Microsoft caused considerable consternation in the open source community over the past month, after unveiling a shake up to the way developers will be able to monetize open source software. From a report: There are many examples of open source software sold in Microsoft's app store as full-featured commercial applications, ranging from video editing software such as Shotcut, to FTP clients such as WinSCP. But given how easy it is for anyone to reappropriate and repackage open source software as a new standalone product, it appears that Microsoft is trying to put measures in place to prevent such "copycat" imitations from capitalizing on the hard work of the open source community.

However, at the crux of the issue was the specific wording of Microsoft's new policy, with section 10.8.7 noting that developers must not: ...attempt to profit from open-source or other software that is otherwise generally available for free, nor be priced irrationally high relative to the features and functionality provided by your product. In its current form, the language is seemingly preventing anyone -- including the project owners and maintainers -- from charging for their work. Moreover, some have argued that it could hold implications for proprietary applications that include open source components with certain licenses, while others have noted that developers may be deterred from making their software available under an open source license.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: "People are realizing now: wait a minute, literally everything we do is underpinned by Linux," says Dave Aitel, a cybersecurity researcher and former NSA computer security scientist. "This is a core technology to our society. Not understanding kernel security means we can't secure critical infrastructure." Now DARPA, the US military's research arm, wants to understand the collision of code and community that makes these open-source projects work, in order to better understand the risks they face. The goal is to be able to effectively recognize malicious actors and prevent them from disrupting or corrupting crucially important open-source code before it's too late. DARPA's "SocialCyber" program is an 18-month-long, multimillion-dollar project that will combine sociology with recent technological advances in artificial intelligence to map, understand, and protect these massive open-source communities and the code they create. It's different from most previous research because it combines automated analysis of both the code and the social dimensions of open-source software.

Here's how the SocialCyber program works. DARPA has contracted with multiple teams of what it calls "performers," including small, boutique cybersecurity research shops with deep technical chops. One such performer is New York -- based Margin Research, which has put together a team of well-respected researchers for the task. Margin Research is focused on the Linux kernel in part because it's so big and critical that succeeding here, at this scale, means you can make it anywhere else. The plan is to analyze both the code and the community in order to visualize and finally understand the whole ecosystem.

Margin's work maps out who is working on what specific parts of open-source projects. For example, Huawei is currently the biggest contributor to the Linux kernel. Another contributor works for Positive Technologies, a Russian cybersecurity firm that -- like Huawei -- has been sanctioned by the US government, says Aitel. Margin has also mapped code written by NSA employees, many of whom participate in different open-source projects. "This subject kills me," says d'Antoine of the quest to better understand the open-source movement, "because, honestly, even the most simple things seem so novel to so many important people. The government is only just realizing that our critical infrastructure is running code that could be literally being written by sanctioned entities. Right now." This kind of research also aims to find underinvestment -- that is critical software run entirely by one or two volunteers. It's more common than you might think -- so common that one common way software projects currently measure risk is the "bus factor": Does this whole project fall apart if just one person gets hit by a bus? SocialCyber will also tackle other open-source projects too, such as Python which is "used in a huge number of artificial-intelligence and machine-learning projects," notes the report. "The hope is that greater understanding will make it easier to prevent a future disaster, whether it's caused by malicious activity or not."

Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO. ZDNet reports: It had been rumored at May 2022's Red Hat Summit that Cormier, who had been with Red Hat for over 14 years, might retire soon. That rumor wasn't true, but he is moving to a "somewhat" less demanding position. That said, as Stephanie Wonderlick, Red Hat's VP of Brand Experience + Communication, said, "I don't think Red Hat would have become Red Hat without Paul Cormier." [...]

As for Hicks, he's a popular figure in the company. He's known as a hands-on leader. Hicks joined Red Hat in 2006 as a developer working on porting Perl applications to Java. That is not the start one thinks of for a future CEO! Hicks knows it. He said in a note to Red Hat employees that he'd "never imagined that my career would lead me to this moment. If I had followed my initial path, not raised my hand for certain projects, or shied away from contributing ideas and asking questions, I might not be here. That is what I love about Red Hat, and it's something that differentiates us from other companies: nothing is predetermined; we're only limited by our passion and drive to contribute and make an impact." So it was that he quickly rose to leadership positions. In particular, thanks to his work with Red Hat OpenShift, he saw Red Hat move from being primarily a Linux powerhouse to a hybrid cloud technology leader as well.

