An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization has announced that Intel has joined RISC-V at the Premier membership level. Let that sink in for a minute. Intel, which has made billions from its closed-source, complex instruction set computer (CISC) x86 processors, is joining forces with RISC-V, the open-source reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU group. What next? Dogs and cats living together!? Dr. David Patterson, co-creator of RISC-V helped create it to be an open lingua franca for computer chips, a set of instructions that would be used by all chipmakers and owned by none. Today, Patterson said, "I'm delighted that Intel, the company that pioneered the microprocessor 50 years ago, is now a member of RISC-V International."

Why? Because Intel sees a future in which ARM, x86, and RISC-V all play major roles. In particular, Intel has already seen strong demand for more RISC-V intellectual property (IP) and chip offerings. Intel's not just giving this idea lip service. Intel also announced a new $1 billion fund to support early-stage foundry startups. Together Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services (IFS) will prioritize investments in chip IP, software tools, innovative chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies. Randhir Thakur, IFS President, said this new program will focus on two key strategic industry points: Enabling modular products with an open chiplet platform and supporting design approaches that leverage multiple instruction set architectures including and spanning x86, Arm, and RISC-V.

As part of these initiatives, IFS will sponsor an open-source software development platform. This will provide IP for all three of the leading ISAs chip architectures. RISC-V has always been about providing open modular building blocks. Together Intel and RISC-V will expand the RISC-V ecosystem and help drive its commercialization. [...] Intel is already offering RISC-V chips: It's Nios V processors based on RISC-V. Moving ahead Intel hopes its new RISC-V investment will speed up RISC-V's development. Calista Redmond, RISC-V International's CEO, sees these moves as recognizing that "massive investment in open source has the power to change the course of history." Redmond went on to say that open collaboration with RISC-V has "ignited a profound shift in the semiconductor industry, and this partnership will accelerate innovation in open computing. RISC-V welcomes Intel and looks forward to our collective expansion and the commercial adoption of RISC-V across compute workloads and industries, growing RISC-V everywhere."

The nation of Chile "is in the midst of governmental changes," writes the Free Software Foundation, "and with these changes comes the opportunity for the people of Chile to make their voices heard for long-term benefits to their digital rights and freedoms.

"Chilean activists have submitted three constitutional proposals relating to free software and user freedom, but they need signatures in order to have these proposals submitted to the constitutional debate."

FSF community member Felix Freeman writes: Chile is living a historic moment. For the first time, it is drafting a constitution with constituents elected democratically, on a participatory basis, and with the participation of native peoples. 154 people are in charge of drafting the new fundamental charter of the country, and they have arranged a mechanism of popular participation based on the collection of support: 15,000 signatures are required to submit citizen proposals to the constitutional debate directly.

The opportunity to achieve substantive and long-term change for digital rights and freedom of software and other intellectual works is unique in Chile's history, and may not be repeated in our lifetime. This is why four communities historically related to the use and dissemination of free software in Chile got together to draft three of these proposals, which are:

- Access to knowledge
- Technological and digital sovereignty
- Internet privacy

These constitutional proposals explain principles of the nation, the rights of citizens, and the duties of the state concerning them. The inclusion of the constitutional articles will allow and promote the creation of laws that defend our freedoms and rights effectively. They are not the end of the road for intellectual freedoms and digital rights, but only the beginning....

People of any nationality can support us by spreading the word all over the Internet.

[A Spanish-language version is available HERE.]

The Linux Foundation has released three new training courses on the edX platform: Open Source Software Development: Linux for Developers (LFD107x), Linux Tools for Software Development (LFD108x), and Git for Distributed Software Development (LFD109x). The three courses can be taken individually or combined to earn a Professional Certificate in Open Source Software Development, Linux, and Git. ZDNet reports: The first class, Open Source Software Development: Linux for Developers (LFD107x) explores the key concepts of developing open-source software and how to work productively in Linux. You don't need to know Linux before starting this class, as it's an introduction to Linux designed for developers. In it, you'll learn how to install Linux and programs, how to use desktop environments, text editors, important commands and utilities, command shells and scripts, filesystems, and compilers. For this class, the Foundation recommends you use a computer installed with a current Linux distribution. I'd go further and recommend you use one with one of the professional Linux distributions. In particular, you should focus on one of the three main enterprise Linux families: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Ubuntu. There are hundreds of other distros, but these are the ones that matter to companies looking for Linux developers.

