An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Meet AdBlock Radio, an adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts. Its creator, Alexandre Storelli, told Motherboard he hopes to help companies "develop alternative business models for radio and podcast lovers that do not want ads." "Ads exploit the weaknesses of many defenseless souls," Storelli told Motherboard. "Ads dishonestly tempt people, steal their time and promise them a higher social status. Blocking them will be a relieving experience for many."

Most audio ads exploit "auditory artifacts" to produce an ad that can't be ignored or tuned out because it feels louder than it actually is -- this has gotten so bad that there has actually been a "sonic arms race" where ads have been made increasingly louder over the years. "Adblock Radio detects audio ads with machine-learning and Shazam-like techniques," Storelli wrote about the project. He said he's been working on it for more than three years and that it uses techniques such as speech recognition, acoustic fingerprinting, and machine learning to detect known ad formats. It uses a crowdsourced database of ads and "acoustic fingerprinting," which converts audio features into a series of numbers that can be combed by an algorithm. Storelli has made Adblock Radio open-source and given detailed instructions on how to build on it, integrate it into user devices, and deploy it in a way that pressures radio stations (and podcasts) to self-regulate the quality of their ads.

"Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has shared his August 2019 notes where he outlines the frustrations and issues that have come up as a result of init system diversity with some developers still aiming to viably support systemd alternatives within Debian," reports Phoronix: Stemming from elogind being blocked from transitioning to testing and the lack of clarity into that, Hartman was pulled in to try to help mediate the matter and get to the bottom of the situation with a lack of cooperation between the elogind and systemd maintainers for Debian as well as the release team. Elogind is used by some distributions as an implementation of systemd's logind, well, outside of systemd as a standalone daemon. Elogind is one of the pieces to the puzzle for trying to maintain a modern, systemd-free Linux distribution.

Various issues were raised that are trying to be worked through albeit many Debian developers face time limitations and other factors like emotional exhaustion. Hartman noted in his August notes, "I think we may be approaching a point where we need to poll the project -- to have a GR and ask ourselves how committed we are to the different parts of this init diversity discussion. Reaffirming our support for sysvinit and elogind would be one of the options in any such GR. If that option passed, we'd expect all the maintainers involved to work together or to appoint and empower people who could work on this issue. It would be fine for maintainers not to be involved so long as they did not block progress. And of course we would hold the discussions to the highest standards of respect."

MojoKid writes: Lakka with RetroArch is one of the most comprehensive open-source retro-gaming console front ends available, with support for a wide array of single-board computers and multiple operating systems. Although the more powerful Raspberry Pi 4 was released months ago, the developers of Lakka had a number of bugs to contend with that prevented an official stable release, until yesterday. Lakka 2.3 (with RetroArch 1.7.8) is available now though, and it appears to leverage the additional horsepower of the Pi 4 quite well. It's even able to play some of the more demanding Sega Dreamcast and Saturn games -- among many other retro-consoles, like the Atari 2600, SuperNES, and many others. In addition to the Pi 4, this latest Lakka release also adds support for the ROCKPro64 and incorporates a wide range of bug fixes and feature enhancements.

Who should be responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting open-source projects? From a report: When you buy a product like Philips Hue's smart lights or an iPhone, you probably assume the people who wrote their code are being paid. While that's true for those who directly author a product's software, virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through "open-source" projects on sites like GitHub and GitLab. Often these developers are happy to work for free. Writing open-source software allows them to sharpen their skills, gain perspectives from the community, or simply help the industry by making innovations available at no cost. According to Google, which maintains hundreds of open-source projects, open source "enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real-world problems."

But when software used by millions of people is maintained by a community of people, or a single person, all on a volunteer basis, sometimes things can go horribly wrong. The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions. Other times, developers grow bored and abandon their projects, which can be breached while they aren't paying attention. It's hard to demand that programmers who are working for free troubleshoot problems or continue to maintain software that they've lost interest in for whatever reason -- though some companies certainly try. Not adequately maintaining these projects, on the other hand, makes the entire tech ecosystem weaker. So some open-source programmers are asking companies to pay, not for their code, but for their support services. Daniel Stenberg is one of those programmers. He created cURL, one of the world's most popular open-source projects.