Hicks, now in charge, said in a statement, "When I first joined Red Hat, I was passionate about open source and our mission, and I wanted to be a part of that. I am humbled and energized to be stepping into this role at this moment. There has never been a more exciting time to be in our industry, and the opportunity in front of Red Hat is vast. I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and prove that open-source technology truly can unlock the world's potential." He also said, Together, [IBM and Red Hat] can really lead a new era of hybrid computing. Red Hat has the technology expertise and open-source model -- IBM has the reach."

Cormier's new role will focus on "moving forward to help customers drive innovation forward with a hybrid cloud platform built on open-source technology. Open-source technology has won the innovation debates, and whatever the future looks like, it's going to be built on open-source technology, and Red Hat will be there. Moving ahead, Cormier will continue to work alongside IBM chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna. Both Cormier and Hicks will report to Krishna. As for day-to-day work, Hicks said, "I'm here to do the work with you. Let's roll up our sleeves together, embrace these values and earn the opportunity ahead of us."

"If I want AWS to ignore me completely all I have to do is open a pull request against one of their repositories," quipped cloud economist Corey Quinn in April, while also complaining that the real problem is "how they consistently and in my opinion incorrectly try to shape a narrative where they're contributing to the open source ecosystem at a level that's on par with their big tech company peers."

But on Friday tech columnist Matt Asay argued that AWS is quietly getting better at open source. "Agreed," tweeted tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in response, commending "Good open source people, good open-source work." (And Vaughan-Nichols later retweeted an AWS principle software engineer's announcement that "Over at Amazon Linux we are hiring, and also trying to lead and better serve customers by being more involved in upstream communities.") Mark Atwood, principle engineer for open source at Amazon, also joined Asay's thread, tweeting "I'm glad that people are noticing. Me and my team have been doing heavy work for years to get to this point. Generally we don't want to sit at the head of the table, but we are seeing the value of sitting at the table."

Asay himself was AWS's head of developer marketing/Open Source strategy for two years, leaving in August of 2021. But Friday Asay's article noted a recent tweet where AWS engineer Divij Vaidya announced he'd suddenly become one of the top 10 contributors to Apache Kafka after three months as the founding engineer for AWS's Apache Kafka open source team. (Vaida added "We are hiring for a globally distributed fully remote team to work on open source Apache Kafka! Join us.")

Asay writes: Apache Kafka is just the latest example of this.... This is exactly what critics have been saying AWS doesn't do. And, for years, they were mostly correct.

AWS was, and is, far more concerned with taking care of customers than being popular with open-source audiences. So, the company has focused on being "the best place for customers to build and run open-source software in the cloud." Historically, that tended to not involve or require contributing to the open-source projects it kept building managed services around. Many felt that was a mistake — that a company so dependent on open source for its business was putting its supply chain at risk by not sustaining the projects upon which it depended...

PostgreSQL contributor (and sometime AWS open-source critic) Paul Ramsey has noticed. As he told me recently, it "[f]eels like a switch flipped at AWS a year or two ago. The strategic value of being a real stakeholder in the software they spin is now recognized as being worth the dollars spent to make it happen...." What seems to be happening at AWS, if quietly and usually behind the scenes, is a shift toward AWS service teams taking greater ownership in the open-source projects they operationalize for customers. This allows them to more effectively deliver results because they can help shape the roadmap for customers, and it ensures AWS customers get the full open-source experience, rather than a forked repo with patches that pile up as technical debt.

Vaidya and the Managed Service for Kafka team is an example along with Madelyn Olson, an engineer with AWS's ElastiCache team and one of five core maintainers for Redis. And then there are the AWS employees contributing to Kubernetes, etcd and more. No, AWS is still not the primary contributor to most of these. Not yet. Google, Microsoft and Red Hat tend to top many of the charts, to Quinn's point above. This also isn't somehow morally wrong, as Quinn also argued: "Amazon (and any company) is there to make money, not be your friend."

But slowly and surely, AWS product teams are discovering that a key element of obsessing over customers is taking care of the open-source projects upon which those customers depend. In other words, part of the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" that AWS takes on for customers needs to be stewardship for the open-source projects those same customers demand.
UPDATE: Reached for a comment today, Asay clarified his position on Quinn's original complaints about AWS's low level of open source contributions. "What I was trying to say was that while Corey's point had been more-or-less true, it wasn't really true anymore."

