Thursday Go's long-time tech lead Russ Cox made an announcement: Starting September 1, Austin Clements will be taking over as the tech lead of Go: both the Go team at Google and the overall Go project. Austin is currently the tech lead for what we sometimes call the "Go core", which encompasses compiler toolchain, runtime, and releases. Cherry Mui will be stepping up to lead those areas.

I am not leaving the Go project, but I think the time is right for a change... I will be shifting my focus to work more on Gaby [or "Go AI bot," an open-source contributor agent] and Oscar [an open-source contributor agent architecture], trying to make useful contributions in the Go issue tracker to help all of you work more productively. I am hopeful that work on Oscar will uncover ways to help open source maintainers that will be adopted by other projects, just like some of Go's best ideas have been adopted by other projects. At the highest level, my goals for Oscar are to build something useful, learn something new, and chart a path for other projects. These are the same broad goals I've always had for our work on Go, so in that sense Oscar feels like a natural continuation.
The post notes that new tech lead Austin Clements "has been working on Go at Google since 2014" (and Mui since 2016). "Their judgment is superb and their knowledge of Go and the systems it runs on both broad and deep. When I have general design questions or need to better understand details of the compiler, linker, or runtime, I turn to them." It's important to remember that tech lead — like any position of leadership — is a service role, not an honorary title. I have been leading the Go project for over 12 years, serving all of you, and trying to create the right conditions for all of you to do your best work. Large projects like Go absolutely benefit from stable leadership, but they can also benefit from leadership changes. New leaders bring new strengths and fresh perspectives. For Go, I think 12+ years of one leader is enough stability; it's time for someone new to serve in this role.

In particular, I don't believe that the "BDFL" (benevolent dictator for life) model is healthy for a person or a project. It doesn't create space for new leaders. It's a single point of failure. It doesn't give the project room to grow. I think Python benefited greatly from Guido stepping down in 2018 and letting other people lead, and I've had in the back of my mind for many years that we should have a Go leadership change eventually....

I am going to consciously step back from decision making and create space for Austin and the others to step forward, but I am not disappearing. I will still be available to talk about Go designs, review CLs, answer obscure history questions, and generally help and support you all in whatever way I can. I will still file issues and send CLs from time to time, I have been working on a few potential new standard libraries, I will still advocate for Go across the industry, and I will be speaking about Go at GoLab in Italy in November...

I am incredibly proud of the work we have all accomplished together, and I am confident in the leaders both on the Go team at Google and in the Go community. You are all doing remarkable work, and I know you will continue to do that.

According to Statcounter, Linux use hit another all-time high in July. For July 2024, the statistics website is showing Linux at 4.45%, climbing almost a half a percentage point from June's 4.05% high.

Is 2024 truly the year of Linux on the desktop?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: According to a new statement, the White House realizes open source is key to artificial intelligence (AI) development -- much like many businesses using the technology. On Tuesday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) issued a report supporting open-source and open models to promote innovation in AI while emphasizing the need for vigilant risk monitoring. The report recommends that the US continue to support AI openness while working on new capabilities to monitor potential AI risks but refrain from restricting the availability of open model weights.

Despite multiple methods available across major operating systems for installing and updating applications, there remains "no real clear answer to 'which is best,'" reports The Next Web. Each system faces unique challenges such as outdated packages, high fees, and policy restrictions.

Enter Homebrew.

"Initially created as an option for developers to keep the dependencies they often need for developing, testing, and running their work, Homebrew has grown to be so much more in its 15-year history." Created in 2009, Homebrew has become a leading solution for macOS, integrating with MDM tools through its enterprise-focused extension, Workbrew, to balance user freedom with corporate security needs, while maintaining its open-source roots under the guidance of Mike McQuaid. In an interview with The Next Web's Chris Chinchilla, project leader Mike McQuaid talks about the challenges and responsibilities of maintaining one of the world's largest open-source projects: As with anything that attracts plenty of use and attention, Homebrew also attracts a lot of mixed and extreme opinions, and processing and filtering those requires a tough outlook, something that Mike has spoken about in numerous interviews and at conferences. "As a large project, you get a lot of hate from people. Either people are just frustrated because they hit a bug or because you changed something, and they didn't read the release notes, and now something's broken," Mike says when I ask him about how he copes with the constant influx of communication. "There are a lot of entitled, noisy users in open source who contribute very little and like to shout at people and make them feel bad. One of my strengths is that I have very little time for those people, and I just insta-block them or close their issues."

