First FSFE Summit Will Focus on Social Issues and Strategies

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August 26, 2016

Free Software advocates from all over Europe will be meeting in Berlin Sept. 2-4 at the first ever Free Software Foundation Europe’s summit.

This 2016 event, besides being long overdue, also marks 15 years since the creation of the FSFE. Throughout its history, the FSFE has had its fair share of landmark achievements. It has been instrumental in a successful antitrust-case against a big software corporation that intended to dominate the market of personal computers. It managed to keep software patents unenforceable in Europe, thereby avoiding a veritable apocalypse for European small and medium-sized tech companies. And, it worked alongside gpl-violations.org to get free licenses vindicated in German courts, setting ground-breaking precedents for the whole of the EU.

One of the main missions of the Free Software community in general, and the FSFE in particular, is to put users back into the driver’s seat, so that people control technology and not the other way around. This may seem like a lofty goal, but it would likely not be an exaggeration to say that the FSFE has transformed the foundations of IT in Europe and that it has had a deep impact on anybody who has used a computer, a smartphone, or a tablet in the last decade or so.

On the Schedule

In that spirit, September’s event will not be a technical one; instead speakers will focus on social issues, policies, and business strategies that will help encourage further adoption of Free Software in homes, companies, and public institutions.

The summit will feature, for example, Sonia Montegiove explaining how the Italian Armed Forces, a traditionally conservative institution, migrated to LibreOffice; Sam Tuke will describe a whole new tool set of open source utilities and frameworks for sales and marketing; and Matthias Kirschner, the current President of the FSFE, will dispel some of the more persistent misconceptions associated with Free Software.

Additionally, the Summit will be held alongside QtCon, KDE’s aKademy, VLC’s yearly conference, and KDAB’s 2016 meetup, which means if you are into hardcore technical development stuff, there’s something for you, too. So, if you’re in Berlin in early September, drop by the Berlin Congress Center for some Free Software goodness.

Platform9 & ZeroStack Make OpenStack a Little More VMware-Friendly

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SDx Central

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August 26, 2016

Platform9 and ZeroStack are adding VMware high availability to their prefab cloud offerings, part of the ongoing effort to make OpenStack better accepted by enterprises.

OpenStack is a platform, an archipelago of open source projects that help you run a cloud. But some assembly is required. Both Platform9 and ZeroStack are operating on the theory that OpenStack will better succeed if it’s turned into more of a shrink-wrapped product. Adding a feature like high availability could help OpenStack stay on par with public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Putting Ops Back in DevOps

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DevOps .com

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August 26, 2016

What Agile means to your typical operations staff member is, “More junk coming faster that I will get blamed for when it breaks.” There always is tension between development and operations when something goes south. Developers are sure the code worked on their machine; therefore, if it does not work in some other environment, operations must have changed something that made it break. Operations sees the same code perform differently on the same machine with the same config, which means if something broke, the most recent change must have caused it … i.e. the code did it. The finger-pointing squabbles are epic (no pun intended). So how do we get Ops folks interested in DevOps without promising them only a quantum order of magnitude more problems—and delivered faster?

…Ops has an extended role in understanding what lives underneath the abstraction layer that lives on top. Over time, only Ops will understand these particulars. They will become the only in-house experts about which cloud provider to use, which sets of physical hardware performs best and under what conditions.

5 Cool Unikernels Projects

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Container Journal

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August 26, 2016

Unikernels are poised to become the next big thing in microservices after Docker containers. Here’s a look at some of the cool things you can do with unikernels. First, though, here’s a quick primer on what unikernels are, for the uninitiated. Unikernels are similar to containers in that they let you run an app inside a portable, software-defined environment. But they go a step further than containers by packaging all of the libraries required to run the app directly into the unikernel.

The result is an app that can boot and run on its own. It does not require a host of any kind. That makes unikernels leaner and meaner than containers, which require a container engine such as Docker and a host operating system such as Linux to run.

Secure the Internet: Core Infrastructure Initiative’s Aim

By

eWeek

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August 26, 2016

VIDEO: Nicko van Someren, CTO of the Linux Foundation, discusses how the CII is moving forward to make open-source software more secure.

