Bryden Wood, Cast, and the Mayor of London have launched a new app to speed up the capital’s home building. The freely-available app, titled PRISM, is aimed at the design and construction of high-quality, factory-built homes to address the current demand of 50,000+ houses per year. London will be the first city in the world to make sure of a freely-available app of this kind, sharing precision housing knowledge and leveraging technology to revolutionize the design process. [Source: Arch Daily]

Facebook has released a new open-source JavaScript engine, Hermes, to speed up start times for native Android apps built with Facebook’s own React Native JavaScript framework. Facebook software engineer Marc Horowitz unveiled the new JavaScript engine at the Chain React 2019 conference on Thursday in Portland, Oregon. Hermes is a new tool for developers to primarily improve app startup performance in the same way Facebook already does for its apps, and to make apps more efficient on low-end smartphones. (Source: ZDNet)

Kali Linux is a specialized distribution targeted at security professionals that also shows up on popular TV show, Mr. Robot. Kali Linux is now compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4. Currently, the distro is only available as a 32-bit OS, but the project is planning on releasing a 64-bit version soon. In the meantime, security aficionados who have a spare Raspberry Pi 4 lying around can head over to the Kali Linux site and download the distro image. (Source: NoteBookCheck)

Michael Larabel of Phoronix reports that GNOME developers are planning to disable the Snap plug-in for GNOME Software. Canonical has begun writing their own Snap Store. They don’t plan to use GNOME Software in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and thus have taken their developers away from working on the upstream support. Due to the likelihood that the GNOME Software Snap plug-in will quickly suffer from bit-rot and pose a maintenance burden to GNOME developers with little to no return, it’s certainly reasonable that they would at least disable this plug-in. [Source: Phoronix]

Cloudera has announced changes to its licensing policy that will make its entire product portfolio available under open-source terms, effectively adopting Hortonworks’ business model. The move has important implications for the industry’s ongoing debate about how business models can be built upon a foundation of free software. Although Cloudera is a major contributor to open-source projects, its decade-old business has always been based on selling licensed software.

Microsoft recently applied to join a private Linux kernel mailing list that’s meant for reporting and discussing security issues privately before they are made public. After a week-long discussion, it’s all but certain that Microsoft will be subscribed to the list.  Alexander Peslyak, the maintainer of the list wrote in a discussion thread on Openwall, “Per our current policy and precedents, I see no valid reasons not to subscribe Microsoft (or part(s) of it, see below) to ‘linux-distros’. So I intend to figure out some detail and proceed with the subscription.”  Once accepted, Microsoft will join companies like Oracle and Amazon who are already on the list.