The next course, Linux Tools for Software Development (LFD108x) examines the tools necessary to do everyday work in Linux development environments and beyond. It is designed for developers with experience working on any operating system who want to understand the basics of open-source development. Upon completion, participants will be familiar with essential shell tools, so they can work comfortably and productively in Linux environments. In addition, I recommend you come to this class with a working knowledge of the C programming language.

Finally, Git for Distributed Software Development (LFD109x) provides a thorough introduction to Git. Git is Linux Torvalds' other great accomplishment. This source control system was first used by the Linux kernel community to enable developers from around the world to operate efficiently. In addition, thanks to such sites as GitHub and GitLab, Git has become the lingua franca of all software development. Everyone uses Git today. With this class, you'll learn to use Git to create new repositories or clone existing ones, commit new changes, review revision histories, examine differences with older versions, work with different branches, merge repositories, and work with a distributed development team. Whether or not you end up programming in Linux, knowing how to use Git is essential for the modern programmer. As ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols notes, you can take the three courses through edX in audit mode for no cost. However, you'll need to earn the professional certificate so employers will know you're capable of open-source programming.

"To do this, you must enroll in the program, complete all three courses, and pay a verified certificate fee of $149 per course."

Remember that developer who intentionally corrupted his two libraries which collectively had over 20 million weekly downloads and thousands of dependent projects? In the immediate aftermath he'd complained on Twitter that NPM "has reverted to a previous version of the faker.js package and Github has suspended my access to all public and private projects. I have 100s of projects. #AaronSwartz."

That was January 6th, and within about a week GitHub had restored his access, while one of his two libraries (faker-js) was forked by its community to create a community-driven project. But Thursday the developer announced on his Twitter account: What's up @Github? Ten days since you removed my ability to publish to NPM and fix the Infinity Zalgo bug in colors.js

Never responded to my support emails.

I have 100s of packages I need to maintain.

Everyone makes programming mistakes from time to time. Nobody is perfect.
It hasn't been confirmed that NPM has actually blocked his ability to publish — but the tweet already appears to be attracting reactions from other developers on social media.

Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The Free Open Source 3D production software Blender has been released in version 3.0 (official showreel) with more new features, improvements and performance optimizations as well as further improved workflows.

In recent years Blender has received an increasing rate of attention from the 3D industry, with various larger businesses such as Epic, Microsoft, Apple and most recently Intel joining the blender foundation and donating to its development fund. Blender has seen an increasing rise in usage in various industries, such as animated feature film production, architecture and game development.

This week the Free Software Foundation's board announced that for the first time in the organization's 37-year-history, its 5,000-plus associate members will now be able to nominate and evaluate candidates for its board of directors. Under new procedures adopted by the FSF board on January 17 and summarized here, the organization will proactively engage associate members with a sufficient history of association with the FSF in the recruiting process by inviting them to suggest board nominees and then research collectively those nominees' suitability for a position on the board, including most importantly their record of commitment to free software ideals.... Following the new procedures, voting members (which include all current directors and are listed here) can start a process to recruit new directors, or a modified process to reconsider existing directors...

The FSF intends to first add several new directors in 2022, utilizing these new procedures, and then begin a review of existing directors. The FSF staff and board have made this expanded engagement process a high priority and are working together to put in place the necessary infrastructure to support it, with a target to activate it within the first quarter of 2022... Voting members will review the community's nominations.