New submitter JDShewey writes: The CentOS Project has announced that CentOS 8.0 will be available for download beginning Tuesday, September 24. This release was deferred so that work to release CentOS 7.7 could be completed, which means that CentOS 7.7 will be out shortly as well (and 7.7 it is already beginning to appear in mirrors and repos). This comes 20 weeks to the day from the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Besides their Linux laptops, single-board computers, and tablets, Pine64 is now also working on "PineTime," a new $25 smartwatch for Linux smartphones running open source software (and based on either ARM Mbed or FreeRTOS), reports Liliputing.com: The company describes the PineTime watch as a companion for Linux smartphones... you know, like the company's upcoming $150 PinePhone. For either or both of those reasons, it could appeal to folks who may not have wanted in on the smartphone space until now...

The PineTime uses an existing watch body that's used by other device makers, but Pine64 is choosing custom internal hardware. The PineTime will support Bluetooth 5.0, a heart rate monitor, and multi-day battery life and the watch features a zinc alloy & plastic case and comes with a charging dock...

At this point the PineTime is described as a side project, which means it's not a top priority for Pine64. While the company says the picture above is an actual photo of a prototype, Pine64 is still seeking software developers interested in contributing to the project, and the company's primary focus at this point will still be other upcoming devices like the PineBook Pro laptop and PinePhone smartphone.

"Given how dependent we've become upon open source software, one would think that we would have a bevy of options for supporting the developers who write the code, but we don't..." writes InfoWorld's Matt Asay, in an essay defending Feross Aboukhadijeh for experimenting with ads in his open source JavaScript style guide library.

"We have some inchoate business and funding models that serve open source companies and open source developers more or less well, and too often less. What we need is more people like Aboukhadijeh earnestly experimenting with ways to make things better, more companies like Tidelift introducing novel ways to fund developers, and more organizations recognizing their own self-interest in employing or otherwise paying the developers who build the software they rely on... [U]ltimately, we need more experimentation, and less criticism." What about donations? As Aboukhadijeh has noted, "Lots of maintainers struggle to reach a barely livable wage via donations...." Linux Foundation Chris Aniszczyk has derisively described the approach [and] goes on to put the onus for paying developers on those companies that most benefit from their work: "[A] big part of innovation comes from developers working at organizations adopting open source software at scale and using it in interesting ways. It's these organizations that should be tasked to sustain open source software versus individuals, especially since they depend on open source software to survive as a business."

Aniszczyk isn't talking about mega-corps throwing money at mega-tip jars. Rather, he's talking about the big beneficiaries employing the developers who build the projects upon which they depend. It's a great idea, and one that has borne fruit in the Linux community and currently in the Kubernetes world. However it's done, there's an underlying principle that is critical to all of this: We need more experimentation.

The first requirement for ensuring open source sustainability is to allow and encourage experimentation. Concerned at his (and other open source developers') inability to make a comfortable living writing popular open source software, Standard co-founder Aboukhadijeh decided to experiment with an ad-supported model...

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: While Sun open-sourced some of Java as long ago as November 2006, actually using Java in an open-source way was... troublesome. Just ask Google about Android and Java. But for Java in the enterprise things have changed. On September 10, The Eclipse Foundation announced the full open-source release of the Jakarta EE 8 Full Platform and Web Profile specifications and related Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs).

This comes after Oracle let go of most of Java Enterprise Edition's (JEE) intellectual property. Oracle retains Java's trademarks though -- thus Java EE's naming convention has been changed to Jakarta EE. But for practical programming and production purposes Jakarta EE 8 is the next generation of enterprise Java.... Jakarta EE 8 also includes the same APIs and Javadoc using the same programming model Java developers have always used. The Jakarta EE 8 TCKs are based on and fully compatible with Java EE 8 TCKs. All of this means enterprise customers will be able to migrate to Jakarta EE 8 without any changes to Java EE 8 applications.

Eclipse hasn't been doing this in a vacuum. Fujitsu, IBM, Oracle, Payara, Red Hat, Tomitribe, and other members of what was once the Java community have been working on Jakarta EE... All of the Jakarta EE Working Group vendors intend to certify their Java EE 8 compatible implementations as Jakarta EE 8 compatible. In other words, Jakarta is the future for Java EE.
Oracle is now working on delivering a Java EE 8 and Jakarta EE 8 compatible implementation of their WebLogic Server.