Microsoft has "delayed enforcement" of what could be a controversial policy change, according to the Software Freedom Conservancy: A few weeks ago, Microsoft quietly updated its Microsoft [app] Store Policies, adding new policies (which go into effect next week), that include this text:

all pricing ... must ... [n]ot attempt to profit from open-source or other software that is otherwise generally available for free [meaning, in price, not freedom].

Wednesday, a number of Microsoft Store users discovered this and started asking questions. Quickly, those of us (including our own organization) that provide Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) via the Microsoft Store started asking our own questions too.... Since all (legitimate) FOSS is already available (at least in source code form) somewhere "for free" (as in "free beer"), this term (when enacted) will apply to all FOSS...

Sadly, these days, companies like Microsoft have set up these app stores as gatekeepers of the software industry. The primary way that commercial software distributors reach their customers (or non-profit software distributors reach their donors) is via app stores. Microsoft has closed its iron grasp on the distribution chain of software (again) — to squeeze FOSS from the marketplace. If successful, even app store users will come to believe that the only legitimate FOSS is non-commercial FOSS. This is first and foremost an affront to all efforts to make a living writing open source software. This is not a merely hypothetical consideration. Already many developers support their FOSS development (legitimately so, at least under the FOSS licenses themselves) through app store deployments that Microsoft recently forbid in their Store....

Microsoft counter-argues that this is about curating content for customers and/or limiting FOSS selling to the (mythical) "One True Developer". But, even a redrafted policy (that Giorgio Sardo [General Manager of Apps at Microsoft] hinted at publicly early Thursday) will mandate only toxic business models for FOSS (such as demo-ware, less-featureful versions available as FOSS, while the full-featured proprietary version is available for a charge).
The Conservancy argues that FOSS "was designed specifically to allow both the original developers and downstream redistributors to profit fairly from the act of convenient redistribution (such as on app stores)." But it also speculates about the sincerity of Microsoft's intentions. "We're cognizant that Microsoft probably planned all this, anyway — including the community outrage followed by their usual political theater of feigned magnanimity."

The Conservancy's post Thursday received an update Friday about Microsoft's coming policy update: After we and others pointed out this problem, a Microsoft employee claimed via Twitter that they would "delay enforcement" of their new anti-FOSS regulation [giving as their reason that "it could be perceived differently than intended."]

We do hope Microsoft will ultimately rectify the matter, and look forward to the change they intend to enact later. Twitter is a reasonable place to promote such a change once it's made, but an indication of non-enforcement by one executive on their personal account is a suboptimal approach. This is a precarious situation for FOSS projects who currently raise funds on the Microsoft Store; they deserve a definitive answer.

Given the tight timetable (just five days!) until the problematic policy actually does go into effect, we call on Microsoft to officially publish a corrected policy now that addresses this point and move the roll-out date at least two months into the future. (We suggest September 16, 2022.) This will allow FOSS projects to digest the new policy with a reasonable amount of time, and give Microsoft time to receive feedback from the impacted projects and FOSS experts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The burgeoning low-code and no-code movement is showing little sign of waning, with numerous startups continuing to raise sizable sums to help the less-technical workforce develop and deploy software with ease. Arguably one of the most notable examples of this trend is Airtable, a 10-year-old business that recently attained a whopping $11 billion valuation for a no-code platform used by firms such as Netflix and Shopify to create relational databases. In tandem, we're also seeing a rise in "open source alternatives" to some of the big-name technology incumbents, from Google's backend-as-a-service platform Firebase to open source scheduling infrastructure that seeks to supplant the mighty Calendly. A young Dutch company called Baserow sits at the intersection of both these trends, pitching itself as an open source Airbase alternative that helps people build databases with minimal technical prowess. Today, Baserow announced that it has raised $5.2 million in seed funding to launch a suite of new premium and enterprise products in the coming months, transforming the platform from its current database-focused foundation into a "complete, open source no-code toolchain," co-founder and CEO Bram Wiepjes told TechCrunch.

So what, exactly, does Baserow do in its current guise? Well, anyone with even the most rudimentary spreadsheet skills can use Baserow for use-cases spanning content marketing, such as managing brand assets collaboratively across teams; managing and organizing events; helping HR teams or startups manage and track applicants for a new role; and countless more, which Baserow provides pre-built templates for. [...] Baserow's open source credentials are arguably its core selling point, with the promise of greater extensibility and customizations (users can create their own plug-ins to enhance its functionality, similar to how WordPress works) -- this is a particularly alluring proposition for businesses with very specific or niche use cases that aren't well supported from an off-the-shelf SaaS solution. On top of that, some sectors require full control of their data and technology stack for security or compliance purposes. This is where open source really comes into its own, given that businesses can host the product themselves and circumvent vendor lock-in.