A nominee may be removed from consideration if at least two voting members vote to do so without opposition from other voting members. The voting members will discuss the candidates and decide which should move forward in the process next. The FSF's associate members will then review each nominee's application, then evaluate and comment on those nominees in a private, staff-moderated discussion forum. Voting members will review this input and privately interview the finalists to assess their candidacy, ideals, and commitment to free software, then vote on their appointment....

The process is designed such that new iterations for both recruiting new directors and reviewing existing directors can be run whenever the need arises in the future.
"Opening the director recruitment process to our associate members is a historic and welcome milestone for the FSF," said FSF president Geoffrey Knauth. "We are pleased to engage the free software community in attracting new talent to our leadership who will keep the freedoms.... We have worked hard to strengthen governance standards at the FSF and to create a transparent leadership recruitment process. We look forward to tackling new challenges and opportunities this year."

The FSF's announcement calls the new "community engagement process" a "key result of a six-month consultant-led review designed to help make FSF governance and recruitment practices more transparent and participatory, while more systematically ensuring their commitment to the FSF's values and principles."

Open source is no place for secrets. From a report: This is a critical time for the Good Chip Intel. After the vessel driftied through the Straits of Lateness towards the Rocks of Irrelevance, Captain Pat parachuted into the bridge to grab the helm and bark "Full steam ahead!" Its first berth at Alder Lake is generally seen as a return to competitive form, but that design started well before Gelsinger's return and there's still zero room for navigational errors in the expeditions ahead. At least one of the course corrections looks a bit rum. Intel has long realised the importance of supporting open source to keep its chips dancing with Linux. Unlike the halcyon days of Wintel dominance, though, this means being somewhat more open about the down-and-dirty details of exactly how its chips do their thing. You can't sign an NDA with the Linux kernel.

Chipmakers are notoriously paranoid: Silicon Valley was born in intrigue and suspicion. Despite Intel's iconic CEO Andy Grove making paranoia a corporate mantra, Intel became relatively relaxed. Qualcomm and Apple would throw you into their piranha pools merely for asking questions if they could, while Intel has learned to give as well as take. But it may be going back to bad habits. One of the new things not open to discussion is something called Software Defined Silicon (SDSi), about which Intel has nothing to say. Which is odd because it has just submitted supporting code for it to the Linux kernel. The code itself doesn't say anything about SDSi, instead adding a mechanism to control whatever it is via some authorised secure token. It basically unlocks hardware features when the right licence is applied. That's not new. Higher performance or extra features in electronic test equipment often comes present but disabled on the base models, and the punter can pay to play later. But what might it mean in SDSi and the Intel architecture?

It is expensive for Intel and OEMs alike to have multiple physical variants of anything; much better if you make one thing that does everything and charge for unlocking it. It's a variant of a trick discovered by hackish school kids in the late 1970s, where cheaper Casio scientific calculators used exactly the same hardware as the more expensive model. Casio just didn't print all the functions on the keyboards of the pleb kit. Future Intel chips will doubtless have cores and cache disabled until magic numbers appear, and with the SoC future beckoning that can extend to all manner of IO, acceleration, and co-processing features. It might even be there already. From engineering, marketing, and revenue perspectives, this is great. Intel could make an M1-like SoC that can be configured on the fly for different platforms, getting the design, performance, and fab efficiencies that Apple enjoys while making sense for multiple OEMs. There could be further revenue from software upgrades, or even subscription models.

The European Commission has announced that it's adopting new rules around open source software which will see it release software under open source licenses. From a report: The decision follows a Commission study that found investment in open source software leads on average to four times higher returns. There has also been a push for this type of action from the Public Money, Public Code campaign. If you're wondering what sort of code the EC could offer to the world, it gave two examples. First, there's its eSignature, a set of free standards, tools, and services that can speed up the creation and verification of electronic signatures that are legally valid inside the EU. Another example is LEOS (Legislation Editing Open Software) which is used to draft legal texts.