The Eclipse Foundation says Jakarta EE 8's release "provides a new baseline for the evolution and innovation of enterprise Java technologies under an open, vendor-neutral, community-driven process."

DevNull127 shares some of the key findings from The New Stack's second annual "Open Source Programs in the Enterprise" survey, co-sponsored by VMware and in partnership with The Linux Foundation's TODO Group: Companies with initiatives to promote open source overwhelmingly say these efforts are improving their companies' software practices. The results [of the survey] show that proponents of free and open-source software (FOSS) have moved to the next phases of open source adoption, widening its usage within the enterprise while keeping alive the spirit and ethos of non-commercial software communities.

69% are at least sometimes using open-source code in commercial products, with that figure jumping to 83% among technology companies -- within three percentage points of the same survey's results last year. And most (79%) Internet-scale technology companies with more than 10,000 employees already have an open-source management program, which is a slight increase compared to last year. That stability shows that the next big changes in enterprise open source will instead involve its scope and how much enterprises emphasize giving back to the community.

Increased innovation rose to become the most cited benefit of open-source programs. Participants said development speed, technology flexibility, and total cost of ownership are the top three. Lower support costs were also seen as a likely benefit. But open-source programs are also improving how software development is handled. In response to one of our new questions, 81% of respondents say their program has had a positive impact on their company's software practices. In an open-ended follow-up question, code reviews and license-compliance processes were repeatedly cited as specific practices that were improved as a direct result of the program. Furthermore, code quality and reduced costs were often cited as specific benefits coming from improved software practices. While "quality" is often hard to define, many respondents say newly-instituted code reviews have been a specific positive impact on their company's software practices. The full dataset can be found here.

Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen has announced the release of GNOME 3.34, bringing many performance improvements and better Wayland support. Phoronix reports: Making GNOME 3.34 particularly exciting is the plethora of optimizations/fixes in tow with this six-month update. Equally exciting are a ton of improvements and additions around the Wayland support to ensure its performance and feature parity to X11. GNOME 3.34 also brings other improvements like sandboxed browsing with Epiphany, GNOME Music enhancements, GNOME Software improvements, and a ton of other refinements throughout GNOME Shell, Mutter, and the many GNOME applications. More details can be found via release announcement and release notes.

urdak writes: Four years ago, ScyllaDB introduced Scylla -- a new open-source NoSQL database, compatible with the popular Cassandra but 10 times faster. Today, the project announced support for the DynamoDB API as well. This will allow applications that use Amazon's DynamoDB to be migrated to other public or private clouds -- running on Scylla instead of DynamoDB. Beyond the added choice, large users may also see their cloud bills drastically reduced by moving to Scylla: ScyllaDB reported in the past that the total cost of running Scylla is only one seventh the cost of DynamoDB.

Forbes.com shares some big Linux news: Since 2011, Arch Linux-based Manjaro has focused on being a simple-to-use, accessible Linux desktop distribution with a friendly community... But as of today, Manjaro Linux is no longer just a Linux distribution -- it's officially transforming into a company with ambitious plans for its future. Say hello to Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG.

The announcement happened just hours ago, via Manjaro developer Philip Müller. It's not the catchiest name, but the advantages to this move seem beneficial to the both the Manjaro project and the community using it. Müller says that for quite some time he's been researching "ways to secure the project in its current form and how to allow for activities which can't be undertaken as a 'hobby project.'" Crucially, he and the team wanted to reach new heights and be able to invest considerably more time into the project, without compromising the way its currently operating. To that end, the Manjaro team is announcing the formation of an established company, Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG, "to enable full-time employment of maintainers and exploration of future commercial opportunities." They'll also be taking on Blue Systems -- a German IT company specializing in Free and Libre software -- as an advisor.

Additionally, the team will transfer the ownership of all donations -- and the allocation of donations -- to fiscal hosts CommunityBridge and OpenCollective, which will both secure donations and make their use transparent... At this stage is look like there's a distinction between what will change in the immediate future, and what the company will strive for. The biggest immediate change -- one that Manjaro supporters may applaud -- is that developers Philip Müller and Bernhard Landauer can now commit to the distribution in a full-time capacity, with an eye toward taking on even more employees down the road. "One of our main goals is to improve our infrastructure and continuously work on the essentials and requirements of our distro as a professional endeavor," writes Müller. "Our hope is to soon be able to include additional contributors on a paid basis."