With a fresh 5 million euros in the bank, Baserow is planning to double down on its commercial efforts, starting with a premium incarnation that's officially launching out of an early access program later this month. This offering will be available as a SaaS and self-hosted product and will include various features such as the ability to export in different formats; user management tools for admin; Kanban view; and more. An additional "advanced" product will also be made available purely for SaaS customers and will include a higher data storage limit and service level agreements (SLAs). Although Baserow has operated under the radar somewhat since its official foundation in Amsterdam last year, it claims to have 10,000 active users, 100 sponsors who donate to the project via GitHub and 800 users already on the waiting list for its premium version. Later this year, Baserow plans to introduce a paid enterprise version for self-hosting customers, with support for specific requirements such as audit logs, single sign-on (SSO), role-based access control and more.

One of the GNOME developers has suggested that the next major release of Gtk could drop support for the X window system. The Register reports: Emmanuele Bassi opened a discussion last week on the GNOME project's Gitlab instance that asked whether the developers could drop X.11 support in the next release of Gtk. At this point, it is only a suggestion, but if it gets traction, this could significantly accelerate the move to the Wayland display server and the end of X.11.

Don't panic: Gtk 5 is not imminent. Gtk is a well-established toolkit, originally designed for the GIMP bitmap editing program back in 1998. Gtk 4 arrived relatively recently, shortly before the release of GNOME 40 in 2021. GNOME 40 has new user-interface guidelines, and as a part of this, Gtk 4 builds GNOME's Adwaita theme into the toolkit by means of the new libadwaita library, which is breaking the appearance of some existing apps.

Also, to be fair, as we recently covered, the X window system is very old now and isn't seeing major changes, although new releases of parts of it do still happen. This discussion is almost certain to get wildly contentious, and the thread on Gitlab has been closed to further comments for now. If this idea gains traction, one likely outcome might well be a fork of Gtk, just as happened when GNOME 3 came out. [...] A lot of the features of the current version, X.11, are no longer used or relevant to most users. Even so, X.12 is barely even in the planning stages yet.

Open hardware company Pine64 says it's preparing to launch a single-board computer (SBC) that will be its most powerful RISC-V powered device yet. Liliputing reports: While Pine64 hasn't provided detailed specs yet (some are still being worked out), the company says that the upcoming SBC have a RISC-V chip that offers comparable performance to the Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor at the heart of Pine64's Quartz64 board.

The RISC-V board will be available with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and features support for USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and a PCIe slot. And while Pine64 hasn't revealed which RISC-V processor it's using yet, the company notes that that the chip features an Imagination Technologies BXE-2-32 GPU which is designed for "entry-level" and "mid-range" applications and for which Imagination plans to make source code available soon. Pine64 says the board will follow the "Model A" form factor, meaning it'll measure around 133 x 80 x 19mm (5.24" x 3.15" x 0.75"). That makes it a bit larger than a Raspberry Pi Model B, but the extra space means there's room for that PCIe slot and other I/O connectors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit focused on free and open source software (FOSS), said it has stopped using Microsoft's GitHub for project hosting -- and is urging other software developers to do the same. In a blog post on Thursday, Denver Gingerich, SFC FOSS license compliance engineer, and Bradley M. Kuhn, SFC policy fellow, said GitHub has over the past decade come to play a dominant role in FOSS development by building an interface and social features around Git, the widely used open source version control software. In so doing, they claim, the company has convinced FOSS developers to contribute to the development of a proprietary service that exploits FOSS. "We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub," said Gingerich and Kuhn.

The SFC mostly uses self-hosted Git repositories, they say, but the organization did use GitHub to mirror its repos. The SFC has added a Give Up on GitHub section to its website and is asking FOSS developers to voluntarily switch to a different code hosting service. "While we will not mandate our existing member projects to move at this time, we will no longer accept new member projects that do not have a long-term plan to migrate away from GitHub," said Gingerich and Kuhn. "We will provide resources to support any of our member projects that choose to migrate, and help them however we can."