Intel has open-sourced ControlFlag , a tool that uses machine learning to detect problems in computer code -- ideally to reduce the time required to debug apps and software. From a report: In tests, the company's machine programming research team says that ControlFlag has found hundreds of defects in proprietary, "production-quality" software, demonstrating its usefulness. "Last year, ControlFlag identified a code anomaly in Client URL (cURL), a computer software project transferring data using various network protocols over one billion times a day," Intel principal AI scientist Justin Gottschlich wrote in a blog post on LinkedIn.

"Most recently, ControlFlag achieved state-of-the-art results by identifying hundreds of latent defects related to memory and potential system crash bugs in proprietary production-level software. In addition, ControlFlag found dozens of novel anomalies on several high-quality open-source software repositories." The demand for quality code draws an ever-growing number of aspiring programmers to the profession. After years of study, they learn to translate abstracts into concrete, executable programs -- but most spend the majority of their working hours not programming. A recent study found that the IT industry spent an estimated $2 trillion in 2020 in software development costs associated with debugging code, with an estimated 50% of IT budgets spent on debugging.

ISayWeOnlyToBePolite writes: The new social network founded by former President Trump may violate the terms of use of the software on which it is based. On Wednesday night, after Trump revealed the TRUTH social app, Twitter users began to note that the network appeared to be based on an open-source social networking software called Mastodon, which allows people to modify the underlying code so long as they abide by its license. But the Trump network appears to have taken the publicly available code for the website while violating the terms that make it free to use.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told TPM in an email that TRUTH appeared to violate the terms of use that the software sets forth: making the source code available, and having a copy of the general product license available to users. "I do intend to seek legal counsel on the situation though," Rochko told TPM, while declining to discuss any specific legal action he may be contemplating. "Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free," Rochko added.

The AGPL license mandates that software developed for free -- like Mastodon -- remain publicly available after its been modified. Under the license, TRUTH needs to share any modifications to Mastodon's code. The requirement allows developers to remain aware of how the software is being used so long as its run on public servers, continuing the chain by which different open-source developers continue to work on and further modify code that's been created. Former President Trump announced plans to launch the social media platform yesterday, saying his goal is to rival the tech companies that have denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his rise. TRUTH social will be open to "invited users" for a beta launch in November, with plans for it to launch publicly beginning early next year.

With that said, the "invite only" system has already run into some problems, according to Slashdot reader slack_justyb. Some users were able to sign up to create accounts using a publicly available link, allowing them to generate their own handles, like @donaldtrump.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey says the company is starting a "deep technical investigation" to create an open-source Bitcoin mining system. It comes as the price of Bitcoin passed $62,000 while threatening to pass the all-time high of $65,000. The Independent reports: Mr Dorsey said Bitcoin mining isn't currently accessible to everyone, but it should be as easy as plugging into a power source. "Silicon design is too concentrated into a few companies. This means supply is likely overly constrained. Silicon development is very expensive, requires long term investment, and is best coupled tightly with software and system design," Mr Dorsey said in a tweet. "If we do this, we'd follow our hardware wallet model: build in the open in collaboration with the community," he added.

The company's hardware lead building the wallet, Jesse Dorogusker, is also starting the technical investigation required to take on the mining project, Mr Dorsey said. While announcing Square is considering getting into the mining business, Mr Dorsey said the process needs to be more energy-efficient and more distributed. "The core job of a miner is to securely settle transactions without the need for trusted 3rd parties. This is critical well after the last bitcoin is mined. The more decentralized this is, the more resilient the Bitcoin network becomes," he said. "There isn't enough incentive today for individuals to overcome the complexity of running a miner for themselves," he added.

Andrew Cunningham writes via Ars Technica: It has been well over a decade since PowerPC Macs roamed the earth -- so long that the Intel Macs that replaced them are themselves being replaced by something else. But to this day, there's a small community of people still developing software for PowerPC Macs and Mac OS 9. One of those projects was TenFourFox, a fork of the Firefox browser for G3, G4, and G5-based PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. Maintained primarily by Cameron Kaiser, the TenFourFox project sprang up in late 2010 after Mozilla pulled PowerPC support from Firefox 4 during its development. And amazingly, the browser has continued to trundle on ever since.