More crucially, an open-source project is often managed and maintained by a group of people. Homebrew has several dozen maintainers and nearly one thousand total contributors. Mike explains that all of these people also deserve to be treated with respect by users, "I'm also super protective of my maintainers, and I don't want them to be treated that way either." But despite these features and its widespread use, one area Homebrew has always lacked is the ability to work well with teams of users. This is where Workbrew, a company Mike founded with two other Homebrew maintainers, steps in. [...] Workbrew ties together various Homebrew features with custom glue to create a workflow for setting up and maintaining Mac machines. It adds new features that core Homebrew maintainers had no interest in adding, such as admin and reporting dashboards for a computing fleet, while bringing more general improvements to the core project.

Bearing in mind Mike's motivation to keep Homebrew in the "traditional open source" model, I asked him how he intended to keep the needs of the project and the business separated and satisfied. "We've seen a lot of churn in the last few years from companies that made licensing decisions five or ten years ago, which have now changed quite dramatically and have generated quite a lot of community backlash," Mike said. "I'm very sensitive to that, and I am a little bit of an open-source purist in that I still consider the open-source initiative's definition of open source to be what open source means. If you don't comply with that, then you can be another thing, but I think you're probably not open source."

And regarding keeping his and his co-founder's dual roles separated, Mike states, "I'm the CTO and co-founder of Workbrew, and I'm the project leader of Homebrew. The project leader with Homebrew is an elected position." Every year, the maintainers and the community elect a candidate. "But then, with the Homebrew maintainers working with us on Workbrew, one of the things I say is that when we're working on Workbrew, I'm your boss now, but when we work on Homebrew, I'm not your boss," Mike adds. "If you think I'm saying something and it's a bad idea, you tell me it's a bad idea, right?" The company is keeping its early progress in a private beta for now, but you can expect an announcement soon. As for what's happening for Homebrew? Well, in the best "open source" way, that's up to the community and always will be.

"As free software activists, we ought to take the opportunity to look at the situation and see how things could have gone differently," writes FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough: Let's be clear: in principle, there is nothing ethically wrong with automatic updates so long as the user has made an informed choice to receive them... Although we can understand how the situation developed, one wonders how wise it is for so many critical services around the world to hedge their bets on a single distribution of a single operating system made by a single stupefyingly predatory monopoly in Redmond, Washington. Instead, we can imagine a more horizontal structure, where this airline and this public library are using different versions of GNU/Linux, each with their own security teams and on different versions of the Linux(-libre) kernel...

As of our writing, we've been unable to ascertain just how much access to the Windows kernel source code Microsoft granted to CrowdStrike engineers. (For another thing, the root cause of the problem appears to have been an error in a configuration file.) But this being the free software movement, we could guarantee that all security engineers and all stakeholders could have equal access to the source code, proving the old adage that "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." There is no good reason to withhold code from the public, especially code so integral to the daily functioning of so many public institutions and businesses. In a cunning PR spin, it appears that Microsoft has started blaming the incident on third-party firms' access to kernel source and documentation. Translated out of Redmond-ese, the point they are trying to make amounts to "if only we'd been allowed to be more secretive, this wouldn't have happened...!"

We also need to see that calling for a diversity of providers of nonfree software that are mere front ends for "cloud" software doesn't solve the problem. Correcting it fully requires switching to free software that runs on the user's own computer.The Free Software Foundation is often accused of being utopian, but we are well aware that moving airlines, libraries, and every other institution affected by the CrowdStrike outage to free software is a tremendous undertaking. Given free software's distinct ethical advantage, not to mention the embarrassing damage control underway from both Microsoft and CrowdStrike, we think the move is a necessary one. The more public an institution, the more vitally it needs to be running free software.

For what it's worth, it's also vital to check the syntax of your configuration files. CrowdStrike engineers would do well to remember that one, next time.

Tuesday Meta released Llama 3.1, its largest open-source AI model to date. But just one day Mistral released Large 2, notes this report from TechCrunch, "which it claims to be on par with the latest cutting-edge models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of code generation, mathematics, and reasoning...

