Hi all!
We continue to review the news of free and open source software and hardware (and a little coronavirus). All the most important things about penguins and not only in Russia and the world. Participation of the Open Source community in the fight against COVID-19 (Boston Dynamics noted), barriers and opportunities that Open Source gives to small and medium-sized businesses, an increase in the number of vulnerabilities discovered in FOSS projects, an alternative to Zoom, the final release of Python 2, examples of paid GNU / Linux distributions and much more.
Main news
Coronavirus Control
We continue to publish news about the participation of the FOSS community in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Recent titles:
- Boston Dynamics opens up some of its robotics developments to help build robotic assistants
- Developers continue to offer solutions to ventilator shortages and their development could change the future of healthcare long after the pandemic , ,
- 'handy' is a simple tool to keep things clean
Top Barriers and Benefits for Small Businesses Using Open Source
FOSS technologies are now widely used by industry leaders such as Oracle and Microsoft, who have been adopting them for many years, because such technologies make organizations more efficient and provide a highly customizable, adaptable, and scalable environment. With big players like Amazon and IBM focused on using open source as a tool to build powerful cloud solutions, it may seem like the technology is limited to the big leagues, but SMBs are slowly getting into the process as well. . Many understand that open source allows them to compete at the level of larger technology companies and provides the flexibility, interoperability, and cost savings that these solutions provide. But there are also challenges that the smaller players face: the need to find competent people, to choose the right projects to use, operational problems and lack of support.
The number of discovered vulnerabilities in Open Source projects increased by 50% in 2019. How will this affect development in 2020?
According to a research report by the WhiteSource team, the main source of the increase in the number of discovered vulnerabilities in open source products is the increase in the use of such products itself, writes DevOps. There are now more open source projects, code, and community members than ever before. All these good people are working hard not only to write more code, often with the support of big tech giants, but also to look for vulnerabilities in the code that could put users of their components at risk. The combination of more code being written and more eyes analyzing the code for these inevitable human errors eventually leads to the discovery of more vulnerabilities. The increase in vulnerabilities in open source components will have a significant impact on software development. In recent years, we have seen open source components play an increasing role in how developers build their applications. Most estimates suggest that open source components make up between 60% and 80% of the codebase in most modern applications. When a vulnerability is reported in a popular project such as Apache Struts or the Linux kernel, then a huge number of developers are suddenly faced with the need to update their programs.
Want to get rid of Zoom? Jitsi Offers an Open Source Alternative
From meetings and parties to dates, we all now live in video conferencing applications, writes Wired. But after a series of privacy and security breaches at Zoom that has become almost synonymous with video conferencing during the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations and individuals are wondering which service is the most secure for our conversations. Emil Ivov says you don't need to trust anyone. Ivov is the creator of the Jitsi open source text and video chat software and head of video collaboration at 8x8, which acquired Jitsi in 2018. The firm sells services based on the Jitsi code, but still pays developers to maintain the open source version. Jitsi Meet is a video conferencing app with handy features like the ability to password protect your meetings or kick people out of a meeting. But what makes it different from most famous video conferencing services is that it's free and can run entirely on your own hardware.
Final release of the Python 2 branch
Is Python 2 dead? Not quite, but from this event he takes a confident step towards his place of honor in the museum of the history of computer technology. On April 20, the final final release of Python 2.7.18 was presented, which marked the complete end of support for the Python 2 branch, writes OpenNET. This event ends an entire era, according to the expression . If you haven't upgraded to version 3 yet, now is the time. However, the 2nd version will continue to live through the efforts of individual companies for the time being, for example, Red Hat will continue to maintain packages with Python 2.7 throughout the life cycle of RHEL 6 and 7 distributions, and for RHEL 8 it will generate package updates in the Application Stream until June 2024 . If this is not your option - you are welcome to look . But it may take a long time, for example over the years xnumx.