But continuing to backport Firefox features to aging, stuck-in-time PowerPC processors only got more difficult as time went on. And in March of this year, Kaiser announced that TenFourFox updates would be ending after over a decade of development. The final planned release of TenFourFox was earlier this month. Kaiser's full post is long, but it's worth a read for vintage-computer enthusiasts or anyone who works on software -- Kaiser expresses frustration with the realities of developing and supporting a niche app, but he also highlights TenFourFox's impressive technical achievements and ruminates on the nature of the modern Internet and open source software development [...].

Kaiser doesn't intend to fully halt work on the browser, but he is downshifting it into what he calls "hobby mode." He will continue to backport security patches from newer ESR releases of Firefox and post them to the TenFourFox Github page, but anyone who wants to use these will need to build the app themselves. Kaiser also won't commit to providing support for these additions or providing them on any kind of schedule. Other developers are also welcome to continue to release TenFourFox builds on their own.

ArchieBunker writes: Everyone's favorite security-focused operating system, OpenBSD, released version 7.0 today. In addition to the usual bug fixes and performance enhancements, support for RISC-V processors has been added. The changelog and mirrors can be found at their respective links.

The role of Microsoft's .NET Foundation, set up for the governance and support of open-source .NET and related projects, has been questioned by a former board member who resigned in frustration. Here's an excerpt from The Register's report: Rodney Littles II is a software engineer at Megsoft Consulting and core maintainer of an open-source project, ReactiveUI, which is a .NET Foundation project. The .NET Foundation was formed in 2014 and describes itself as "an independent, non-profit organization established to support an innovative, commercially friendly, open-source ecosystem around the .NET platform." Littles joined the .NET Foundation board in August 2020. In his campaign pitch he spoke of a "serious disconnect in the .NET ecosystem" in that Microsoft promotes .NET open source but that the community around it is not healthy. "Maintainers of .NET OSS that Microsoft wants to help thrive are still in rough shape," he said. The sustainability of open-source projects was a key concern, as was expanding the .NET open-source ecosystem.

Littles resigned from the .NET Foundation board ahead of its elections in September. He intended to say nothing in public about it, but changed his mind when the foundation posted that "we wish him all the best as he refocuses on his personal life." Concerned friends contacted him, resulting in this post, where he explains some of the background to his resignation and said: "I am fine. No issue in my personal life took me away from the board." According to Littles' post, "the .NET Foundation was not concerned about its membership" and "hasn't been transparent with the community about anything." He asked the foundation: "Are you here to enforce Microsoft's will on .NET Open Source, or are you here to help foster and promote a healthy community?" He added: "The scoreboard doesn't look good for the latter... I watched Microsoft kill an Open Source Project, while my friends in the community demanded the Foundation say something, I felt powerless to do anything. It was clear the reasons I joined the Foundation weren't important."

We asked Littles about his experience of being on the board. He joined, he told us, with the awareness that the previous board "was not a fully functioning board... it didn't seem coherent, it didn't seem that it was a board moving towards a goal. They put up the maturity model which I had a very big issue with." Project Maturity was a pilot including "maturity profiles," designed to improve software quality. The project was abandoned shortly after its introduction after community members complained that it was over-reaching, with board member Ben Adams acknowledging that "we didn't then open this discussion up to all projects, to find out if it was acceptable to them, or if there was a better way. This was wrong." Littles told us: "My problem with the maturity model was it seemed too Microsoft bureaucratic... member projects would have to provide a service level agreement for consumers of those libraries... it was elitist and exclusionary. I felt the model should have been more about how do we open up a path for a small open-source library to go from a one-person labour of love to a library that the community can depend on? I felt the focus was more on overseeing and dictating versus nurturing and helping."