"Though Mistral is one of the newer entrants in the artificial intelligence space, it's quickly shipping AI models on or near the cutting edge." In a press release, Mistral says one of its key focus areas during training was to minimize the model's hallucination issues. The company says Large 2 was trained to be more discerning in its responses, acknowledging when it does not know something instead of making something up that seems plausible. The Paris-based AI startup recently raised $640 million in a Series B funding round, led by General Catalyst, at a $6 billion valuation...

However, it's important to note that Mistral's models are, like most others, not open source in the traditional sense — any commercial application of the model needs a paid license. And while it's more open than, say, GPT-4o, few in the world have the expertise and infrastructure to implement such a large model. (That goes double for Llama's 405 billion parameters, of course.)
Mistral only has 123 billion parameters, according to the article. But whichever system prevails, "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward," Mark Zuckerberg wrote this week, predicting that open-source AI will soar to the same popularity as Linux: This year, Llama 3 is competitive with the most advanced models and leading in some areas. Starting next year, we expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry. But even before that, Llama is already leading on openness, modifiability, and cost efficiency... Beyond releasing these models, we're working with a range of companies to grow the broader ecosystem. Amazon, Databricks, and NVIDIA are launching full suites of services to support developers fine-tuning and distilling their own models. Innovators like Groq have built low-latency, low-cost inference serving for all the new models. The models will be available on all major clouds including AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and more. Companies like Scale.AI, Dell, Deloitte, and others are ready to help enterprises adopt Llama and train custom models with their own data.
"As the community grows and more companies develop new services, we can collectively make Llama the industry standard and bring the benefits of AI to everyone," Zuckerberg writes. He says that he's heard from developers, CEOs, and government officials that they want to "train, fine-tune, and distill" their own models, protecting their data with a cheap and efficient model — and without being locked into a closed vendor. But they also tell him that want to invest in an ecosystem "that's going to be the standard for the long term." Lots of people see that open source is advancing at a faster rate than closed models, and they want to build their systems on the architecture that will give them the greatest advantage long term...

One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms. Between the way they tax developers, the arbitrary rules they apply, and all the product innovations they block from shipping, it's clear that Meta and many other companies would be freed up to build much better services for people if we could build the best versions of our products and competitors were not able to constrain what we could build. On a philosophical level, this is a major reason why I believe so strongly in building open ecosystems in AI and AR/VR for the next generation of computing...

I believe that open source is necessary for a positive AI future. AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life — and to accelerate economic growth while unlocking progress in medical and scientific research. Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn't concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society. There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it's in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer... [O]pen source should be significantly safer since the systems are more transparent and can be widely scrutinized...

The bottom line is that open source AI represents the world's best shot at harnessing this technology to create the greatest economic opportunity and security for everyone... I believe the Llama 3.1 release will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source, and I expect that approach to only grow from here. I hope you'll join us on this journey to bring the benefits of AI to everyone in the world.

Nvidia's new R555 Linux driver series has significantly improved their open-source GPU kernel driver modules, achieving near parity with their proprietary drivers. Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: The NVIDIA open-source kernel driver modules shipped by their driver installer and also available via their GitHub repository are in great shape. With the R555 series the support and performance is basically at parity of their open-source kernel modules compared to their proprietary kernel drivers. [...] Across a range of different GPU-accelerated creator workloads, the performance of the open-source NVIDIA kernel modules matched that of the proprietary driver. No loss in performance going the open-source kernel driver route. Across various professional graphics workloads, both the NVIDIA RTX A2000 and A4000 graphics cards were also achieving the same performance whether on the open-source MIT/GPLv2 driver or using NVIDIA's classic proprietary driver.

Across all of the tests I carried out using the NVIDIA 555 stable series Linux driver, the open-source NVIDIA kernel modules were able to achieve the same performance as the classic proprietary driver. Also important is that there was no increased power use or other difference in power management when switching over to the open-source NVIDIA kernel modules.

It's great seeing how far the NVIDIA open-source kernel modules have evolved and that with the upcoming NVIDIA 560 Linux driver series they will be defaulting to them on supported GPUs. And moving forward with Blackwell and beyond, NVIDIA is just enabling the GPU support along their open-source kernel drivers with leaving the proprietary kernel drivers to older hardware. Tests I have done using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards with Linux gaming workloads between the MIT/GPL and proprietary kernel drivers have yielded similar (boring but good) results: the same performance being achieved with no loss going the open-source route. You can view Phoronix's performance results in charts here, here, and here.

