Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 4.14-rc6, released on October 23. Linus said: "rc6 is a bit larger than I was hoping for, and I'm not sure whether that is a sign that we _will_ need an rc8 after all this release (which wouldn't be horribly surprising), or whether it's simply due to timing. I'm going to leave that open for now, so just know that rc8 _may_ happen."

Stable updates: 4.13.9, 4.9.58, 4.4.94, and 3.18.77 were released on October 22. The 4.13.10, 4.9.59, 4.4.95, and 3.18.78 updates are in the review process as of this writing; they are due on October 26.

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The Linux Foundation's annual kernel development report

The Linux Foundation has announced the availability of its roughly annual report on kernel development. "This is the eighth such report that is released on a roughly annual basis to help illustrate the Linux kernel development process and the work that defines the largest collaborative project in the history of computing. This year’s paper covers work completed through Linux kernel 4.13, with an emphasis on releases 4.8 to 4.13.". This report, written by LWN editor Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman, will have little that's new to regular LWN readers, but there is a set of nice developer profiles.

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Realtime summit livestream video available

A single video of the livestream from the 2017 Realtime Summit is a available on YouTube. The Realtime Summit was held October 21 at Czech Technical University in Prague. The schedule of talks is available as well.

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Quotes of the week

— Narcisa Vasile (at the OSS Europe kernel developer panel)

— Dave Chinner

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Schaller: Looking back at Fedora Workstation so far

Christian Schaller has posted a list of the Fedora Workstation project's accomplishments since its inception. "Wayland – We been the biggest contributor since we joined the effort and have taken the lead on putting in place all the pieces needed for actually using it on a desktop, including starting to ship it as our primary offering in Fedora Workstation 25. This includes putting a lot of effort into ensuring that XWayland works smoothly to ensure full legacy application support." The list as a whole is quite long.

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Firefox 57 coming soon: a Quantum leap (Fedora Magazine)

The upcoming Firefox 57 release presents a challenge to distributors, who have to decide when and how to ship a major update that will break a bunch of older extensions. This Fedora Magazine article describes the plan that Fedora has come up with for this transition. "Users probably shouldn’t 'hold back at FF56 as my favorite extensions don’t work.' Recall that security fixes only come from new versions, and they’ll all be WebExtension only. The Extended Support Release version will also switch to WebExtensions only at the next release. This date, June 2018, marks the deadline for ESR users to migrate their extensions."

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LEDE v17.01.4 service release

Version 17.01.4 of the LEDE router distribution is available with a number of important fixes. "While this release includes fixes for the bugs in the WPA Protocol disclosed earlier this week, these fixes do not fix the problem on the client-side. You still need to update all your client devices. As some client devices might never receive an update, an optional AP-side workaround was introduced in hostapd to complicate these attacks, slowing them down."

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Samsung to support Linux distributions on Galaxy handsets

Here's a Samsung press release describing the company's move into the "run Linux on your phone" space. "Installed as an app, Linux on Galaxy gives smartphones the capability to run multiple operating systems, enabling developers to work with their preferred Linux-based distributions on their mobile devices. Whenever they need to use a function that is not available on the smartphone OS, users can simply switch to the app and run any program they need to in a Linux OS environment."

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Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) released

The Ubuntu 17.10 release is out. "Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 4.13-based kernel, glibc 2.26, gcc 7.2, and much more. Ubuntu Desktop has had a major overhaul, with the switch from Unity as our default desktop to GNOME3 and gnome-shell. Along with that, there are the usual incremental improvements, with newer versions of GTK and Qt, and updates to major packages like Firefox and LibreOffice." See the release notes for more information.

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Quote of the week

— Mark Shuttleworth

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Apache OpenOffice 4.1.4 released

The OpenOffice 4.1.4 release is finally available; see this article for some background on this release. The announcement is all bright and sunny, but a look at the August 16 Apache board minutes shows concern about the state of the project. Indeed, the OpenOffice project management committee was, according to these minutes, supposed to post an announcement about the state of the project; it would appear that has not yet happened.

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SciPy 1.0 released

The SciPy project has announced the release of SciPy 1.0. The "Python-based ecosystem of open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering" has been around for 16 years since version 0.1 and, in reality, the 1.0 designation is overdue. "Some key project goals, both technical (e.g. Windows wheels and continuous integration) and organisational (a governance structure, code of conduct and a roadmap), have been achieved recently. Many of us are a bit perfectionist, and therefore are reluctant to call something '1.0' because it may imply that it's 'finished' or 'we are 100% happy with it'. This is normal for many open source projects, however that doesn't make it right. We acknowledge to ourselves that it's not perfect, and there are some dusty corners left (that will probably always be the case). Despite that, SciPy is extremely useful to its users, on average has high quality code and documentation, and gives the stability and backwards compatibility guarantees that a 1.0 label imply." Beyond the Windows wheels (a binary distribution format) mentioned above, there are some other new features in the release: continuous-integration coverage for macOS and Windows, a set of new ordinary differential equation solvers and a unified interface to them, two new trust region optimizers and a new linear programming method, many new BLAS and LAPACK functions were wrapped, and more.

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Development quote of the week

— Joey Hess (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

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Linux Foundation debuts Community Data License Agreement

The Linux Foundation has announced a pair of licenses for data that are modeled on the two broad categories of free-software licenses: permissive and copyleft. The Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) comes in two flavors: Sharing that "encourages contributions of data back to the data community" and Permissive that allows the data to be used without any further requirements. "Inspired by the collaborative software development models of open source software, the CDLA licenses are designed to enable individuals and organizations of all types to share data as easily as they currently share open source software code. Soundly drafted licensing models can help people form communities to assemble, curate and maintain vast amounts of data, measured in petabytes and exabytes, to bring new value to communities of all types, to build new business opportunities and to power new applications that promise to enhance safety and services. The growth of big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has allowed people to extract unprecedented levels of insight from data. Now the challenge is to assemble the critical mass of data for those tools to analyze. The CDLA licenses are designed to help governments, academic institutions, businesses and other organizations open up and share data, with the goal of creating communities that curate and share data openly."

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