Microsoft engaged in some strange behavior with regard to its WinGet project, finding out all the details of an existing open-source project called AppGet by dangling the prospect of a job at Microsoft for its creator, but then in effect killing that open-source project though borrowing many of its ideas. Littles was more than disappointed. "The foundation, which is supposed to be the champion for open source, said nothing," Littles told us. "The foundation remained silent and to me, that was extremely loud... that is what made me wake up and realize the foundation doesn't care about the community or incidents like this... the community was in outrage behind this and the Foundation that's supposed to be Microsoft's open source arm said nothing." AppGet was not a .NET Foundation project, but Little felt that "if you're here for open source, you cannot be exclusionary, you cannot say it's not a foundation project so we don't care."

This week the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced JShelter, "an anti-malware Web browser extension to mitigate potential threats from JavaScript, including fingerprinting, tracking, and data collection."

The browser add-on — supported by NLnet Foundation's Next Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Privacy & Trust Enhancing Technologies fund — is currently "in development and the first release is available." This browser add-on will limit the potential for JavaScript programs to do harmful actions by restricting default behavior and adding a layer of control... Accessing cookies, performing fingerprinting to track users across multiple sites, revealing the local network address, or capturing the user's input before they submit a form are some examples of JavaScript's capabilities that can be used in harmful ways. JShelter adds a safety layer that allows the user to choose if a certain action should be forbidden on a site, or if it should be allowed with restrictions, such as reducing the accuracy of geolocation to the city area. This layer can also aid as a countermeasure against attacks targeting the browser, operating system, or hardware levels... [The extension] will ask — globally or per site — if specific native functions provided by the JavaScript engine and the Document Object Model (DOM) are allowed by the user. It will also link to an explanatory page for each function, to raise awareness of related threats. Depending on the function being addressed, the user will have the option to allow it, block it, or have it return a custom value...

"Our browsers have become perhaps the most critical of tools we depend on, and yet the browser environment is far from healthy," says Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at NLnet Foundation and coordinator of NGI Zero. "Dominant corporate behavior from a small amount of actors has been aggressively reshaping the evolution of the Web, and that is starting to wreak havoc. Despite an enormous systemic dependency, we as users have very little control over what browsers allow and share — leading to significant risk as the most powerful tools in the shed are essentially left unprotected for every casual Web site to abuse. JShelter is a great initiative to help empower us all, to help us gain better understanding and to better safeguard ourselves from obvious and otherwise unavoidable harm."

The effort is part of a larger, multi-year campaign from FSF on JavaScript on the Web started in 2013, which among others includes the development of GNU LibreJS and outreach to users and developers about nonfree software inside the browser. The GNU LibreJS extension detects JavaScript web labels and assists users with running only JavaScript distributed under a free software license, according to their ethical convictions and individual preferences.
"JShelter will help protect users from critical threats now, and contribute significantly to progress on the necessary longer-term cultural shift of moving away from nonfree JavaScript," said Ruben Rodriguez, former FSF chief technology officer.

"This is a project I've been looking forward to for years, tired of dealing with all kinds of potential antifeatures in the browsers I use and distribute, and having to figure out some countermeasure for them with configuration changes, patches or extensions. Being able to wrap the JavaScript engine in a layer of protection is a game changer."

An anonymous reader writes: This week saw the annual check-in with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America, this year held in Seattle (as well as virtually). Torvalds took the stage for the event's traditional half-hour of questions from Dirk Hohndel, an early Linux contributor (now also the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware) in an afternoon keynote session.... And the theme of community seemed to keep coming up — notably about what that community has ultimately taught Linus Torvalds. (For example, while Torvalds said he'd originally planned on naming the operating system Freax, "I am eternally grateful for two other people for having more taste than I did.")

But even then Linux was a project that "I probably would've left behind," Torvalds remembered, "if it was only up to me." Torvalds credits the larger community for its interest (and patches) "that just kept the motivation going. And here we are 30 years later, and it's still what keeps the motivation going. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's been done for 29 of those 30 years, and every single feature ever since has been about things that other people needed or wanted or were interested in."

