Introducing the Open Source Entrepreneur Network

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April 19, 2017

I’m happy to announce that Linux.com will syndicate content from the Open Source Entrepreneur Network. Wait. What? Who? Where? Read on for more…

I’ve been an open source guy for many years now – since 1998. Over the years I’ve been a proud open source user, sometime developer, and overall advocate. Seeing the success of open source has been a real joy, but I’ve also been mystified by the myths that permeate the industry when it comes to business models and product development and where they intersect with open source software. Now that open source has “won” the focus now shifts to opimization. As in, how do you optimize your processes to fully participate in and get maximum benefits from all the things happening right now in open source ecosystems?

Frankly, I’m amazed – and not in a good way – at how much bad advice and “thought leadership” exists out there pertaining to open source business things. I followed the open source way of scratching an itch, and I decided to finally do something about it: I created the Open Source Entrepreneur Network or OSEN. The OSEN is where you learn how to make, market and sell products and services based on open source software. In our brave new open source world, this is a skillset needed by startup founders (and their investors), product managers, IT managers, CIOs/CTOs, devops pros and more. The fact that so much of modern software supply chains originates with upstream communities adds several layers of complexity to product development, which was already complex to begin with.

So join us on this journey and let me know what you think!

Blockchain’s Weak Spots Pose a Hidden Danger to Users

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MIT Technology Review

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April 19, 2017

Technologists, entrepreneurs, and some big companies are busy dreaming up new ways of using the core of Bitcoin—a distributed cryptographic ledger, or blockchain—to reinvent everything from business contracts and health records to carbon credits and new trading platforms (see “Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency”).

However, one expert warns that they may be building their dreams on top of a precarious foundation. Emin Gün Sirer, an associate professor at Cornell University, has been researching ways in which Bitcoin and blockchains can fail.

“The Bitcoin client is about 30,000 lines of code,” Gün Sirer said Tuesday at Business of Blockchain, a conference organized by MIT Technology Review and the MIT Media Lab.

Docker Brings Containerization to Legacy Apps

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TechCrunch

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April 19, 2017

At the DockerCon conference today in Austin, Docker announced a new service called the Modernize Traditional Applications (MTA) Program that enables customers to move certain legacy apps into Docker containers, put them under management of Docker Enterprise Edition and prepare them for use on more modern infrastructure.

What’s more, the company is so confident in their ability to move these applications, that they are willing to guarantee the outcome, so long as the applications meet certain criteria.

What Docker found over the last six months while they built this offering was that customers were hungry to try containerization. While they didn’t necessarily have the skill or the will to go to all the way to microservices…

IBM Brings Anaconda Open Data Science Platform to its Cognitive Systems

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SDx Central

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April 19, 2017

IBM is working with Continuum Analytics to offer the latter’s Anaconda open data science platform as part of IBM’s Cognitive Systems. Anaconda will also integrate with IBM’s PowerAI software for machine learning and deep learning.

IBM Cognitive Systems are based on the company’s own Power8 processors, which uses Nvidia’s high-speed NVLink interface to work in conjunction with Nvidia’s Tesla Pascal P100 GPU accelerators. The combination is designed to give a performance boost to deep learning and analytics applications.

Docker Debuts Containerized Kit for Building Linux Distros

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InfoWorld

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April 19, 2017

Today Docker unveiled LinuxKit and the Moby Project, a pair of projects that are intended to allow operating system vendors, do-it-yourselfers, and cutting-edge software creators to create container-native OSes and container-based systems.

The do-it-yourself kit

LinuxKit, which Docker has been using internally to create Docker Desktop and Cloud, uses containers as a building block for assembling custom Linux distributions. It provides a minimal system image—35MB at its absolute smallest—with all its system daemons containerized. Both system components and the software it ships with are delivered in containers.

GStreamer 1.12: Intel Media SDK Support and More

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Mark Filion

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April 19, 2017

With GStreamer 1.12’s first release candidate out for testing and the final release expected soon, here’s a brief preview of some of the (many) new features, bugfixes and improvements that will be arriving with this release. Of course, keep an eye out for the official release notes as they’ll provide considerably more information around these changes.

Written by Olivier Crete, Multimedia Lead at Collabora.

As usual, this latest stable release will come loaded with new features, notably support for the EGL extension used by the i.MX6 Vivante proprietary driver, support for waylandsink DMABuf importation (which means you can get zerocopy media display under Wayland) and support for the Fraunhofer FDK AAC encoder and decoder. However, one of the higlights will undoubtedly be the addition of support for Intel’s Media SDK*, the cross-platform API to access Intel’s hardware accelerated video encoder and decoder functions on Windows and Embedded Linux.