For the SFC, the break with GitHub was precipitated by the general availability of GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant tool. GitHub's decision to release a for-profit product derived from FOSS code, the SFC said, is "too much to bear." Copilot, based on OpenAI's Codex, suggests code and functions to developers as they're working. It's able to do so because it was trained "on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub," according to GitHub. Gingerich and Kuhn see that as a problem because Microsoft and GitHub have failed to provide answers about the copyright ramifications of training its AI system on public code, about why Copilot was trained on FOSS code but not copyrighted Windows code, and whether the company can specify all the software licenses and copyright holders attached to code used in the training data set. "We don't believe Amazon, Atlassian, GitLab, or any other for-profit hoster are perfect actors," said Gingerich and Kuhn. "However, a relative comparison of GitHub's behavior to those of its peers shows that GitHub's behavior is much worse. GitHub also has a record of ignoring, dismissing and/or belittling community complaints on so many issues, that we must urge all FOSS developers to leave GitHub as soon as they can."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A few months ago, we reviewed the MNT Reform, which attempts to bring the dream of entirely open source hardware to an audience that doesn't want to design and build a laptop totally from scratch. Now, MNT is bringing its open-hardware ethos to a second PC, a 7-inch "Pocket Reform" laptop that recalls the design of old clamshell Pocket PCs, just like the big Reform references the design of chunky '90s ThinkPads.

The Pocket Reform borrows many of the big Reform laptop's design impulses, including a low-profile mechanical keyboard and trackball-based pointing device and a chunky, retro-throwback design. The device includes a 7-inch 1080p screen, a pair of USB-C ports (one of which is used for charging), a microSD slot for storage expansion, and a micro HDMI port for connecting to a display when you're at your desk. [...] The version of the Pocket Reform in the announcement isn't ready to launch yet, and MNT says it represents "near-final specs and design." For users interested in the Pocket Reform's imminent early beta program, there's a newsletter sign-up link at the bottom of the announcement. One of the main complaints Ars noted about the big Reform was the "miserably slow ARM processor," which will be included in the Pocket Reform.

With that said, MNT has addressed other complaints about the big Reform by "adding reinforced metal side panels to cover the ports and a redesigned battery system that won't let the batteries fully discharge if the laptop is left unplugged."

slack_justyb shares a report from ZDNet: For over three decades, Linux has been written in the C programming language. Indeed, Linux is C's most outstanding accomplishment. But the last few years have seen a growing momentum to make the Rust programming language Linux's second Linux language. At the recent Open Source Summit in Austin, Texas, Linux creator Linus Torvald said he could see Rust making it into the Linux kernel as soon as the next major release. "I'd like to see the Rust infrastructure merging to be started in the next release, but we'll see." Linux said after the summit. "I won't force it, and it's not like it's going to be doing anything really meaningful at that point -- it would basically be the starting point. So, no promises."

Now, you may ask: "Why are they adding Rust at all?" Rust lends itself more easily to writing secure software. Samartha Chandrashekar, an AWS product manager, said it "helps ensure thread safety and prevent memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities." Many other developers agree with Chandrashekar. Torvalds also agrees and likes that Rust is more memory-safe. "There are real technical reasons like memory safety and why Rust is good to get in the kernel." Mind you, no one is going to be rewriting the entire 30 or so million lines of the Linux kernel into Rust. As Linux developer Nelson Elhage said in his summary of the 2020 Linux Plumber's meeting on Rust in Linux: "They're not proposing a rewrite of the Linux kernel into Rust; they are focused only on moving toward a world where new code may be written in Rust." The three areas of potential concern for Rust support are making use of the existing APIs in the kernel, architecture support, and dealing with application binary interface (ABI) compatibility between Rust and C.

Today I learned Turkey's Scientific and Technological Research Council has a subsidiary developing a GNU/Linux distro called Pardus, "redesigned to be used in accordance with the practices and habits of users in Turkey."

And this week the Free Software Foundation published a post from the proud project leader of Pardus, explaining exactly why open source was chosen in the district of Eyüpsultan (on the European side of Istanbul) and how they got it implemented: After the municipal elections held in 2014, the new administration realized (through internal financial analysis reports) that a large amount of money was being spent on licensing proprietary software. Looking to cut costs, management asked for a study to be carried out for solutions. As the Eyüpsultan municipality's IT department, we recommended to replace Microsoft Windows with Pardus GNU/Linux instead. We described our preference to transition to free software as "the desire to be independent from a company as well as the savings to be gained from cutting hefty license fees."