Open AI models that allow developers to customize them with few restrictions are more likely to promote competition, FTC Chair Lina Khan said, weighing in on a key debate within the industry. From a report: "There's tremendous potential for open-weight models to promote competition," Khan said Thursday in San Francisco at startup incubator Y Combinator. "Open-weight models can liberate startups from the arbitrary whims of closed developers and cloud gatekeepers."

"Open-weight" models disclose what an AI model picked up and was tweaked on during its training process. That allows developers to better customize them and makes them more accessible to smaller companies and researchers. But critics have warned that open models carry an increased risk of abuse and could potentially allow companies from geopolitical rivals like China to piggyback off the technology. Khan's comments come as the Biden administration is considering guidance on the use and safety of open-weight models.

Switzerland has enacted the "Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Government Tasks" (EMBAG), mandating open-source software (OSS) in the public sector to enhance transparency, security, and efficiency. "This new law requires all public bodies to disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless third-party rights or security concerns prevent it," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "This 'public money, public code' approach aims to enhance government operations' transparency, security, and efficiency." From the report: Making this move wasn't easy. It began in 2011 when the Swiss Federal Supreme Court published its court application, Open Justitia, under an OSS license. The proprietary legal software company Weblaw wasn't happy about this. There were heated political and legal fights for more than a decade. Finally, the EMBAG was passed in 2023. Now, the law not only allows the release of OSS by the Swiss government or its contractors, but also requires the code to be released under an open-source license "unless the rights of third parties or security-related reasons would exclude or restrict this."

Professor Dr. Matthias Sturmer, head of the Institute for Public Sector Transformation at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, led the fight for this law. He hailed it as "a great opportunity for government, the IT industry, and society." Sturmer believes everyone will benefit from this regulation, as it reduces vendor lock-in for the public sector, allows companies to expand their digital business solutions, and potentially leads to reduced IT costs and improved services for taxpayers.

In addition to mandating OSS, the EMBAG also requires the release of non-personal and non-security-sensitive government data as Open Government Data (OGD). This dual "open by default" approach marks a significant paradigm shift towards greater openness and practical reuse of software and data. Implementing the EMBAG is expected to serve as a model for other countries considering similar measures. It aims to promote digital sovereignty and encourage innovation and collaboration within the public sector. The Swiss Federal Statistical Office (BFS) is leading the law's implementation, but the organizational and financial aspects of the OSS releases still need to be clarified.

Nvidia is ready to fully transition to open-source Linux GPU kernel drivers, starting with the R555 series and planning a complete shift with the R560 series. The open-source kernel modules will only be available for select newer GPUs, while older architectures like Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta must continue using proprietary drivers. TechSpot reports: According to Nvidia, the open-source GPU kernel modules have helped deliver "equivalent or better" application performance compared to its proprietary kernels. The company has also added new features like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support, confidential computing, and the coherent memory architectures of the Grace platform to its open-source kernels. [...] For compatible GPUs, the default version of the driver installed by all methods is switching from proprietary to open-source. However, users will have the ability to manually select the closed-source modules if they are still available for their platform.

Unfortunately, the open-source kernel modules are not available for GPUs from the older Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, meaning people still running a GTX 980 or GTX 1080 will have to continue using Nvidia's proprietary drivers. For mixed deployments with older and newer GPUs in the same system, Nvidia recommends continuing to use the proprietary driver for full compatibility. "Nvidia has moved most of its proprietary functions into a proprietary, closed-source firmware blob," adds Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "The parts of Nvidia's GPUs that interact with the broader Linux system are open, but the user-space drivers and firmware are none of your or the OSS community's business."

OW2, the non-profit international consortium dedicated to developing open-source middleware, published an open letter to the European Commission today. They're urging the European Union to continue funding free software after noticing that the Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs were no longer mentioned in Cluster 4 of the 2025 Horizon Europe funding plans.

