At this week’s AT&T Spark event in San Francisco, where Amy Wheelus, vice president of Network Cloud at the carrier, explained that AT&T was an “open source-first shop.”
AT&T’s embrace of the open source community was echoed by Wheelus’ colleague Catherine Lefèvre, associate vice president for Network Cloud and infrastructure at AT&T Labs, who said the carrier’s work with that ecosystem is very collaborative.
…As part of a panel discussion tied to the open source topic, Arpit Joshipura, general manager for networking and orchestration at the Linux Foundation, said that while this new operating model is a big change for legacy telecom vendors, he also sees an opportunity in this upheaval for those traditional vendors to oversee actual deployments.
“There is an opportunity in the open source world for those traditional vendors to be systems integrators,” Joshipura said. He explained that those vendors have a long history of knowing exactly what telecom operators and networks need in terms of support and could lead in making “those open source projects more distributed and hardened for telecom.”
The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) has released an update to its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct geared at computing professionals. The update was done “to address the significant advances in computing technology and the degree [to which] these technologies are integrated into our daily lives,” explained ACM members Catherine Flick and Michael Kirkpatrick, writing in Reddit.
This marks the first update to the Code, which the ACM maintains “expresses the conscience of the profession,” since 1992. The goal is to ensure it “reflects the experiences, values and aspirations of computing professionals around the world,’’ Flick and Kirkpatrick said.
The Code was written to guide computing professionals’ ethical conduct and includes anyone using computing technology “in an impactful way.” It also serves as a basis for remediation when violations occur. The Code contains principles developed as statements of responsibility in the belief that “the public good is always the primary consideration.”
Ethical Decision Making
In its entirety, the ACM says the Code “is concerned with how fundamental ethical principles apply to a computing professional’s conduct. The Code is not an algorithm for solving ethical problems; rather it serves as a basis for ethical decision-making.”
It is divided into four sections: General Ethical Principles; Professional Responsibilities; Professional Leadership Principles; and Compliance with the Code.
The General Ethical Principles section discusses the role of a computer professional, saying they should contribute to society, with an acknowledgement “that all people are stakeholders in computing.” This section addresses the “obligation” of computing professionals to use their skills for the benefit of society.
“An essential aim of computing professionals is to minimize negative consequences of computing, including threats to health, safety, personal security, and privacy,’’ the code advises. “When the interests of multiple groups conflict, the needs of those less advantaged should be given increased attention and priority.”
Computing professionals should perform high quality work and maintain professional confidence. They should also take into consideration diversity and social responsibility in their efforts and engage in pro bono or volunteer work benefitting the public good, the ACM recommends.
They should also try to avoid harm, in areas including “unjustified physical or mental injury, unjustified destruction or disclosure of information, and unjustified damage to property, reputation, and the environment.” To minimize the possibility of unintentionally or indirectly hurting others, computing professionals are advised to follow “generally accepted best practices unless there is a compelling ethical reason to do otherwise.” They should also carefully consider the consequences of “data aggregation and emergent properties of systems,” the ACM advises.
Computing professionals should also be honest and trustworthy and transparent. They should “provide full disclosure of all pertinent system capabilities, limitations, and potential problems to the appropriate parties. Making deliberately false or misleading claims, fabricating or falsifying data, offering or accepting bribes, and other dishonest conduct are violations of the Code,” the ACM stresses. This also applies to honesty about their qualifications and any limitations in their ability to complete a task. They should also be fair and not discriminate against others, and “credit the creators of ideas, inventions, work and artifacts, and respect copyrights, patents, trade secrets, license agreements, and other methods of protecting authors’ works.”
With a nod to the ability of technology to collect, monitor and disseminate personal information, another call to action under the Ethical Principles section is respecting the privacy, rights and responsibilities associated with collecting and using personal information. Use of personal information should only be done for “legitimate ends and without violating the rights of individuals and groups,” the Code states.