Additionally, we spoke about how the four freedoms would improve things outside of the budget. For example, we told the administration that users, when using free software, can fully benefit from the rights they have over the programs running on their computers. We also informed everyone that, when the software they run is proprietary, it means that a company claims rights over the user, and that such a claim of ownership can place restrictions on users in how they may or may not use the software. We told them that this is unacceptable. Arguments such as these were among the deciding factors that influenced our transition to free software.

The plan was presented to the municipal administration and widely accepted.

The municipal administration approved the project, and in January, 2015, the Eyüpsultan municipality started using free software applications such as LibreOffice (e.g. Writer, Calc, Impress, etc.). Prior to the implementations, basic user training on LibreOffice software was provided to the personnel of the institution. Over time, users were gradually and steadily directed to free systems, and, notably, without receiving backlash from users.... Training was an important item in the transition to Pardus GNU/Linux.
Besides an online support forum, they've also set up a live call center to answer questions. "I think we may be the only distribution that helps with issues via a call center."

So how do they feel now about that transition, eight years later? Free software has many advantages, including flexibility, high performance, major cost savings from licensing fees, independence from any particular company, and compliance with interoperability standards. Therefore, the transition of Eyüpsultan municipality to free software has resulted in benefits that were both strategic and practical. We believe, in the near future, more organizations will need to understand the philosophy of free software and the opportunities that free software provides.

The municipal budget has freed up money as a result of the moving from proprietary software to free software. The savings from the "proprietary software licenses" line of the budget was applied to the district in the form of new projects. The money goes now to, among other things, increasing the number of new parks and gardens, bicycle paths, and security cameras in the parks. Additionally, by increasing the number of classes we provide technical training, we started to provide classes in robotics and computation to young people. The Eyüpsultan municipality is now increasing the opportunities for students to further develop their personalities, abilities, goals, and self-discovery. It introduces young people to technology and encourages them to produce new technologies.
One final effect of using free software? It encourages others to do the same: As a result of this brave decision, many of the Istanbul district municipalities have started working to switch or have already made the switch to the Pardus GNU/Linux operating system. Institutions in other cities of the country have also expressed growing interest by asking questions about the Pardus operating system and free software.

The nonprofit Linux Foundation pays Linus Torvalds' salary and supports many other open source projects. But they also launched a new podcast series this week covering "The Untold Stories of Open Source."

"Each week we explore the people who are supporting Open Source projects, how they became involved with it, and the problems they faced along the way," explains the podcast's GitHub page (where you can put in a pull request to suggest future episodes or track the project's progress.)

The podcast is available on its official web page, as well as on Spotify, Apple, Google, or "wherever you listen to your podcasts," according to an announcement from the Linux Foundation. An introductory page says the podcast will be "used to inform the Linux and Open Source communities as to the current state in development of open source initiatives and Linux Foundation Projects. It is vendor neutral, with no interviews of commercial product vendors or sales teams."

Here's the first four episodes:

• Balancing Priorities at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, with Priyanka Sharma, general manager

• A Life in Open Source, with Brian Behlendorf, general manager at Open Source Security Foundation

• A New Model for Technical Training, with Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president of the Linux Foundation's training/certification project

• The Business Side of Open Source, with Patrick Debois, "godfather of DevOps"

Microsoft updated the Microsoft Store policies yesterday to prohibit publishers from charging fees for software that is open source or generally available for free. They're also no longer allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products. gHacks reports: If you have been to the Microsoft Store in the past couple of years, you may have noticed that it is home to more and more open source and free products. While that would be a good thing if the original developer would have uploaded the apps and games to the store, it is not, because the uploads have been made by third-parties. Even worse is the fact that many of these programs are not freely available, but available as paid applications. In other words: Microsoft customers have to pay money to buy a Store version of an app that is freely available elsewhere. Sometimes, free and paid versions exist side by side in the Store. Having to pay for a free application is bad enough, but this is not the only issue that users may experience when they make the purchase. Updates may be of concern as well, as the copycat programs may not be updated as often or as quickly as the source applications.

Open source and free products may not be sold anymore on the Microsoft Store, if generally available for free, and publishers are not allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products anymore. The developers of open source and free applications may charge for their products on the Microsoft Store, the developer of Paint.net does that, for example. If Microsoft enforces the policies, numerous applications will be removed from the Store. Developers could report applications to Microsoft before, but the new policies give Microsoft control over application listings and submissions directly.