In the aftermath of the Heartbleed vulnerability’s emergence in 2014, the Linux Foundation created the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII)to help prevent that type of issue from recurring. Two years later, the Linux Foundation has tasked its newly minted CTO, Nicko van Someren, to help lead the effort and push it forward.

CII has multiple efforts under way already to help improve open-source security. Those efforts include directly funding developers to work on security, a badging program that promotes security practices and an audit of code to help identify vulnerable code bases that might need help. In a video interview with eWEEKat the LinuxCon conference here, Van Someren detailed why he joined the Linux Foundation and what he hopes to achieve.

Understanding Different Classifications of Shell Commands and Their Usage in Linux

By

Tecmint

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August 26, 2016

When it comes to gaining absolute control over your Linux system, then nothing comes close to the command line interface (CLI). In order to become a Linux power user, one must understand the different types of shell commands and the appropriate ways of using them from the terminal.

In Linux, there are several types of commands, and for a new Linux user, knowing the meaning of different commands enables for efficient and precise usage. Therefore, in this article, we shall walk through the various classifications of shell commands in Linux.

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Linux Took Over the Web. Now, It’s Taking Over the World

By

Wired

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August 26, 2016

ON AUGUST 25, 1991, a Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds announced a new project. “I’m doing a (free) operating system,” he wrote on an Internet messaging system, insisting this would just be a hobby.

But it became something bigger. Much bigger. Today, that open source operating system—Linux—is one of the most important pieces of computer software in the world. Chances are, you use it every day. Linux runs every Android phone and tablet on Earth. And even if you’re on an iPhone or a Mac or a Windows machine, Linux is working behind the scenes, across the Internet, serving up most of the webpages you view and powering most of the apps you use. Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Wikipedia—it’s all running on Linux.

Why Linux is Poised to Lead the Tech Boom in Africa

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The Linux Foundation

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August 25, 2016

Certain emerging markets are advancing so quickly that they aren’t just speeding through the technology phases of developed countries. They’re skipping stages entirely — a phenomenon economists call “leapfrogging.”

The most visible signs of leapfrogging are in consumer technologies, including the rapid adoption of the internet, mobile phones and social media. By 2020, Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to be the world’s second-largest mobile Internet market, surpassing Europe and ranking only behind Asia-Pacific, according to Frost & Sullivan.

These advances in consumer technologies are creating a corresponding need for advances in IT infrastructure. This week to help meet that need, IBM announced a new LinuxONE Community Cloud for Africa. Developers will have access at no charge for 120 days utilizing the cloud to create and test their applications on IBM LinuxONE, the industry’s most powerful Linux system.

Keep It Small: A Closer Look at Docker Image Sizing

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Red Hat

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August 25, 2016

A recent blog post, 10 things to avoid in docker containers, describes ten scenarios you should avoid when dealing with docker containers. However, recommendation #3 – Don’t create large images and the sentence “Don’t install unnecessary packages or run “updates” (yum update) that download files to a new image layer” has generated quite a few questions. Some of you are wondering how a simple “yum update” can create a large image. In an attempt to clarify the point, this post explains how docker images work, some solutions to maintain a small docker image, yet still keep it up to date.

To better illustrate the problem, let’s start with a fresh Fedora 23 (or RHEL) image. (Use `docker pull fedora:23`).

Want to Work for a Cloud Company? Here’s the Cream of the Crop

By

Fortune

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August 25, 2016

What do Asana, Greenhouse Software, WalkMe, Chef Software, and Sprout Social have in common? They’ve been deemed the very best privately held “cloud” companies to work for, according to new rankings compiled by Glassdoor and venture capital firm Battery Ventures.

For “The 50 Highest Rated Private Cloud Computing Companies,” Glassdoor and Battery worked with Mattermark to come up with a list of non-public companies that offer cloud-based services, and then culled them, making sure that each entry had at least 30 Glassdoor reviews, Neeraj Agrawal, Battery Ventures general partner told Fortune.