Red Hat has released a minor beta update to RHEL 8 to improve manageability and add new security enhancements and new drivers to the operating system. RHEL 8 was announced in May this year as a successor to RHEL 7. One of the highlights of RHEL 8 was an image builder, which helps users to create custom system images in a variety of formats. With RHEL 8.1 Beta, Image Builder is extended to support more configuration options for adding users and SSH keys. New image formats have also been added to support cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud. With these additions, RHEL 8.1 Beta now supports every major cloud infrastructure platform including AWS, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and VMWare. Source: TFiR, Red Hat

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 5.3-rc1. He wrote in the mailing list, “This is a pretty big release, judging by the commit count. Not the biggest ever (that honor still goes to 4.9-rc1, which was exceptionally big), and we’ve had a couple of comparable ones (4.12, 4.15 and 4.19 were also big merge windows), but it’s definitely up there. Source: LKML

Ubisoft will join the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a corporate Gold member. Not only will Ubisoft help funding online support for Blender developers, Ubisoft Animation Studio – a department of Ubisoft Film and Television – will also use Blender for their productions and assign developers to contribute to Blender’s open source projects. Ubisoft is a leading creator, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and services, with a rich portfolio of world-renowned brands, including Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Watch Dogs, Tom Clancy’s video game series, Rayman, Far Cry and Watch Dogs.  Pierrot Jacquet, Head of Production at Ubisoft Animation Studio says “Blender was for us an obvious choice: Its strong and engaged community paired up with the vision carried by the Blender Foundation makes it one of the most creative DCC of the market.” Source: Ubisoft

The OpenWhisk open source serverless platform hit graduation status as a Top-Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation. The designation comes as the serverless ecosystem continues its rapid evolution in meeting the production needs of organizations. The OpenWhisk project itself was initially born out of IBM, which donated its beta-level code into the Apache Incubator project in late 2016. IBM was using that codebase to support functions running on its IBM Cloud. Source: SDX Central

Microsoft is working to standardize data-sharing terms via pre-designed licensing agreements, the first of which now are available for preview and comment. Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief IP Counsel Erich Andersen said that Microsoft is trying to bring open-source-license-like structure to data-sharing agreements. The OSI maintains a number of pre-approved licenses, such as the Apache License, BSD License, MIT License, etc., which companies can use to license their source code. Microsoft officials said they believe these kinds of agreements could alleviate the need of companies to spend months or years negotiating and creating data-sharing governance agreements. Source: ZDNet

IBM recently developed three artificial intelligence tools that could help medical researchers fight cancer. Now, the company has decided to make all three tools open-source, meaning scientists will be able to use them in their research whenever they please, according to ZDNet. The tools are designed to streamline the cancer drug development process and help scientists stay on top of newly-published research — so, if they prove useful, it could mean more cancer treatments coming through the pipeline more rapidly than before. “Our goal is to deepen our understanding of cancer to equip industries and academia with the knowledge that could potentially one day help fuel new treatments and therapies,” IBM wrote in the release.

Source: Futurism.com

In an effort to bolster the development of cars capable of driving themselves around without human supervision, Lyft today released an autonomous vehicle data set that the company is calling the largest of its kind. It’s freely available in the existing nuScenes format, which was initially developed by Aptiv.

“Autonomous vehicles are expected to dramatically redefine the future of transportation. When fully realized, this technology promises to unlock a myriad of societal, environmental, and economic benefits,” said Lyft. “With this, we aim to empower the community, stimulate further development, and share our insights into future opportunities from the perspective of an advanced industrial autonomous vehicles program.”

Source: Venture Beat

Google has announced Spinnaker for Google Cloud Platform, a service that brings the popular continuous delivery (CD) solution to its users. By bringing Spinnaker to GCP, Google is making it easier for users to consume Spinnaker. Users can now easily install Spinnaker in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with a couple of clicks, and start creating pipelines for continuous delivery. Spinnaker on GCP includes Spinnaker, Deck (the UI for Spinnaker), an installation and management console, microservices, and sample applications. 

Microsoft today announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. In a blog post, Brockman said the investment will support the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI with the capacity to learn any intellectual task that a human can — with “widely distributed” economic benefits.
Source: Venture Beat

Nils Brauckmann, SUSE CEO who led the company through its turbulent phase and eventually made it an independent company again is retiring, paving the path for a new leader of the green team. Melissa Di Donato has been named the successor of Brauckmann. Prior to SUSE, Di Donato was chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at SAP where she was responsible for the worldwide revenue, profit and customer satisfaction of the company’s digital core solutions.

Source: TFIR