"It's here! Purism announces shipment of the Librem 5," writes long-time Slashdot reader Ocean Consulting: Librem 5 is a landmark mobile device with a dedicated platform, runs PureOS Linux, and is the first mobile phone to seek hardware certification from the Free Software Foundation. Initially a crowd sourced funding campaign, the phone embraces principles of free software and user privacy. IP native communication is supported via Matrix. Privacy features include hardware kill switches for camera, microphone, cellular, wifi, Bluetooth and GPS.
"The Librem 5 phone is built from the ground up to respect the privacy, security, and freedoms of society," reads the site's official announcement. "It is a revolutionary approach to solving the issues that people face today around data exploitation -- putting people in control of their own digital lives."

They're adopting an "iterative" shipping schedule -- publishing a detailed schedule defining specific batches and their features with corresponding shipping dates. "Each iteration improves upon the prior in a rapid rolling release throughout the entire first version of the phone... As slots in a particular early batch free up, we will open it up for others in a later batch to join in, according to the date of the order."

pacopico writes: Aerospace technology has gotten better. The price of rocket launches has come down. So much so that a group of space friends in Silicon Valley now think it's possible to create their own settlement on the moon for less than $3 billion. They've formed a non-profit called the Open Lunar Foundation that looks to begin launching probes to the lunar surface and then to start work on a habitat. The idea is to build a settlement in the spirit of open-source technology where data and hardware designs can be shared and where policies around the settlement are shaped by people all over the world rather than a particular nation state or billionaire. So far the team is small and working off a few million dollars, but there's an all-star cast of advisors, including former astronauts, NASA heads and aerospace execs.

Garabito writes: Free Software advocate Richard M. Stallman gave a talk at Microsoft Campus yesterday. Stallman was invited by Microsoft Research. Stallman's talk was related -- as most of his talks -- with Free Software, Privacy and the GPLv3. He also had a list of small requests to Microsoft: "make Github push users to better software license hygiene, make hardware manufacturers to publish their hardware specs, make it easier to workaround Secure Boot." While Microsoft has changed its attitude toward Open Source Software in the last years, this does not mean RMS has made peace with Microsoft: "If you're wondering whether Stallman's distaste for Microsoft has lessened over the years, his personal home page makes it clear that it has not".

Gregor Hohpe: A significant share of architectural energy is spent on reducing or avoiding lock-in. That's a rather noble objective: architecture is meant to give us options and lock-in does the opposite. However, lock-in isn't a simple true-or-false matter: avoiding being locked into one aspect often locks you into another. Also, popular notions, such as open source automagically eliminating lock-in, turn out to be not entirely true. Time to have a closer look at lock-in, so you don't get locked up into avoiding it!

Top Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a new 30-minute interview with TFIR during the Open Source Summit, 2019. He discusses security in the post-Spectre world, remembers when Microsoft joined the Linux distros mailing list, and acknowledges good-naturedly that he and Richard Stallman "approach things from a different standpoint".

An anonymous reader writes: In the interview Kroah-Hartman talks about downsides of living in the Hague. "My son's school actually mandates that they all have MacBooks. So he has a MacBook, my wife has a MacBook, and that's about it." But of course, Kroah-Hartman himself is always using Linux.

So what distro does he use? "I don't use openSUSE any more, I use Arch. And my build system I think is actually running Fedora. I have a number of virtual machines still running Gentoo, Dubya, and Fedora to do some testing on some userspace tools. But yeah, all my laptops and everything is switched over to Arch these days... I have a Chromebook that I play around with, and you can run Linux applications, and you can of course SSH into anything..."

Why Arch? "At the moment it had something that I needed. I don't remember what it was, the latest development version, what not -- and I've known a number of the Arch developers over the years. Their idea of a constantly rolling, forward-moving system is the way to go... It's neutral, it's community-based, it has everything I need. It works really really well. I've actually converted my cloud instances that I have all to Arch... It's nice." And in addition, "Their Wiki is amazing. The documentation -- it's like one of the best resources out there these days... If you look up any userspace program and how to configure it and use it. Actually, the systemd Arch Wiki pages are one of the most amazing resources out there...

