Zemlin said that for enterprises to make the most from open source they need to participate in creating open source: Unfortunately, “Organization still don’t know how to be a participate.”
“Today all software development is influenced by open source,” Zemlin said. “Just as projects are looking to create communities to sustain them over the long term, corporations are seeking to better understand how they can work with and contribute to open source. The new guides will help more organizations directly engage for the benefit of the broader community.”
Over the past decade, Bluetooth has become almost the default way for billions of devices to exchange data over short distances, allowing PCs and tablets to transfer audio to speakers and phones to zap pictures to nearby computers. Now, researchers have devised an attack that uses the wireless technology to hack a wide range of devices, including those running Android, Linux, and, until a patch became available in July, Windows.
BlueBorne, as the researchers have dubbed their attack, is notable for its unusual reach and effectiveness. Virtually any Android, Linux, or Windows device that hasn’t been recently patched and has Bluetooth turned on can be compromised by an attacking device within 32 feet. It doesn’t require device users to click on any links, connect to a rogue Bluetooth device, or take any other action, short of leaving Bluetooth on. The exploit process is generally very fast, requiring no more than 10 seconds to complete, and it works even when the targeted device is already connected to another Bluetooth-enabled device.
“Just by having Bluetooth on, we can get malicious code on your device,” Nadir Izrael, CTO and cofounder of security firm Armis, told Ars. “BlueBorne abuses the fact that when Bluetooth is on, all of these devices are always listening for connections.”
One of the first items discussed when companies start using and leveraging open source is the determination of what, in their IP portfolio, is the unique differentiation between themselves and their competitors. What is, in other words, their “secret sauce.” Companies can then use open source to allow them, and their development, to focus on their secret sauce and to consume, or contribute/donate, non-differentiating software to the open source community. This allows companies to focus their time, talent and resources on those aspects of technology that provide the most innovation to them and their customers.
Some companies, known as Open Core companies, also leverage the idea of “secret sauce” in that they release their code under an Open Source license, but sell “Enterprise Extensions” as commercial products, and keep that technology private and confidential, as their own secret sauce.
But the most important “secret sauce” in Open Source is also the most unrecognized and most misunderstood. Ironically, science fiction understands this secret ingredient better than most.
Red Hat’s product offerings are all built upon open source projects—they all are derived from one or more upstream, community-based open source projects. Red Hat’s product managers need to have a good sense of what is going on in their respective upstream open source projects to enable the product’s continued evolution based on the strength of the community and collaboration in the project. In addition to Red Hat’s own needs, the explosion of products and services that use the hundreds of thousands of open source projects to drive the technology revolution calls for a coherent, repeatable and objective tool/method to ascertain how a project is doing.
Enter Prospector, a tool we built internally at Red Hat to help measure this and that we now have contributed to the Linux Foundation to help form the basis of the new CHAOSS project.
A whopping 48 percent of developers say they’re most productive between 8 a.m. and noon, with 21 percent listing noon until 4 p.m. as their best hours. As for all-nighters: only 5 percent indicate 8 p.m. to midnight as a high production time, with only a few more, 8 percent, saying they’re at their best between midnight and 4 a.m.
That’s one of many takeaways from a new survey, aptly titled The 2017 State of the Modern Developer, that was conducted by research firm Coleman Parkes for the software analysis and measurement company CAST. In all, 500 developers in four countries — USA, UK, France and Germany — were surveyed. According to CAST, the research was conducted “to learn more about the motivators and behavior of modern developers, in addition to their attitude towards code quality.”
One of the hot topics right now in the web development world is functional programming in the language of the web, JavaScript.
Functional programming encompasses a whole host of mathematical properties and phenomena that is beyond this post, but what I am going to address here is how to write a a few functions with nominal functional programming.
This is going to be a series. I am currently researching these topics as I go along and what I find excites me. I will be digging into these topics, each array method bit by bit. You can find some more of this on Steve Smith’s blog Funky JavaScript.
Important Concept: Higher Order Functions
One of the best and worst parts about JavaScript is that you can pass functions into other functions. This can lead to beautifully expressive code and sometimes bugs.