A Position of Trust
Noting that computing professionals “are in a position of trust,” they have “a special responsibility to provide objective, credible evaluations and testimony to employers, employees, clients, users, and the public.” Consequently, the Code says these individuals “should strive to be perceptive, thorough, and objective when evaluating, recommending, and presenting system descriptions and alternatives.”
The Code also stresses that “extraordinary care should be taken to identify and mitigate potential risks in machine learning systems.” Other mandates in the Professional Responsibilities section include maintaining high standards of competence, conduct and ethical practice. Computing professionals should also only perform work in areas in which they are competent. They should also design and implement systems that are “robustly and usably secure,” the Code states.
The Professional Leadership Principles section, as the name suggests, deals with the attributes of a leader. These principles deal with the importance of ensuring computing work is done, again, with the public good in mind, and having procedures and attitudes oriented toward the welfare of society. Doing so, the Code suggests, will “reduce harm to the public and raise awareness of the influence of technology in our lives.”
Leaders should also enhance the quality of work life, articulate, apply and support the Code’s principles and create opportunities for people to grow as professionals. They should use care when changing or discontinuing support for systems/features, and help users understand “that timely replacement of inappropriate or outdated features or entire systems may be needed.”
Lastly, the ACM urges compliance to the Code’s principles and to treat violations “as inconsistent with membership in the ACM.”
When Forrester released its 2016 report “Open Source Powers Enterprise Digital Transformation,” some people in the open source community were surprised by the results. They weren’t surprised that 41 percent of enterprise decision makers called open source a high priority and planned to increase use of open source in their organizations. They were concerned that the other 59 percent didn’t seem to understand the role open source would play in the future of the enterprise.
Paul Miller, one of the analysts behind the report, wrote, “The myth that open source software is exclusively written by and for lonely – rather odd – individual geeks remains remarkably prevalent. And yet it’s a myth that is almost entirely wrong. Again and again, we encounter executives who do not grasp how much their organization already depends on open source. More importantly, they do not see the key role that open source technologies and thinking will play in enabling their efforts to transform into a customer-obsessed business that really can win, serve, and retain customers.”
Fast-forward to today, and open source skills are among the most in-demand: 83 percent of hiring managers surveyed for the 2018 Open Source Jobs report said hiring open source talent was a priority this year, up from 76 percent last year.
Slowlybutsurely, Google is bringing support for Linux applications to Chrome OS. Even though the feature is primarily aimed at developers, like those who want to get Android Studio running on a Pixelbook, there are plenty of apps that can benefit normal users. We already have a guide about installing Linux apps on Chrome OS, but if you’re not sure what to try, this post may point you in the right direction.
This isn’t a simple compilation of the best Linux apps, because plentyofthoseexistalready. Instead, the goal here is to recommend apps for tasks that cannot be adequately filled by web apps or Android applications. For example, serious photo editing isn’t really possible through the web, and options on the Play Store are limited, but Gimp is perfect for it.
Two surprising things happened this year in my personal tech life. Dell’s XPS 13 laptop became my daily driver, finally pulling me away from Apple’s MacBook Pro. Then I ditched Windows 10 in favor of Ubuntu. Now I’ve gone down the Linux rabbit hole and become fascinated with the wealth of open source (and commercial!) software available, the speed and elegance of system updates and the surprising turn of events when it comes to gaming on Linux. I’ve also seen a rising interest in Linux inside my community, so I wanted to craft a guide to help you install Ubuntu on your PC of choice. … Read more at Forbes.
For years Linux admins and users have configured their network interfaces in the same way. For instance, if you’re an Ubuntu user, you could either configure the network connection via the desktop GUI or from within the /etc/network/interfaces file. The configuration was incredibly easy and never failed to work. The configuration within that file looked something like this:
auto enp10s0iface enp10s0 inet staticaddress 192.168.1.162netmask 255.255.255.0gateway 192.168.1.100dns-nameservers 1.0.0.1,1.1.1.1
Save and close that file. Restart networking with the command:
sudo systemctl restart networking
Or, if you’re not using a non-systemd distribution, you could restart networking the old fashioned way like so:
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Your network will restart and the newly configured interface is good to go.