Paid GNU/Linux distributions
Obviously, for all of us, free and open source means free. But there are companies that, based on FOSS projects, release paid binary builds, raising money for support or adding special features. As an exception, we present material entirely devoted to such projects. The following examples of paid GNU/Linux distributions are analyzed in the text:
- Zorin OS Ultimate
- Red Hat Enterprise
- Astra Linux Special Edition
- DEW
- clearOS
- Zentyal Server
- Parted Magic
Short line
- To the release of Ubuntu 20.04:
- What's new in Ubuntu 20.04 ,
- 16 things to do after installing Ubuntu 20.04
- What you need to know about Ubuntu 20.04
- Lenovo to start pre-installing Fedora Linux on ThinkPad laptops
- Kiwi web browser open source
- 18 GitLab Features Going Open Source
- New Debian Project Leader Elected, Git Guidelines for Maintainers Published
- Vulnerability in the Squid proxy server that allows access restrictions to be bypassed
- The Tor project announced a significant reduction in staff due to the pandemic
- Open Source Tools for Online Communication: 3 Things to Understand
- Top 5 Open Source License Trends
- MystiQ: FOSS audio/video converter
- MindSpore: Huawei's General Purpose AI Framework Goes Open Source
- AWS and Facebook announce two new projects built around PyTorch
- Istio, one of the most important Open Source projects of Google Cloud, will receive its support fund
- Purism's Librem Mini Linux PC is almost ready for sale
- PostmarketOS distribution has initial support for iPhone 7 ,
- Fishtown Analytics Receives $12.9M in A-Round Funding to Develop Its Open Source Analytics Tool
- On the question of choosing GNU / Linux for corporate tasks
- Choosing a GNU/Linux distribution for embedded systems
- Getting Started with Pacman on Arch Linux-Based Distributions
- Debian is dropping some old drivers
- WebGPU support added to Firefox nightly builds
- The OpenBSD project introduced the first portable release of rpki-client
- Panfrost driver provides 3D rendering support for GPU Bifrost (Mali G31)
- Facebook proposes a new slab memory management mechanism for the Linux kernel
- 724 malicious packages detected in RubyGems
- rebuilderd available for independent verification of Arch Linux with repeatable builds
- FreeBSD fixes remote exploitable vulnerabilities in ipfw
- What is the use of the built-in dictionary in GNU/Linux distributions
Releases
- The Linux Foundation Publishes AGL UCB 9.0 Automotive Distribution
- Release of DXVK 1.6.1, Direct3D 9/10/11 implementations on top of the Vulkan API
- Git update to fix yet another vulnerability
- Update OS KolibriN 10.1 and MenuetOS 1.34, written in assembler
- Linux Lite 5.0: Everything you need to know about the upcoming release
- Release of LXQt 0.15.0 graphical environment
- Mattermost 5.22 is a messaging system focused on enterprise chats
- nginx 1.18.0 release
- Release of the NixOS 20.03 distribution using the Nix package manager
- Release of njs 0.4.0, Rambler filed a motion to dismiss the criminal case against Nginx
- Server-side JavaScript Node.js 14.0 release
- Kdenlive video editor release 20.04
- OpenSSL 1.1.1g released, fixing TLS 1.3 vulnerability
- Pixman 0.40 graphics library release
- Postfix 3.5.1 mail server update
- Release of machine learning framework PyTorch 1.5.0
- RSS reader release - QuiteRSS 0.19.4
- Corrective release of ROSA Fresh R11.1 distribution kit has been published
- Rust programming language 1.43 release
- Scientific Linux 7.8 distribution release
- Release of the GNU Shepherd 0.8 init system
- Final beta release of Snort 3 intrusion detection system
- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS distribution release
- Release of the free operating system Visopsys 0.9
- Wine 5.7 release
- wolfSSL 4.4.0 Cryptographic Library Release
That's all, until next Sunday!
Thank you for their work, a selection of English-language sources for my review is taken from there. I also thank you very much , many news materials are taken from their website.
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Source: habr.com