Torvalds also says "I'm very proud of the fact that there's actually a fair number of people still involved with the kernel that came in in 1991 — I mean, literally 30 years ago.... I think that's a testament to how good the community, on the whole, has been, and how much fun it's been."

And Torvalds says you can see that sense of fun in discussions about writing some Linux kernel modules using Rust. "From a technical angle, does that make sense?" Torvalds asked. "Who knows. That's not the point. The point is for a project to stay interesting — and to stay fun — you have to play with it....

"Probably next year, we'll start seeing some first intrepid modules being written in Rust, and maybe being integrated in the mainline kernel."
"I really love C," Torvalds said at one point. "I think C is a great language, and C is, to me, is really a way to control the hardware at a fairly low level..." Yet Torvalds also saw Hohndel's analogy that it can be like juggling chainsaws. As a long-time watcher of C, Torvalds knows that C's subtle type interactions "are not always logical" and "are pitfalls for pretty much anybody. And they're easy to overlook, and in the kernel that's not always a good thing." Torvalds called Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution"

"2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop," writes PC Magazine. "No, really..." Walk into any school now, and you'll see millions of Linux machines. They're called Chromebooks. For a free project launched 30 years ago today by one man in his spare time, it's an amazing feat.... Linux found its real niche — not as a political statement about "free software," but as a practical way to enable capable, low-cost machines for millions...

Chrome OS and Android are both based on the Linux kernel. They don't have the extra GNU software that distributions like Ubuntu have, but they're descended from Linus Torvalds' original work. Chromebooks are the fastest growing segment of the traditional PC market, according to Canalys. IDC points out that Canalys' estimates of 12 million Chromebooks shipped in Q1 2021 are only a fraction of the 63 million notebooks sold that quarter, but once again, they're where the growth is. Much of that is driven by schools, where Chromebooks dominate now. Schoolkids don't generally need a million apps' worth of generic computing power. They need inexpensive, rugged ways to log into Google Classroom. Linux came to the rescue, enabling cheap, light, easy-to-manage PCs that don't have the Swiss Army Knife cruft of Windows or the premium price of Macs...

One great thing about open-source hacker projects is that they can be taken in unexpected directions. Linux isn't controlled, so it can adapt, Darwinian-style. It was a little scurrying mammal in the time of the dinosaurs, and then the mobile-computing asteroid hit. Linux could evolve. Windows couldn't. When you're building something that fits in your hand and has to sip battery, you can't just keep throwing processors and storage at it. Microsoft had a tough time adapting its monstrous megakernel OS to the new, tiny world. But *nix platforms thrive there: Android (based on Linux) and iOS.
"Android and Chrome water down the Linux philosophy," the article argues, "but they are Linux..."

Does this make any long-time geeks feel vindicated? In the original submission wiredog (Slashdot reader #43,288) looks back to 1995, remembering that "my first Linux was RedHat 2.0 in the beige box, running the 0.95(?) kernel and the F Virtual Window Manager...

"It came with 2 books, a CD, and a boot floppy disk."

destinyland writes: A newly-released video at GNU.org shows an hour-long talk given by free software advocate Richard Stallman for the BigBlueBotton open source conference (which was held online last July). After a 14-minute clip from an earlier speech, Stallman answers questions from the audience — and the first question asked Stallman for his opinion about the AI Copilot [automated pair programming tool] developed for Microsoft's GitHub in collaboration with AI research and deployment company OpenAI.

Stallman's response?

There are many legal questions about Copilot whose answers I don't know, and maybe nobody knows. And it's likely some of theo depend on the country you're in [because of the copyright laws in those countries.] In the U.S. we won't be able to have reliable answers until there are court cases about it, and who knows how many years it'll take for those court cases to arise and be finally decided. So basically what we have is a gigantic amount of uncertainty.

Now the next thing is, what about morally? What can I say morally about Copilot? Well the basic idea seems okay. Why shouldn't a program be able to give you hints like that?