That’s how it’s been done for years. Until now. With certain distributions (such as Ubuntu Linux 18.04), the configuration and control of networking has changed considerably. Instead of that interfaces file and using the /etc/init.d/networking script, we now turn to Netplan. Netplan is a command line utility for the configuration of networking on certain Linux distributions. Netplan uses YAML description files to configure network interfaces and, from those descriptions, will generate the necessary configuration options for any given renderer tool.
I want to show you how to use Netplan on Linux, to configure a static IP address and a DHCP address. I’ll be demonstrating on Ubuntu Server 18.04. I will give you one word of warning, the .yaml files you create for Netplan must be consistent in spacing, otherwise they’ll fail to work. You don’t have to use a specific spacing for each line, it just has to remain consistent.
The new configuration files
Open a terminal window (or log into your Ubuntu Server via SSH). You will find the new configuration files for Netplan in the /etc/netplan directory. Change into that directory with the command cd /etc/netplan. Once in that directory, you will probably only see a single file:
01-netcfg.yaml
You can create a new file or edit the default. If you opt to edit the default, I suggest making a copy with the command:
With your backup in place, you’re ready to configure.
Network Device Name
Before you configure your static IP address, you’ll need to know the name of device to be configured. To do that, you can issue the command ip a and find out which device is to be used (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Finding our device name with the ip a command.
I’ll be configuring ens5 for a static IP address.
Configuring a Static IP Address
Open the original .yaml file for editing with the command:
sudo nano /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml
The layout of the file looks like this:
network:
Version: 2
Renderer: networkd
ethernets:
DEVICE_NAME:
Dhcp4: yes/no
Addresses: [IP/NETMASK]
Gateway: GATEWAY
Nameservers:
Addresses: [NAMESERVER, NAMESERVER]
Where:
DEVICE_NAME is the actual device name to be configured.
yes/no is an option to enable or disable dhcp4.
IP is the IP address for the device.
NETMASK is the netmask for the IP address.
GATEWAY is the address for your gateway.
NAMESERVER is the comma-separated list of DNS nameservers.
Edit the above to fit your networking needs. Save and close that file.
Notice the netmask is no longer configured in the form 255.255.255.0. Instead, the netmask is added to the IP address.
Testing the Configuration
Before we apply the change, let’s test the configuration. To do that, issue the command:
sudo netplan try
The above command will validate the configuration before applying it. If it succeeds, you will see Configuration accepted. In other words, Netplan will attempt to apply the new settings to a running system. Should the new configuration file fail, Netplan will automatically revert to the previous working configuration. Should the new configuration work, it will be applied.
Applying the New Configuration
If you are certain of your configuration file, you can skip the try option and go directly to applying the new options. The command for this is:
sudo netplan apply
At this point, you can issue the command ip a to see that your new address configurations are in place.
Configuring DHCP
Although you probably won’t be configuring your server for DHCP, it’s always good to know how to do this. For example, you might not know what static IP addresses are currently available on your network. You could configure the device for DHCP, get an IP address, and then reconfigure that address as static.
To use DHCP with Netplan, the configuration file would look something like this:
Netplan should succeed and apply the DHCP configuration. You could then issue theip a command, get the dynamically assigned address, and then reconfigure a static address. Or, you could leave it set to use DHCP (but seeing as how this is a server, you probably won’t want to do that).
Should you have more than one interface, you could name the second .yaml configuration file 02-netcfg.yaml. Netplan will apply the configuration files in numerical order, so 01 will be applied before 02. Create as many configuration files as needed for your server.
That’s All There Is
Believe it or not, that’s all there is to using Netplan. Although it is a significant change to how we’re accustomed to configuring network addresses, it’s not all that hard to get used to. But this style of configuration is here to stay… so you will need to get used to it.
Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.
Companies that contribute to open source software and use it in their own IT systems and applications can gain a competitive advantage—even though they may be helping their competitors in the short run.
Open source software is software whose code can be adopted, adapted and modified by anyone. As part of the open source ethos, it is expected that people or companies who use open source code will “give back” to the community in the form of code improvements and enhancements.
