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flexiWAN Open Source SD-WAN Platform Hits GA

flexiWAN launched the first stable release of its open-source SD-WAN platform, which is available through one of the company’s hardware partners: Advantech, Lanner, and Silicom.

“This release is a major milestone for flexiWAN and our community as it is the world’s first production-ready open and community-driven SD-WAN solution,” said Amir Zmora, CEO and co-founder of flexiWAN, in a statement. “Our innovation and openness doesn’t stop at the technical level. By offering our services as a freemium business model, along with publicly sharing our pricing and source code with the community, we strive to lead the industry to more openness.”

[Source: SDxCentral]

With friends like AWS, who needs an open source business?

In response to the article, Andi Gutmans, vice-president of analytics and ElastiCache at AWS, wrote a blog post claiming that customers have repeatedly asked AWS to offer managed services for Elasticsearch and other popular open source projects.

“A number of maintainers of open source projects build commercial companies around the open source project,” he said. Open source licensing aims to encourage innovation by enabling contributors to build new functionality as a branch of the core open source code. The project maintainer can then choose to incorporate this contribution into the core code.

[Source: ComputerWeekly.com]

SUSE and Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences collaborate to enhance cloud and open source learning

The SUSE Academic Program, the education arm of SUSE, and Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences (KITS), have signed an MoU to collaborate in providing Linux and open source learning and skills to students. The program aims to provide aspiring professionals with essential technical expertise and help them leverage opportunities in the cloud job market via “SUSE Certified Administrator (SCA) in Enterprise Linux” certification.

SUSE will support the program with all course materials for cloud-related technologies such as DevOps, cloud application development, cloud administration, and enterprise Linux.

[Source: CRN]

Diversity: Why open source needs to work on it in 2020

Sometimes the answer to a problem is hiding in plain sight. Take, for example, the problem of diversity in tech and, specifically, in open source software. If we look at US Bureau of Labor data, 21.2% of professional developers are female. According to a 2017 GitHub open source survey, however, 95% of respondents were male and just 3% were female (1% identified as non-binary). It turns out that 68% of the female respondents are “very interested” in contributing to open source, but are significantly less likely to do so than men (45% vs. 61%).

[Source: Tech Republic]

Dell Unveils 2020 XPS 13 Linux Laptop with Fingerprint Reader, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Dell kicked off 2020 by announcing the 10th generation XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu Linux preloaded, fingerprint-reader support, up to 32GB of RAM, and 10th Gen Intel Core CPUs.

World, please meet the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop, which continues Dell’s Project Sputnik and its Linux portfolio by offering customers the latest and greatest XPS 13 laptop powered by 10th Gen Intel Core 10nm mobile processors and up to 32GB of RAM.

[Source: Softpedia]

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

The Linux kernel has around 27.8 million lines of code in its Git repository, up from 26.1 million a year ago, while systemd now has nearly 1.3 million lines of code, according to GitHub stats analysed by Michael Larabel at Phoronix.

There were nearly 75,000 code commits to the kernel during 2019 which is actually slightly down on 2018 (80,000 commits), and the lowest number since 2013. The top contributors by email domain were Intel and Red Hat (Google’s general gmail.com aside) and the top contributing individuals were Linus Torvalds, with 3.19 per cent of the commits, followed by David Miller (Red Hat) and Chris Wilson (Intel). There were 4,189 different contributors overall.

[Source: The Register]

Tips for implementing an open source storage solution

Open source storage is a solution that solves vertical and pain point challenges. There are many scenarios where it is not necessary. Organisations might just want to hold onto the data they have. In this instance, an S3 bucket or Blobstore API will cover them.

But, implementing an open source storage solution makes sense for targeted use cases. Lustre is a good example if your organisation needs to do some aggressive high performance computing. “For those sorts of workloads, Lustre is extremely mature,” said Stephen Manley, chief technologist at Druva. “It’s extremely well integrated into the ecosystem.”

[Source: Information Age]

Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license

Last year, lawyer Van Lindberg drafted a software license called the Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL) on behalf of distributed development platform Holo – and submitted it to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval as an Open Source Definition-compliant (OSD) license.

The debate over whether or not to approve the license, now in its fourth draft, has proven contentious enough to prompt OSI co-founder Bruce Perens to resign from the organization, for a second time, based on concern that OSI members have already made up their minds.

[Source: The Register]

EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V

Linux gamers have found yet again that their ubiquitous operating system remains unwelcome in the context of mainstream entertainment. The latest insult comes from Electronic Arts, which appears to have issued a few permanent bans to online Battlefield V players attempting to play the game on Linux systems. Mind you, Battlefield V isn’t intended for Linux; the EA game specifies that a 64-bit version of Windows 7, 8.1, or 10 is required. But those committed to Linux can get around that by using Lutris, a Linux gaming client.

[Source: The Register]

Kali Linux to Default to Non-Root User With 2020.1 Release

The Kali Linux distribution is going to switch to a new security model by defaulting to a non-root user starting with the upcoming 2020.1 release. This change will come with the release of the 2020.1 version scheduled for late January 2020, but users can already test it via the daily builds. They will also be able to test it by downloading and running the weekly images released until Kali 2020.1 will be officially available.

[Source: BleepingComputer]