OW2 argues that discontinuing NGI funding would weaken Europe's technological ecosystem, leaving many projects under-resourced and jeopardizing Europe's position in the global digital landscape. The letter reads, in part: NGI programs have shown their strength and importance to support the European software infrastructure, as a generic funding instrument to fund digital commons and ensure their long-term sustainability. We find this transformation incomprehensible, moreover when NGI has proven efficient and economical to support free software as a whole, from the smallest to the most established initiatives. This ecosystem diversity backs the strength of European technological innovation, and maintaining the NGI initiative to provide structural support to software projects at the heart of worldwide innovation is key to enforce the sovereignty of a European infrastructure. Contrary to common perception, technical innovations often originate from European rather than North American programming communities, and are mostly initiated by small-scaled organizations.

Previous Cluster 4 allocated 27 millions euros to:
- "Human centric Internet aligned with values and principles commonly shared in Europe";
- "A flourishing internet, based on common building blocks created within NGI, that enables better control of our digital life";
- "A structured eco-system of talented contributors driving the creation of new internet commons and the evolution of existing internet commons."

In the name of these challenges, more than 500 projects received NGI funding in the first 5 years, backed by 18 organizations managing these European funding consortia.

After teasing support for the fediverse earlier this year, the newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost has finally delivered. "Over the past few days, Ghost says it has achieved two major milestones in its move to become a federated service," reports TechCrunch. "Of note, it has federated its own newsletter, making it the first federated Ghost instance on the internet." From the report: Users can follow the newsletter through their preferred federated app at @index@activitypub.ghost.org, though the company warns there will be bugs and issues as it continues to work on the platform's integration with ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and other federated apps. "Having multiple Ghost instances in production successfully running ActivityPub is a huge milestone for us because it means that for the first time, we're interacting with the wider fediverse. Not just theoretical local implementations and tests, but the real world wide social web," the company shared in its announcement of the news.

In addition, Ghost's ActivityPub GitHub repository is now fully open source. That means those interested in tracking Ghost's progress toward federation can follow its code changes in real time, and anyone else can learn from, modify, distribute or contribute to its work. Developers who want to collaborate with Ghost are also being invited to get involved following this move. By offering a federated version of the newsletter, readers will have more choices on how they want to subscribe. That is, instead of only being able to follow the newsletter via email or the web, they also can track it using RSS or ActivityPub-powered apps, like Mastodon and others. Ghost said it will also develop a way for sites with paid subscribers to manage access via ActivityPub, but that functionality hasn't yet rolled out with this initial test.

Its FOSS writes: When it comes to Linux, we get to see some really cool, and sometimes quirky projects (read Hannah Montana Linux) that try to show off what's possible, and that's not a bad thing. One such quirky undertaking has recently surfaced, which sees a sophomore trying to one-up their friend, who had booted Linux off NFS. With their work, they have been able to run Arch Linux on Google Drive.
Their ultimate idea included FUSE (which allows running file-system code in userspace). The developer's blog post explains that when Linux boots, "the kernel unpacks a temporary filesystem into RAM which has the tools to mount the real filesystem... it's very helpful! We can mount a FUSE filesystem in that step and boot normally.... " Thankfully, Dracut makes it easy enough to build a custom initramfs... I decide to build this on top of Arch Linux because it's relatively lightweight and I'm familiar with how it work."
Doing testing in an Amazon S3 container, they built an EFI image — then spent days trying to enable networking... And the adventure continues. ("Would it be possible to manually switch the root without a specialized system call? What if I just chroot?") After they'd made a few more tweaks, "I sit there, in front of my computer, staring. It can't have been that easy, can it? Surely, this is a profane act, and the spirit of Dennis Ritchie ought't've stopped me, right? Nobody stopped me, so I kept going..." I build the unified EFI file, throw it on a USB drive under /BOOT/EFI, and stick it in my old server... This is my magnum opus. My Great Work. This is the mark I will leave on this planet long after I am gone: The Cloud Native Computer.

Despite how silly this project is, there are a few less-silly uses I can think of, like booting Linux off of SSH, or perhaps booting Linux off of a Git repository and tracking every change in Git using gitfs. The possibilities are endless, despite the middling usefulness.

If there is anything I know about technology, it's that moving everything to The Cloud is the current trend. As such, I am prepared to commercialize this for any company wishing to leave their unreliable hardware storage behind and move entirely to The Cloud. Please request a quote if you are interested in True Cloud Native Computing.

Unfortunately, I don't know what to do next with this. Maybe I should install Nix?