And that presents an interesting dilemma for firms that rely heavily on open source. Should they allow employees on company time to make updates and edits to the software for community use that could be used by competitors? New research by Assistant Professor Frank Nagle, a member of the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, shows that paying employees to contribute to such software boosts the company’s productivity from using the software by as much as 100 percent, when compared with free-riding competitors.
The Z shell known as zsh is a shell for Linux/Unix-like operating systems. It has similarities to other shells in the sh (Bourne shell) family, such as as bash and ksh, but it provides many advanced features and powerful command line editing options, such as enhanced Tab completion.
It would be impossible to cover all the options of zsh here; there are literally hundreds of pages documenting its many features. In this article, I’ll present five tips to make you more productive using the command line with zsh.
1. Themes and plugins
Through the years, the open source community has developed countless themes and plugins for zsh. A theme is a predefined prompt configuration, while a plugin is a set of useful aliases and functions that make it easier to use a specific command or programming language.
In his welcoming address in Vancouver, The Linux Foundation’s Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, explained that The Foundation’s job is to create engines of innovation and enable the gears of those engines to spin faster.
This acceleration can be seen in the remarkable growth of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and in the Google Cloud announcement transferring ownership and management of the Kubernetes project’s cloud resources to the CNCF, along with a $9 million grant over three years to cover infrastructure costs.
Such investment underscores a strong belief in the power of open source technologies to speed innovation and solve problems, which was echoed by Zemlin, who encouraged the audience to go solve big problems, one person, one project, one industry at a time.
Empathy
In another conference keynote, Van Jones, President and founder of Dream Corps, best-selling author, and CNN contributor, spoke with Jamie Smith, Chief Marketing Officer at The Linux Foundation about the power of tech and related social responsibilities.
“There was a time when the future was written in law,” Jones said. “Now the future is written in Silicon Valley in code.” Jones went on to say that those working in technology today possess a new set of superpowers and they need to understand how to use those powers for good.
A big deficit that Jones sees, not just in technology but in politics and elsewhere, is an empathy gap. He noted, however, that listening and mentoring can help bridge this gap. “Each person has an opportunity to mentor one person… Don’t underestimate the one person in your life who gave you a shot; you can be that person,” he said.
Allies and advocates
Jennifer Cloer, founder and lead consultant at reTHINKit PR and co-founder of Wicked Flicks, also explored the power of mentors and supporters in her talk highlighting the “Chasing Grace” video project. Cloer offered a preview of the project in a short episode featuring Nithya Ruff, Senior Director, Open Source Practice at Comcast, and member of the Board of Directors for The Linux Foundation. In the video preview, Ruff described the important role that her father played in supporting her career.
Ruff also moderated a panel discussion at Open Source Summit examining issues of diversity and inclusion and exploring solid strategies for success. Ruff acknowledged that the efforts of open source communities to attract and retain diverse contributors with unique talent and perspectives have gathered momentum, but she said, “We cannot tackle these issues without the support of allies and advocates.”
Open development
On the last day of the conference, Linux creator Linus Torvalds sat down with Dirk Hohndel, VMware VP and chief open source officer, for their now-familiar fireside chat session. In the discussion, they touched on topics including hardware, quantum computing, kernel maintainership, and more.
In speaking of recent hardware vulnerabilities, Torvalds said, “These hardware issues were kept under wraps. Because it was secret and we were not allowed to talk about it, we were not allowed to use our usual open development model. That makes it way more painful than it should be.”
“When you’re doing a complex project, the only way to deal with complexity is to have the code out there,” Torvalds said. “There are so many layers. No one knows how all this works,” he continued, describing it as an “explosion of complexity.”
Nonetheless, Torvalds said he doesn’t worry so much about issues of technology within the kernel. “What I’m really worried about is the flow of patches. If you have the right workflow, the code will sort itself out.”
When asked whether he still understands the Linux kernel, Torvalds replied, “No. … Nobody knows the whole kernel. Having looked at patches for many, many years, I know the big picture, and I can tell by looking if it’s right or wrong.”