"One of the main policies of Arch, or philosophies, is you stay as close to the upstream as possible. And as a developer, I want that... They're really good in feedback to the community. Because I want that testing -- I want to make sure that things are fixed. And if it is broken, I learn about it quickly and I fix it and push the stuff out. So that's actually a really good feedback loop. And that's some of the reasons I need it."

An anonymous reader quotes Phoronix: Back on the AMD EPYC 7002 "Rome" launch day I wrote about how AMD is working to return to open-source BIOS/Coreboot support and now there's further confirmation of their work in that direction. We were tipped off Friday that AMD's Head of Platform Firmware, Edward Benyukhis, publicly posted on LinkedIn that he is "looking to hire someone with solid Coreboot and UEFI background." If you have Coreboot experience or know someone who is, see LinkedIn for contacting Benyukhis.

That's exciting itself and certainly noteworthy, but also notable is AMD is now sponsoring next week's Open-Source Firmware Conference. AMD has joined the likes of Amazon AWS, Arm, System76, TrustedFirmware.org, and other companies in sponsoring this conference about Coreboot, LinuxBoot, and related open-source firmware projects.

Exactly 28 years ago today, a 21-year-old student named Linus Torvalds made a fateful announcement on the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix.

i-Programmer commemorates today's anniversary with some interesting trivia: Back in 1991 the fledgling operating system didn't have a name, according to Joey Sneddon's 27 Interesting Facts about Linux:

Linux very nearly wasn't called Linux! Linus wanted to call his "hobby" project "FreaX" (a combination of "free", "freak" and "Unix"). Thankfully, he was persuaded otherwise by the owner of the server hosting his early code, who happened to prefer the name "Linux" (a combination of "Linus" and "Unix").

One fact I had been unaware of is that the original version of Linux wasn't open source software. It was free but was distributed with a license forbidding commercial use or redistribution. However, for version 0.12, released in 1992, the GPL was adopted making the code freely available.
Android Authority describes the rest of the revolution: Torvalds announced to the internet that he was working on a project he said was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional." Less than one month later, Torvalds released the Linux kernel to the public. The world hasn't been the same since...

To commemorate the nearly 30 years that Linux has been available, we compiled a shortlist of ways Linux has fundamentally changed our lives.

- Linux-based operating systems are the number-one choice for servers around the world... As of 2015, web analytics and market share company W3Cook estimated that as many as 96.4% of all servers ran Linux or one of its derivatives. No matter the exact number, it's safe to say that the kernel nearly powers the entire web...

- In Oct. 2003, a team of developers forked Android from Linux to run on digital cameras. Nearly 16 years later, it's the single most popular operating system in the world, running on more than 2 billion devices. Even Chrome OS, Android TV, and Wear OS are all forked from Linux. Google isn't the only one to do this either. Samsung's own in-house operating system, Tizen, is forked from Linux as well, and it's is even backed by The Linux Foundation.

- Linux has even changed how we study the universe at large. For similar reasons cars and supercomputers use Linux, NASA uses it for most of the computers aboard the International Space Station. Astronauts use these computers to carry out research and perform tasks related to their assignments. But NASA isn't the only galaxy studying organization using Linux. The privately-owned SpaceX also uses Linux for many of its projects. In 2017, SpaceX sent a Linux-powered supercomputer developed by HP to space and, according to an AMA on Reddit, even the Dragon and Falcon 9 run Linux.
"Without it," the article concludes, "there would be no science or social human development, and we would all still be cave-people."

Standard, a popular Javascript style guide library that is downloaded about three million times each month, is beginning to show ads when installed through npm, a developer announced this week. The move, which has been pegged as an experiment, comes as the developer looks to find sustainable ways to support contributions to the open source development. In a post, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a developer of Standard, said whenever Standard 14 is installed, "we'll display a message from a company that supports open source. The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving documentation."

The announcement has sparked a debate in the community with some suggesting that there should be a better way to support the FOSS developers without seeing ads on the terminal.