"Linux Mint is taking over development of Timeshift, a popular open-source backup tool," reports the blog OMG! Ubuntu: Anyone familiar with Mint will be familiar with this utility. Timeshift is, as the distro's own lead Clement Lefebvre says in the latest monthly update, a central plank in the system's backup and update 'strategy'.

Sadly, as happens, the creator of Timeshift is unable to keep working on it owing to other responsibilities. Not keen to see it stagnate, Mint says it 'got in touch' to see how they could help. Long story short: Linux Mint is assuming maintenance of the app henceforth.

And as part of the process Timeshift is becoming an official member of the XApp family (this is Mint's stable of home-grown software it designs and develops to be distro-agnostic for widest possible use).

From Google's Open Source blog: The Google Hardware Toolchains team is launching a new developer portal, developers.google.com/silicon, to help the developer community get started with its Open MPW shuttle program.

This will allow anyone to submit open source integrated circuit designs to get manufactured at no-cost.

Since November 2020, when Skywater Technologies announced their partnership with Google to open source their Process Design Kit for the SKY130 process node, the Hardware Toolchains team here at Google has been on a journey to make building open silicon accessible to all developers. Having access to an open source and manufacturable PDK changes the status-quo in the custom silicon design industry and academia:

— Designers are now free to start their projects liberated from NDAs and usage restrictions

— Researchers are able to make their research reproducible by their fellow peers

— Open source EDA tools can integrate deeply with the manufacturing process

Together we've built a community of more than 3,000 members, where hardware designers and software developers alike, can all contribute in their own way to advance the state of the art of open silicon design....

We need to go beyond cramming more transistors into smaller areas and toward more efficient dedicated hardware accelerators. Given the recent global chip supply chain struggles, and the lead time for popular ICs sometimes going over a year, we need to do this by leveraging more of the existing global foundry capacity that provides access to older and proven process node technologies....

By combining open access to PDKs, and recent advancements in the development of open source ASIC toolchains like OpenROAD, OpenLane, and higher level synthesis toolchain like XLS, we are getting us one step closer to bringing software-like development methodology and fast iteration cycles to the silicon design world. Free and open source licensing, community collaboration, and fast iteration transformed the way we all develop software. We believe we are at the edge of a similar revolution for custom accelerator development, where hardware designers compete by building on each other's works rather than reinventing the wheel....

To help you on-board on future shuttles, we created a new developer portal that provides pointers to get started with the various tools of the open silicon ecosystem: so make sure to check out the portal and start your open silicon journey!

The /e/OS-powered Murena One is the first smartphone from Murena that does its best to free you from Google without sacrificing too many core features. There are no Google apps, Google Play Services, or even the Google Assistant. It's all been replaced by open-source software alternatives with privacy-respecting features. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: Murena and Mandrake Linux founder Gael Duval was sick of it by 2017. He wanted his data to be his data, and he wanted open-source software. Almost five years later, Duval and his co-developers launched the Murena One X2. It's the first high-end Android phone using the open-source /e/OS Android fork to arrive on the market. The privacy heart of the Murena One is /e/OS V1. There have been many attempts to create an alternative to Google-based Android and Apple's iOS -- Ubuntu One, FirefoxOS, and Windows Mobile -- but all failed. Duval's approach isn't to reinvent the mobile operating system wheel, but to clean up Android of its squeaky Google privacy-invading features and replace them with privacy-respecting ones. To make this happen, Duval started with LineageOS -- an Android-based operating system, which is descended from the failed CyanogenMod Android fork. It also blends in features from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source-code trees.

In the /e/OS, most (but not all) Google services have been removed and replaced with MicroG services. MicroG replaces Google's libraries with purely open-source implementations without hooks to Google's services. This includes libraries and apps which provide Google Play, Maps, Geolocation, and Messaging services for Android applications. In addition, /e/OS does its best to free you from higher-level Google services. For instance, Google's default search engine has been replaced with Murena's own meta-search engine. Other internet-based services, such as Domain Name Server (DNS) and Network Time Protocol (NTP), use non-Google servers. Above the operating system, you'll find Google-free applications. This includes a web browser; an e-mail client; a messaging app; a calendar; a contact manager; and a maps app that relies on Mozilla Location Service and OpenStreetMap. While it's not here yet, Murena is also working on its own take on Google Assistant, Elivia-AI. You can also run many, but not all Android apps. You'll find these apps on the operating system's App Lounge. [...]

