Hi all!
I continue to review the news of free and open source software (and some hardware). This time I tried to take not only Russian sources, but also English ones, I hope it turned out more interesting. In addition, in addition to the actual news, a few links have been added to reviews and guides that have been released over the past week, related to FOSS and seemed interesting to me.
In Issue #2 February 3-9, 2020:
- FOSDEM 2020 conference;
- the WireGuard code will go into Linux;
- Canonical provides additional options for certified hardware vendors;
- Dell has announced a new version of the top ultrabook on Ubuntu;
- the TFC project offers a "paranoid" secure messaging system;
- the court upheld the developer who defended the GPL;
- a leading Japanese hardware vendor joins the Open Invention Network;
- a startup raised $40 million in investments to facilitate access to cloud-based Open Source projects;
- the source code of the platform for controlling the industrial Internet of Things has been opened;
- in the Linux kernel, the problem of 2038 is solved;
- the Linux kernel will be able to solve the problem of shared locks;
- where venture capital sees the attractiveness of Open Source;
- IBM Watson CTO stated the critical need for Open Source for the dynamically growing field of "edge computing";
- using the Open Source fio utility to evaluate disk performance;
- review of the best open ecommerce platforms in 2020;
- an overview of FOSS HR solutions.
FOSDEM 2020 Conference
One of the largest FOSS conferences, FOSDEM 2020, held February 1-2 in Brussels, brought together more than 8000 developers united by the idea of free and open source software. 800 talks, networking and the opportunity to meet the legendary people of the FOSS world. Habra user Dmitry Sugrobov shared his impressions and notes from the speeches.
List of sections at the conference:
- community and ethics;
- containers and security;
- Database;
- freedom;
- history;
- the Internet;
- miscellaneous;
- certification.
There were also many devrooms: on distributions, CI, containers, decentralized software and many other topics.
And who wants to see everything for yourself - follow on (careful, over 400 hours of content).
WireGuard code will go into Linux
After years of development, WireGuard, described by ZDNet as a "revolutionary approach" to building VPNs, is finally scheduled to be included in the Linux kernel and is expected to be released in April 2020.
Linus Torvalds himself is considered one of the biggest fans of WireGuard, he stated: "Can I just once again confess my love for this project and hope that it will be merged soon? The code may not be perfect, but I skimmed through it and, compared to OpenVPN and IPSec, it's a work of art” (for comparison, the WireGuard codebase is 4 lines of code, while OpenVPN has 000).
Despite its simplicity, WireGuard includes modern cryptographic technologies such as "Noise protocol framework", Curve25519, ChaCha20, Poly1305, BLAKE2, SipHash24, and HKD. Also, the safety of the project has been proven academically.
Canonical provides additional opportunities for certified equipment suppliers
Starting from the LTS version of Ubuntu 20.04, the installation and operation of the system will be different on devices certified by Canonical. The Ubuntu developers are working on checking for certified devices on a system during GRUB boot using the SMBIOS module using device ID strings. Installing Ubuntu on certified hardware will allow, for example, "out of the box" support for newer kernel versions. So, in particular, Linux version 5.5 will be available (it was previously announced for 20.04, but later abandoned) and possibly 5.6. Moreover, this behavior applies not only to the initial installation, but also to subsequent operation, such a check will be carried out when using APT. For example, this approach will be useful for owners of computers from Dell.
Dell has announced a new version of the top ultrabook on Ubuntu
Known for its releases of laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled, Dell has introduced a new version of the XPS 13 Ultrabook - Developer Edition (the model has the code 6300, this is not to be confused with the 2019 version with the code 7390, released in November). The same high-quality aluminum case, new i7-1065G7 processor (4 cores, 8 threads), larger screen (FHD and UHD + 4K displays available), up to 16 gigabytes of LPDDR4x RAM, a new graphics chip and finally support for a fingerprint scanner.
The TFC project proposes a "paranoid-proof" messaging system
The TFC (Tinfoil Chat) project proposed a prototype of a "paranoid-protected" software and hardware messaging system that allows you to keep the secret of correspondence even when end devices are compromised. The project code is available for audit, written in Python under the GPLv3 license, iron schemes are available under FDL.
Common messengers today that use end-to-end encryption protect against interception of intermediate traffic, but do not protect against problems on the client side, for example, from compromising the system if there are vulnerabilities in it.
In the proposed scheme, three computers are used on the client side - a gateway for connecting to the network via Tor, a computer for encryption and a computer for decryption. This, together with the encryption technologies used, theoretically should significantly increase the security of the system.
The court upheld the developer who defended the GPL
The California Court of Appeals ruled in a dispute between Open Source Security Inc., developer of the Grsecurity project, and Bruce Perens, one of the authors of the Open Source definition, co-founder of the OSI organization, creator of the BusyBox package, and one of the early leaders of the Debian project.
The essence of the proceedings was that Bruce in his blog criticized the restriction of access to Grsecurity developments and warned against buying a paid version due to a possible violation of the GPLv2 license, and the company accused him of publishing false statements and using his position in the community to harm the company's business .
The court dismissed the appeal, ruling that Perens' blog post was a personal opinion based on known facts. Thus, the verdict of the lower court was confirmed, in which all claims against Bruce were rejected, and the company was ordered to reimburse legal costs, which amounted to 259 thousand dollars.
However, the proceedings did not directly address the issue of a possible violation of the GPL, and this, perhaps, would be the most interesting.
Leading Japanese Hardware Vendor Joins Open Invention Network
The Open Invention Network (OIN) is the largest non-aggressive patent community in history. Its main task is to protect Linux and Open Source-friendly companies from patent attacks. Now a major Japanese company, Taiyo Yuden, has joined OIN.