In Communications of the ACM, long-time FreeBSD contributor Poul-Henning Kamp mocks the idea that the free and open-source software movement has "come apart" and "will end in tears and regret." Economists and others focused on money — like my bank — have had a lot of trouble figuring out the free and open source software (FOSS) phenomenon, and eventually they seem to have reached the conclusion that it just makes no sense. So, they go with the flow. Recently, very serious people in the FOSS movement have started to write long and thoughtful opinion pieces about how it has all come apart and will end in tears and regret. Allow me to disagree...
What follows is a humorous history of how the Open Source movement bested a series of ill-conceived marketing failures starting after the "utterly bad" 1980s when IBM had an "unimaginably huge monopoly" — and an era of vendor lock-in from companies trying to be the next IBM: Out of that utter market failure came Minix, (Net/Free/Open)BSD, and Linux, at a median year of approximately 1991. I can absolutely guarantee that if we had been able to buy a reasonably priced and solid Unix for our 32-bit PCs — no strings attached — nobody would be running FreeBSD or Linux today, except possibly as an obscure hobby. Bill Gates would also have had a lot less of our money...
The essay moves on to when "that dot-com thing happened, fueled by the availability of FOSS operating systems, which did a much better job than any operating system you could buy — not just for the price, but in absolute terms of performance on any given piece of hardware. Thus, out of utter market failure, the FOSS movement was born."

And ultimately, the essay ends with our present day, and the phenomenon of companies that "make a business out of FOSS or derivatives thereof..." The "F" in FOSS was never silent. In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista. But the FOSS movement has won what it wanted, and no matter how much oldsters dream about their glorious days as young revolutionaries, it is not coming back; the frustrations and anger of IT in 2024 are entirely different from those of 1991.

One very big difference is that more people have realized that source code is a liability rather than an asset. For some, that realization came creeping along the path from young teenage FOSS activists in the late 1990s to CIOs of BigCorp today. For most of us, I expect, it was the increasingly crushing workload of maintaining legacy code bases...

"After approximately seven years in development, the Eclipse Foundation's Theia IDE project is now generally available," writes ADT magazine, "emerging from beta to challenge Microsoft's similar Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor." The Eclipse Theia IDE is part of the Eclipse Cloud DevTools ecosystem. The Eclipse Foundation calls it "a true open-source alternative to VS Code," which was built on open source but includes proprietary elements, such as default telemetry, which collects usage data...

Theia was built on the same Monaco editor that powers VS Code, and it supports the same Language Server Protocol (LSP) and Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) that provide IntelliSense code completions, error checking and other features. The Theia IDE also supports the same extensions as VS Code (via the Open VSX Registry instead of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code Marketplace), which are typically written in TypeScript and JavaScript. There are many, many more extensions available for VS Code in Microsoft's marketplace, while "Extensions for VS Code Compatible Editors" in the Open VSX Registry number 3,784 at the time of this writing...

The Eclipse Foundation emphasized another difference between its Theia IDE and VS Code: the surrounding ecosystem/community. "At the core of Theia IDE is its vibrant open source community hosted by the Eclipse Foundation," the organization said in a news release. "This ensures freedom for commercial use without proprietary constraints and fosters innovation and reliability through contributions from companies such as Ericsson, EclipseSource, STMicroelectronics, TypeFox, and more. The community-driven model encourages participation and adaptation according to user needs and feedback."

Indeed, the list of contributors to and adopters of the platform is extensive, also featuring Broadcom, Arm, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, Samsung, Google, Gitpod, Huawei and many others.
The It's FOSS blog has some screenshots and a detailed rundown.

ADT magazine stresses that there's also an entirely distinct (but related) project called the Eclipse Theia Platform (not IDE) which differs from VS Code by allowing developers "to create desktop and cloud IDEs using a single, open-source technology stack" [that can be used in open-source initiatives]. The Eclipse Theia platform "allows developers to customize every aspect of the IDE without forking or patching the code... fully tailored for the needs of internal company projects or for commercial resale as a branded product."

In 1994, college student Jim Hall created FreeDOS (in response to Microsoft's plan to gradually phase out MS-DOS). After celebrating its 30th anniversary last week, Hill wrote a new article Saturday for OpenSource.net: "What I've learned about Open Source community over 30 years."

Lessons include "every Open Source project needs a website," but also "consider other ways to raise awareness about your Open Source software project." ("In the FreeDOS Project, we've found that posting videos to our YouTube channel is an excellent way to help people learn about FreeDOS... The more information you can share about your Open Source project, the more people will find it familiar and want to try it out.")

