Stories from the Licensing and Compliance Lab

Since 2001, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Licensing and Compliance Lab has provided the legal muscle to defend free software, and has supported software users, programmers, legal professionals, and activists who want their software to remain free. FSF representatives had done copyleft enforcement before this, but the founding of the Lab was a big step toward formalizing and organizing this work. You may have already read licensing and compliance manager Donald Robertson’s comprehensive accounting of the current functions of the team, but today, following our thirty-fifth anniversary celebration, we’re taking a look back at the role this team has played over the course of the FSF’s thirty-five year-long history, and some milestones along the way. Like the other accounts written for this series, which focused on the campaigns team and the tech team's histories, this is far from a complete story of the FSF’s licensing work: there are important milestones that we were barely able to touch upon, and important people involved whose stories and voices aren’t represented here. It’s also possible that some details may have been missed or lost to time.

Meet the New Linux Distro Inspired by the iPad

I’ve seen a tonne of Linux distros come and go in the 12 years I’ve been blogging about Ubuntu, but precious few have been designed exclusively for tablet use. So when I came across JingOS, a new Ubuntu-based distro touting a touch-centric UI, I was naturally intrigued. Tablet-based Linux distros aren’t exactly common. JingOS’s developers say it is “the world’s first iPadOS-style Linux distro”. I don’t imagine anyone is going to take issue with that statement, especially once they’ve seen how it looks!

Linus Torvalds Decides To Land NVIDIA RTX 30 "Ampere" Support In Linux 5.11

While new feature code is normally not allowed in past the end of the merge window for a given Linux kernel release cycle, Linus Torvalds has decided to merge the newly-published open-source driver code for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics cards for the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut as stable in February. Ahead of this weekend's Linux 5.11-rc4 release, Linus Torvalds has merged the new initial open-source code for the NVIDIA RTX 30 / Ampere GPUs via the Nouveau driver. He was fine with allowing this late addition to Linux 5.11 as the new hardware support is all self-contained and doesn't risk regressing the existing NVIDIA GPU support within the Nouveau driver. Thus it's one of the rare times he permits new code to be added after a merge window since there is minimal risk of it regressing the status quo of hardware support.

today's leftovers

• Minimalist vs Modern - Linux Mint 20.1

  It's time to check out the two desktop environments built for the latest release of Linux Mint 20.1 - MATE and Cinnamon!

• Google Docs Replacement | Self-Hosted 36

  Our favorite Google Docs killer with markdown support has a big update. We explain how we host it and why we love it.

• Announcing Istio 1.8.2

  This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.8.1 and Istio 1.8.2

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/02 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

  Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers, Somewhere, I read, 2021 will be the year of the Linux desktop. Do you agree? Let’s make it the year of Tumbleweed on the desktop. In any case, Tumbleweed has been steadily rolling with 5 snapshots published during this week (0107, 0108, 0110, 0111, and 0113).

• Ubuntu 21.04 To Expand The Use Of Phased Package Updates - Phoronix

  With this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of "phased updates" for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates. Going back a number of years in Ubuntu has been Phased Updates that wired into Update Manager has led to the gradual rollout of new stable release updates over a period of about two days. This has been done gradually to ensure that no regressions or potential big problems hit all Ubuntu users at once by over the course of many hours exposing more Ubuntu users to these updates.