There's still one big problem: the App Lounge still relies on you logging in with your Google account. In short, the App Lounge is mainly a gateway to Google Store apps. Munera assures me that the Lounge anonymizes your data -- except if you use apps that require payment. Still, this is annoying for people who want to cut all their ties with Google. The fundamental problem is this: Muena does all it can to separate its operating system and applications from Google, but it can't -- yet -- replace Google's e-commerce and software store system. As for hardware specs, the $379 Murena One features a 6.5-inch IPS LCD display, eight-core MediaTek Helio P60 processor, side-mounted fingerprint scanner, three rear cameras (48MP + 8MP + 5MP) and 25MP front camera, and 4,500mAh battery. It also features a microSD card slot for expandable storage and headphone port.

Munich-based developer Aaron Ardiri is Slashdot reader #245,358, with a profile that still identifies him as a Palm OS developer. Which surprised me, because Palm OS's last update was in 2007. (Then again, ardiri's Slashdot profile also still includes his screen name on AOL Instant Messenger.)

So, a long-time Slashdot reader. And this week he stopped by to share a little history — in more ways than one. ardiri writes: Before the iOS and Android entered the scene — heck, even before the smartphone concept — was the handheld personal digital assistant, with the likes of Newton, Palm OS, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

Palm OS had a thriving gaming scene; with the likes of emulators and implementations/clones of classics such as LodeRunner, Lemmings, and the classic Game and Watch.
But the real news of ardiri's original submission is hidden in its headline. "Palm OS developer releases source to classic games, 20+ years after release." Written mainly in C and optimizations in assembler — maybe these games will make their way to the various Arduino like micro-controllers out there; designed for low memory, low processing power environments they would port perfectly.

As part of its landmark campaign for its 75th anniversary celebrations, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is "opening up a large portion of its archives, making the first 50 years of its published records -- more than 117,500 documents dating from 1951 to 2000 -- accessible to the public without a login," writes Ernie Smith via Associations Now. From the report: Vicki L. Hanson, the group's CEO, noted that the ACM Digital Library initiative is part of a broader effort to make its archives available via open access by 2025. "Our goal is to have it open in a few years, but there's very real costs associated with [the open-access work]," Hanson said. "We have models so that we can pay for it." While the organization is still working through its open-access effort, it saw an opportunity to make its "backfile" of materials available, timed to the organization's 75th anniversary. "It's nice to link it to the 75th celebration year in general, but the emphasis was really coming from what it takes to get the Digital Library fully open," she said. "All those seminal articles from years ago can be made available to everyone."

The collection has some of what you'd expect: technical documents, magazine articles, and research papers, many of which highlight the history of computing -- for example, one of the first documents ACM ever published was about the groundbreaking UNIVAC system. But the treasure trove also goes to the heart of ACM itself, with a number of pieces related to the creation of the organization and how it was run, with in-depth records from early conferences included within the digital library.

The opening of ACM's digital backfile is one of many components to marking the organization's 75th anniversary -- the largest of which, a celebratory panel, will take place June 10 as a hybrid event that will bring together well-known figures in computer science, such as noted social media scholar danah boyd of Microsoft Research, Stanford University's Jure Leskovec, and Google chief economist Hal Varian. ACM is also highlighting its history on its social media channels, including by showcasing notable papers within its archives.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit organization that promotes open-source software and defends the free software General Public License (GPL), recently sued major TV vendor Vizio for abusing the GPL with its Linux-based SmartCast OS. Vizio replied that the SFC had no right to ask for the source code. On May 13, however, the SFC succeeded in federal court with its motion to have its lawsuit against Vizio remanded back to Superior Court in Orange County, CA.

Doesn't sound like that big a deal? Think again. The important part of the decision by U.S. District Court Judge Josephine L. Staton stated that SFC's claim "that the [GPLv2] enforcement of 'an additional contractual promise separate and distinct from any rights provided by the copyright laws' amounts to an 'extra element,' and therefore, SFC's claims are not preempted." Karen M. Sandler, SFC's executive director, explained, "The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleft licensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both as copyright licenses and as a contractual agreement." Sandler added that even in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) legal community people argue incorrectly that the GPL and other copyleft licenses only function as copyright licenses. This decision clearly states that the GPL also acts as a contract. Further, this decision makes it the first case to show individual consumers have rights to the source code as third-party beneficiaries of the GPL.