But the larger lesson is that "Open Source projects must be grounded in community." Without open doors for new ideas and ongoing development, even the most well-intentioned project becomes a stagnant echo chamber...

Maintain open lines of communication... This can take many forms, including an email list, discussion board, or some other discussion forum. Other forums where people can ask more general "Help me" questions are okay but try to keep all discussions about project development on your official discussion channel.
The last of its seven points stresses that "An Open Source project isn't really Open Source without source code that everyone can download, study, use, modify and share" (urging careful selection for your project's licensing). But the first point emphasizes that "It's more than just code," and Hall ends his article by attributing FreeDOS's three-decade run to "the great developers and users in our community." In celebrating FreeDOS, we are celebrating everyone who has created programs, fixed bugs, added features, translated messages, written documentation, shared articles, or contributed in some other way to the FreeDOS Project... Here's looking forward to more years to come!
Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and back in 2000 he answered questions from Slashdot's readers — just six years after starting the project. "Jim isn't rich or famous," wrote RobLimo, "just an old-fashioned open source contributor who helped start a humble but useful project back in 1994 and still works on it as much as he can."

As the years piled up, Slashdot ran posts celebrating FreeDOS's 10th, 15th, and 20th anniversary.

And then for FreeDOS's 25th, Hall returned to Slashdot to answer more questions from Slashdot readers...

This week the Linux Foundation announced a new organization for decentralized systems and technologies, with an aim of "fostering innovation and collaboration" in both their development and deployment.

It will build on existing Linux Foundation blockchain and digital identity projects, according to the announcement, while supporting "a rapidly growing decentralized technology landscape." To foster this broader ecosystem, LF Decentralized Trust will encompass the growing portfolio of Hyperledger projects and host new open source software, communities, standards, and specifications that are critical to the macro shift toward decentralized systems of distributed trust....

LF Decentralized Trust's expanded project and member ecosystem will be both essential to emerging tokenized assets classes and networks, as well as to modernizing the core infrastructure for finance, trade, government, healthcare, and more. LF Decentralized Trust will serve as a neutral home for the open development of a broad range of ledger, identity, security, interoperability, scale, implementation, and related technologies... LF Decentralized Trust will also include new directed funding models that will drive strategic investments by members into individual projects and project resources.

"With LF Decentralized Trust, we're expanding our commitment to open source innovation by embracing a wider array of decentralized technologies," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. "This new, elevated foundation will enable the community to build a more robust ecosystem that drives forward transparency, security, and efficiency in global infrastructure."

"After eight years of advancing the development of blockchain, decentralized identity and related technologies via the Hyperledger community, the time has come to broaden our effort and impact," said Daniela Barbosa, General Manager, Blockchain and Identity, the Linux Foundation. "Ledgers and ledger technologies are but one component of the decentralized systems that will underpin a digital-first global economy. LF Decentralized Trust is where we will gather and grow an expanded community and portfolio of technologies to deliver the transparency, reliability, security and efficiency needed to successfully upgrade critical systems around the world."
The announcement includes quotes of support from numerous companies including Oracle, Siemens, Visa, Accenture, Citi, and Hitachi. Some highlights:

• "The formation of the LF Decentralized Trust reflects the growing demand for open source resources that are critical to the management and functionality of decentralized systems." — CEO of Digital Asset

• "The adoption of decentralized infrastructure is at an inflection point, reflecting the increasing demand from both enterprises and consumers for more secure and transparent digital transactions. As the industry leader for onchain data, blockchain abstraction, and interoperability, we're excited to see the formation of the LF Decentralized Trust and to expand our collaboration with leading financial institutions on advancing tokenized assets and the onchain economy at large." — CMO at Chainlink Labs.

• "As a founding member of the Hyperledger Foundation, and given our unique position in the financial markets, we recognize the vast potential for open-source innovation and decentralized technologies when it comes to reducing risk, increasing resiliency and improving security. The expansion of Hyperledger Foundation into LF Decentralized Trust represents an exciting opportunity to continue expanding these groundbreaking technologies." — a managing director at DTCC

Mark Zuckerberg has criticized the notion of a singular, dominant AI in a new interview. He argued against the idea of AI technology being "hoarded" by one company, taking aim at unnamed competitors who he suggested view themselves as "creating God." Zuckerberg advocated for open-source AI development, emphasizing the need for diverse AI systems reflecting varied interests.