Along with a large cleanup of OpenCV elements, more controls and voice activity information for webrtcdsp, and more support for 10bits and 12bits pixel formats, one of the key new features is videoconvert now supporting the multi-threaded scaling and conversion, a big plus for real-time software manipulation of 4K and 8K streams.

Python programmers will rejoice as more features are natively accessible, in particular, GstCaps describing format can now be fully programmatically modified, thanks to new handwritten overrides.

Continue reading on Collabora’s blog.

The Evolution of Container Usage at Netflix

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Netflix Blog

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April 19, 2017

Containers are already adding value to our proven globally available cloud platform based on Amazon EC2 virtual machines. We’ve shared pieces of Netflix’s container story in the past (video, slides), but this blog post will discuss containers at Netflix in depth. As part of this story, we will cover Titus: Netflix’s infrastructural foundation for container based applications. Titus provides Netflix scale cluster and resource management as well as container execution with deep Amazon EC2 integration and common Netflix infrastructure enablement.

This month marks two major milestones for containers at Netflix. First, we have achieved a new level of scale, crossing one million containers launched per week. Second, Titus now supports services that are part of our streaming service customer experience. We will dive deeper into what we have done with Docker containers as well as what makes our container runtime unique.

Hadoop: The Rise of the Modern Data Lake Platform

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Information Age

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April 19, 2017

Hadoop, while it may be synonymous with big data, and while it may be free to access and work with, engineering teams globally will admit that behind every Hadoop undertaking is a major technical delivery project.

Failures are so commonplace that even the experts don’t have great expectations of 2017: at the recent Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney, research director Nick Heudecker claimed that 70% of Hadoop deployments in 2017 will either fail to deliver their estimated cost savings or their predicted revenue.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Hadoop was designed for big data storage, but it wasn’t designed as an actual big data application. Hadoop and Spark are incredible enabling technologies.

Dive Into Connected Car and Open Source at Automotive Linux Summit 2017

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The Linux Foundation

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April 18, 2017

Next month, the world’s leading automotive experts and engineers will gather at Automotive Linux Summit in Japan to discuss the future of connected cars and collaborate on the open source technologies driving innovation in the automotive arena.

Automotive Linux Summit, taking place May 31-June 2 in Tokyo, gathers automotive systems engineers, Linux experts, R&D managers, business executives, open-source licensing and compliance specialists and community developers, among others. The goal is to connect the developer community which is leading automotive innovation with the vendors and users providing and using the code. Together they will drive the future of embedded devices in the auto industry.

The full agenda for Automotive Linux Summit 2017 is now available. Session highlights include:

Introducing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Application in AGL Charming Chinook, Sri Maldia Hari Asti, Alps Electric Co., Ltd
Vehicle to Cloud: Connecting Cars to Non Automotive Internet Services, Fulup Ar Foll, IoT.bzh
Power Management for Car Infotainment, Takahiko Gomi, Renesas
Securing Vehicle-to-Cloud Data and Privacy with Digital Identity, Ashley Stevenson, ForgeRock
Cockpit System: Collaboration with Applications in AGL Ecosystem, Nobuhiko Tanibata, DENSO
Multi-Screen UX: New GUI Architecture for Next Generation Cockpit System, Takashi Tsubone, Panasonic

Keynote speakers will be revealed in the coming weeks. View the full agenda.

Automotive Linux Summit is co-located with Open Source Summit Japan, and attendees may add on registration to that event at no additional charge. Register now! Linux.com readers can save 5% on the “attendee” pass with discount code LINUXRD5.

Applications for diversity and needs-based scholarships are also being accepted.

Implementing DevOps: 5 Obstacles to Overcome

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ZDNet

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April 18, 2017

DevOps implementation is currently “all over the map,” said Jeff Sussna, founder and principal of Ingineering.IT and author of Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy. “There are some companies that we see at the enterprise DevOps conferences that are all in and making really comprehensive progress. In general though, the majority of companies I see are sort of grappling with it bit by bit, still trying to understand what it is and how to do it.”

Research shows that positive results — including faster deployments, fewer service problems, and more employee loyalty — await those who get it right.

Here are five common challenges enterprises encounter on their DevOps journeys, to help prepare you to tackle any difficulties that may arise.