Way back in April, Amazon announced its intention to publish a data set — the Topical Chat data set — of crowdsourced human conversations to teams competing in the annual Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge competition. It finally made good on that promise today with the release on GitHub of more than 235,000 utterances containing over 4,700,000 words, which it asserts will support “high-quality” and “repeatable” dialogue systems research. (Venture Beat)
GitLab Inhales $268M Series E, Valuation Hits $2.75B
GitLab raised a substantial $268 million in a Series E funding round that was more than doubled what the firm had raised across all of its previous funding rounds and pushed its valuation to $2.75 billion. It also bolsters the company’s coffers as it battles in an increasingly competitive DevOps space. (SDX Central)
How Intel’s Clear Linux Team Cut The Kernel Boot Time From 3 Seconds To 300 ms
Intel engineer Feng Tang spoke at this week’s Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on how the Clear Linux team managed to boot their kernel faster. They started out with around a three second kernel boot time but cut it down to just 300 ms. (Phoronix)
Oracle Announces Autonomous Linux
Oracle on Monday announced Oracle Autonomous Linux, an autonomous operating that eases management of Linux by automating providing, patching, scaling and tuning without any downtime. Oracle has borrowed the ideas from the autonomous database to make its Linux offering More compelling than those offered by players like Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE. (Source: TFIR)
How the Worlds of Linux and Windows Programming Converged
Christopher Tozzi at IT Pro Today writes about how Windows and Linux worlds are coming closer. “Once upon a time, the world of developers was split into two halves: One half was composed of Windows developers, who created most of the productivity apps that powered PCs (and, occasionally, servers). The other half comprised Linux and Unix developers, whose work focused on server-side development. Today, however, as the worlds of Windows and Linux move ever closer together, the distinction between Windows and Linux developers is disappearing. Gone are the days when you had to specialize in one ecosystem or the other.”
The Pentagon Needs to Make More Software Open Source, Watchdog Says
The White House in 2016 required every agency to make at least 20 percent of its custom software available for reuse across the government, but the Pentagon isn’t even halfway there, according to the Government Accountability Office. The Defense Department is not abiding by a federal mandate to promote the use of open source software and make common code more readily available to other agencies, according to the Government Accountability Office. The department has also failed to fully implement a number of other open source software initiatives required by the OMB memo, such as creating an enterprisewide open source software policy and building inventories of custom code, auditors said. Additionally, officials never created performance metrics to measure the success of their open source software efforts. (Source: Next Gov)
Huawei selling MateBook laptops with Linux preinstalled
Despite the trade blacklisting of Huawei by the US government, the Chinese electronics giant’s notebook division is plugging along, despite reports of component order cancellations in June, prompting concern they could exit the PC OEM market. Huawei is now selling the Matebook 13, Matebook 14, and Matebook X Pro at VMALL, Huawei’s ecommerce marketplace in China, with Deepin Linux preinstalled. (Source: Tech Republic)
Working on Linux’s nuts and bolts at Linux Plumbers
Linux is built on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and numerous other more specialized development mailing lists. But email and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) can only get you so far. Sometimes, to get things done, top Linux programmers really need to talk face-to-face with each other. That’s where the Kernel Maintainers Summit and Linux Plumbers comes in. The Kernel Maintainers Summit, Linux ceator Linus Torvalds told me, is an invitation-only gathering of the top Linux kernel developers. But, while you might think it’s about planning on the Linux kernel’s future, that’s not the case. “The maintainer summit is really different because it doesn’t even talk about technical issues.” Instead, “It’s all about the process of creating and maintaining the Linux kernel.” (Source: ZDNet, SJVN)
IBM Buries The Hatchet Between Red Hat And Cloud Foundry
IBM has buried the hatchet between Red Hat and Cloud Foundry by bringing its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment to Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform. Tech Crunch reports that “this work is still officially still a technology experiment, but our understanding is that IBM plans to turn this into a fully supported project that will give Cloud Foundry users the option to deploy their application right to OpenShift, while OpenShift customers will be able to offer their developers the Cloud Foundry experience.”
Debian 10 Review By Ars Technica
Scott Gilbertson at Ars Technica reviews the latest release of Debian. He wrote: “Debian is always a tough distro to get excited about because, while there’s a ton of new things in this release, most of these updates long ago arrived in nearly every other distro. Debian releases look like the distro is playing catch-up with the rest of the Linux world. And in some ways, that’s exactly what’s happening.
This time around, though, it feels like there’s more to the new Debian release than that. Most of the major updates in Debian 10 involve security in one way or another, making Buster feel a bit like “Debian, hardened.”