But there is one pitfall, which is that if you follow those hints, you might end up putting a substantial block of code copied from a GPL-covered program, written by someone else, or one hint after another after another after another — it adds up to a substantial amount of code, perhaps, with very little change, perhaps. And then you've infringed the GPL by releasing that code, unless your program is covered by the same versions — plural — of the GPL, in which case it would be permitted. But you might not even know that. Copilot might not tell you — it doesn't endeavor to inform you. So you're likely not to know. Which means Copilot is leading users — some of its users — into a pitfall. Well, they should fix it so it doesn't do that.

But basically, what can you expect from GitHub? GitHub gives people inadequate advice about what it means to choose a license. They tell you you can choose GPL version 2 or GPL version 3. I think they don't tell you that really you could choose GPL version 2 only, or GPL version 2 or later, or GPL version 3 only, or GPL version 3 or later — and those are four different choices. They give users different permissions over the future. So it's important to make each program say clearly which choice covers it. And GitHub doesn't tell you how to do that.

It doesn't tell you that you need to do that. Because the way you do that is with a licensed notice that is supposed to be in every source file. It's unreliable to put just one statement in a free program and say "This program is covered by such-and-such license." What happens if somebody copies one of the files into some other program which says it's covered by a different license? Now that program has been inaccurately mis-licensed, which is illegal and is going to mislead users. So any self-respecting — any repository that wants to be honest has to explain these things, not just tell people to make the licensing of each piece of code clear, but help users do so — make it easy.

So GitHub has had this enormous problem for all of its existence, and Copilot has the similar — a basically, vaguely similar sort of problem, in the same area. It's not exactly the same problem. I don't think that copying a snippet of a few lines of code infringes any license. I think it's de minimus. But I'm not a lawyer.

"Amazon Web Services on Thursday fulfilled its commitment to rename Amazon Elasticsearch Service with its expected new identity, Amazon OpenSearch Service," reports the Register in a new update on Amazon's ongoing battle over open source licensing: The name change was necessary because AWS and Elasticsearch BV fell out over the licensing of the Elasticsearch open source software and the eating of one another's lunch.... While AWS promises that OpenSearch Service APIs will be backward-compatible with the existing service APIs (open source Elasticsearch 7.10), meaning no backend or client app changes should be necessary, building against new OpenSearch Service features means there's no going back. AWS says that upgrading from existing Elasticsearch 6.x and 7.x managed clusters to OpenSearch is irreversible.

[According to a blog post by Channy Yun, principal developer advocate for AWS], OpenSearch 1.0 (the AWS fork) supports three features unavailable in the legacy Elasticsearch versions still supported in Amazon OpenSearch Service: Transforms, Data Streams, and Notebooks in OpenSearch Dashboards... Amazon OpenSearch Service incorporates various other capabilities not present in the open-source Elasticsearch code, like security integrations (Active Directory, etc), reporting, alerting, and other such things. Cloud provider lock-in can become an issue even when there's compatibility between hosted open source services and the projects they're based upon.

What started out as an exercise in copying, the most lucrative form of flattery, has become a race to differentiate, or — to use the words of former Microsoft VP Paul Martiz when telling Intel representatives in 1995 about how Microsoft would deal with Netscape — "Embrace, extend, extinguish."

"Asahi Linux for Apple M1 Macs is moving closer to reality," writes Slashdot reader TroysBucket.

An Asahi developer posted a detailed status update on Twitter. Linux enthusiast Bryan Lunduke offers this succinct summary:

- The Asahi Linux team has Linux (Debian, in this case) booting and usable with network support.

- They now have (very early) display drivers which "take full advantage of the display hardware."

- They have at least two base distributions — both Arch and Debian — working and functional (to some extent).

They also have, according to their latest update, "boot picker" support so that you can manually select which OS / Drive to boot from on the M1 Macs... I, for one, can't wait to see the first public, functional release of Asahi Linux — and will be following it extremely closely.