Shigetoshi Akino, General Manager of Taiyo Yuden's Intellectual Property Division, stated: “While Taiyo Yuden does not directly use Open Source software in its products, our customers do, and it is important for us to support Open Source initiatives that are critical to our customers' success. By joining the Open Invention Network, we show support for Open Source through patent non-aggression towards Linux and related Open Source technologies».
Startup Raises $40 Million Investment to Ease Access to Open Source Cloud Projects
The growing popularity of Open Source software is of great importance in the evolution of the corporate IT sector. But there is another side - the complexity and cost of studying and adapting such software for the needs of companies.
Aiven, a startup from Finland, is building a platform to facilitate such tasks and recently announced that it has raised $40 million.
The company provides solutions based on 8 different Open Source projects - Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Redis, InfluxDB and Grafana - which cover a wide range of functions from basic data processing to searching and processing large amounts of information.
«The growing adoption of Open Source infrastructure and the use of public cloud services are among the most exciting and powerful trends in enterprise technology, and Aiven is making the benefits of Open Source infrastructure available to customers of all sizes.”, said Eric Liu, Aiven Partner at IVP, a leading enterprise software player who himself has backed well-known projects such as Slack, Dropbox and GitHub.
Open source control platform for the industrial Internet of things
Dutch distributed systems operator Alliander has released the Open Smart Grid Platform (OSGP), a scalable IIoT platform. It allows you to securely collect data and manage smart devices on the network. In particular, it can be used in the following ways:
- A user or operator connects to a web application to monitor or control devices.
- The application connects to OSGP through web services divided by functionality, such as "street lighting", "smart sensors", "power quality". Third party developers may use web services to develop or integrate their applications.
- The platform works with application requests using open and secure protocols.
The platform is written in Java, under the Apache-2.0 license.
The Linux kernel solves the year 2038 problem
On January 19, 2038 Tuesday at 03:14:07 UTC, due to the use of a 32-bit UNIX-time value, a serious problem is expected. And this is not a bloated Y2K issue. The date will be reset, all 32-bit UNIX systems will return to the past, to the beginning of 1970.
But now you can sleep somewhat peacefully. The Linux developers in the new kernel version 5.6 fixed this problem eighteen years before a possible temporary apocalypse. Linux developers have been working on a solution to this problem for several years. Moreover, patches for solving it will be ported to some early versions of the Linux kernel - 5.4 and 5.5.
However, there are caveats - user applications should be modified as necessary to use new versions of libc. And the new kernel should also be supported by them. And this can cause pain for users of unsupported 32-bit devices, and even more so for users of closed source programs.
The Linux kernel will be able to solve the problem of shared locks
A split lock occurs when an atomic instruction operates on data from multiple cache locations. Due to its atomic nature, a global bus lock is required in such a case, which leads to system-wide performance problems and the difficulty of using Linux in "hard real-time" systems.
By default, on supported processors, Linux will print a message to dmesg when a shared lock occurs. And if you specify the split_lock_detect=fatal kernel option, a SIGBUS signal will also be sent to the problem application, which will allow it to either exit or process it.
This functionality is expected to be included in version 5.7.
Where venture capital sees the attractiveness of open source
In recent years, we have seen a significant influx of funds into Open Source: the purchase of Red Hat by IT giant IBM, GitHub by Microsoft Corporation, the Nginx web server by F5 Networks. Investments in startups also grew, for example, just the other day Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought Scytale (https://venturebeat.com/2020/02/03/hpe-acquires-identity-management-startup-scytale/). TechCrunch asked 18 top investors what interests them the most and where they see opportunities.
IBM Watson CTO Says Open Source Is Critically Needed for Dynamically Growing 'Edge Computing' Field
Note: "edge computing", unlike cloud computing, does not yet have a well-established Russian-language term, the translation of "peripheral computing" from an article on Habré is used here , in the sense of computing running closer to customers than "clouds".
The number of "edge computing" devices is growing at an astonishing rate, from 15 billion today to an estimated 55 billion in 2020, according to Rob High, vice president and CTO of IBM Watson.
«The first thing to understand is that the industry is in danger of blowing itself up if the issue of standardized governance is not addressed, creating a set of standards that developer communities can form and rely on when building their ecosystems ... We believe that the only way to achieve such standardization in a reasonable way lies through Open Source. Everything we do is based on Open Source and it's so simple because we don't believe that anyone can be successful without building strong and healthy ecosystems around standards" said Rob.
Using the Open Source fio utility to evaluate disk performance
Ars Technica has published a quick guide to using the cross-platform utility thread to evaluate disk performance. The program allows you to explore throughput, latency, the number of I / O operations and cache. A feature is an attempt to simulate the real use of devices instead of synthetic tests like reading / writing large amounts of data and measuring their execution time.
Review of the Best Open Ecommerce Platforms in 2020
The It's FOSS site, following the review of the best CMS, releases a review of eCommerce solutions for building your own online store or expanding the functionality of an existing site. nopCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Zen Cart, Magento, Drupal reviewed. The review is brief, but it is good to start the path of choosing a solution for your project.
Overview of FOSS HR Solutions
Solutions Review publishes a brief overview of the best FOSS tools to help HR professionals. Examples are A1 eHR, Apptivo, Baraza HCM, IceHRM, Jorani, Odoo, OrangeHRM, Sentrifugo, SimpleHRM, WaypointHR. The review, like the previous one, is brief; only the main functions of each considered solution are also listed.
That's all, until next Sunday!
Subscribe to our or so you don't miss out on new editions of FOSS News.
Source: habr.com