Kubernetes is the hottest thing to hit containers since…Docker. That’s faint praise, given that Docker barely burst onto the scene in 2013. But, given the pace of enterprise infrastructure innovation these days, four years may be all the limelight one gets. As such, it’s critical to make the most of an opportunity, which Kubernetes has done by delivering great code and, as I’ve called out, superior community.
What hasn’t been as clear, however, is how Kubernetes does community so well. Google nailed the mechanics from the start, choosing to push the code to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, rather than going it alone (as Docker and other open source projects have done). But a less-acclaimed feature of Kubernetes’ rise is the incredible developer advocacy that powers it.
My Lenovo T400 was already old when I bought it as a refurb four years ago. It’s still ticking along nicely with a variety of Linux distributions. Here are the details..
About four years ago (Nov 2013) I bought a used, refurbished Lenovo T400laptop computer and docking station. It was already about four years old at that time (most of the original product announcements and hands-on reviews I can find are from 2009), and another four years have gone by now, so I think it would be useful to have another look at it and see how it is holding up.
Today over 80 percent of the software in any technology product or service is open source. And this trend is growing. According to a recent study by Sonatype, every day the supply of open source across all ecosystems increases by about 1,100 new projects and 10,000 new versions.
This raises important questions about which open source projects matter. What code should I bet my product, my company, or career on? Will those projects grow or shrink? Is the code base stable or changing? Does the project depend on one organization or many? Is the community healthy or hopelessly ill?
At The Linux Foundation, we want to grow and sustain the most important software in the world. One of the ways we can do this is by measuring the general health of an open source community and developing methodologies and tools for analyzing modern software development. With this in place, we can improve the health of projects and make it easier to answer the questions above.
We need software that will help benchmark and analyze project health along several dimensions as well as robust guidelines for what makes an open source community healthy. We need the means to apply analytics to the big data produced by all the systems supporting software development.
The ever-increasing push to the cloud demands proven skills in areas such as cloud migration, application integration, automation, and more. The recent Open Source Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation, in fact, cited cloud technology as the most sought-after area of expertise among 70 percent of employers. Now you can demonstrate your skills through the new Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam, offered by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
This online, performance-based exam tests your ability to solve multiple issues in a hands-on, command-line environment. The CKA exam is now available for anyone to take and costs $300. To further support your path to Kubernetes certification, online training is available to help you acquire the skills needed to create and configure a real-world Kubernetes cluster. The Kubernetes Fundamentals course maps directly to the requirements for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam.
And, achieving professional certification can play a crucial role in advancing your career. According to the Open Source Jobs Report, 50 percent of hiring managers say they are more likely to hire a certified professional, and 47 percent of companies are willing to pay for employees to become open source certified.
Kubernetes Certified Service Providers
This new certification program is only part of CNCF’s efforts in facilitating integration of tools like Kubernetes and Prometheus and building a pipeline of skilled talent to help ease adoption of open source technologies. In addition to the CKA program, the CNCF also announced the founding class of Kubernetes Certified Service Providers (KCSPs) — pre-qualified organizations with demonstrated deep experience helping enterprises successfully adopt Kubernetes.
The KCSP program includes vetted service providers that offer Kubernetes support, consulting, professional services, and training for organizations embarking on their Kubernetes journey. The KCSP program ensures that organizations get the necessary support to roll out new applications more quickly and efficiently than before.
To qualify as a KCSP, an organization must have three or more engineers who’ve passed the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam, must show active contribution to the Kubernetes community, and must have a business model that supports enterprise end users, including putting engineers onsite.
The founding class of KCSPs includes the following CNCF and LF members: Accenture, Booze Allen Hamilton, Bitnami, Canonical, Container Solutions, CoreOS, Ghostcloud, Giant Swarm, Heptio, Huawei, IBM, inwinSTACK, Inc., LiveWyer Ltd., Mirantis, RX-M LLC, Samsung SDS, Stackpointcloud, and Supergiant.
You can learn more about becoming a KCSP on the CNCF website.