He likened the future AI landscape to the current ecosystem of phone apps, content creators, and businesses, where no single entity dominates. Meta announced early U.S. tests of AI Studio, software enabling creators to build AI avatars for Instagram messaging. These AIs will be clearly labeled to avoid confusion. Zuckerberg stressed the importance of empowering many to experiment with AI, stating, "That's what culture is, right? It's not one group of people getting to dictate everything for people."

In 2022, Red Hat announced plans to extend RHEL to the automotive industry through Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System (providing automakers with an open and functionally-safe platform). And this week Red Hat announced it achieved ISO 26262 ASIL-B certification from exida for the Linux math library (libm.so glibc) — a fundamental component of that Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System.

From Red Hat's announcement: This milestone underscores Red Hat's pioneering role in obtaining continuous and comprehensive Safety Element out of Context certification for Linux in automotive... This certification demonstrates that the engineering of the math library components individually and as a whole meet or exceed stringent functional safety standards, ensuring substantial reliability and performance for the automotive industry. The certification of the math library is a significant milestone that strengthens the confidence in Linux as a viable platform of choice for safety related automotive applications of the future...

By working with the broader open source community, Red Hat can make use of the rigorous testing and analysis performed by Linux maintainers, collaborating across upstream communities to deliver open standards-based solutions. This approach enhances long-term maintainability and limits vendor lock-in, providing greater transparency and performance. Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System is poised to offer a safety certified Linux-based operating system capable of concurrently supporting multiple safety and non-safety related applications in a single instance. These applications include advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), digital cockpit, infotainment, body control, telematics, artificial intelligence (AI) models and more. Red Hat is also working with key industry leaders to deliver pre-tested, pre-integrated software solutions, accelerating the route to market for SDV concepts.
"Red Hat is fully committed to attaining continuous and comprehensive safety certification of Linux natively for automotive applications," according to the announcement, "and has the industry's largest pool of Linux maintainers and contributors committed to this initiative..."

Or, as Network World puts it, "The phrase 'open source for the open road' is now being used to describe the inevitable fit between the character of Linux and the need for highly customizable code in all sorts of automotive equipment."

The Linux Foundation's "Open Source Security Foundation" (or OpenSSF) is a cross-industry forum to "secure the development, maintenance, and consumption of the open source software". And now the OpenSSF has launched a new mailing list "which aims to monitor the threat landscape of open-source project vulnerabilities," reports I Programmer, "in order to provide real time alerts to anyone subscribed."

The Record explains its origins: OpenSSF General Manager Omkhar Arasaratnam said that at a recent open source event, members of the community ran a tabletop exercise where they simulated a security incident involving the discovery of a zero-day vulnerability. They worked their way through the open source ecosystem — from cloud providers to maintainers to end users — clearly defining how the discovery of a vulnerability would be dealt with from top to bottom. But one of the places where they found a gap is in the dissemination of information widely.

"What we lack within the open source community is a place in which we can convene to distribute indicators of compromise (IOCs) and threats, tactics and procedures (TTPs) in a way that will allow the community to identify threats when our packages are under attack," Arasaratnam said... "[W]e're going to be standing up a mailing list for which we can share this information throughout the community and there can be discussion of things that are being seen. And that's one of the ways that we're responding to this gap that we saw...." The Siren mailing list will encourage public discussions on security flaws, concepts, and practices in the open source community with individuals who are not typically engaged in traditional upstream communication channels...

Members of the Siren email list will get real-time updates about emerging threats that may be relevant to their projects... OpenSSF has created a signup page for those interested and urged others to share the email list to other open source community members...
OpenSSF ecyosystem strategist Christopher Robinson (also security communications director for Intel) told the site he expects government agencies and security researchers to be involved in the effort. And he issued this joint statement with OpenSSF ecosystem strategist Bennett Pursell: By leveraging the collective knowledge and expertise of the open source community and other security experts, the OpenSSF Siren empowers projects of all sizes to bolster their cybersecurity defenses and increase their overall awareness of malicious activities. Whether you're a developer, maintainer, or security enthusiast, your participation is vital in safeguarding the integrity of open source software.
In less than a month, the mailing list has already grown to over 800 members...