Brief items
Security
Security quotes of the week
Look, this was never going to be a fight we "won" once and for all -- the
fight to keep the Internet free, fair and open is ongoing. For so long as
people have:
a) problems; that
b) intersect with the Internet;
there will always be calls to break the Internet to solve them.
— Cory
Doctorow
a) problems; that
b) intersect with the Internet;
there will always be calls to break the Internet to solve them.
We suffered a crushing setback today, but it doesn't change the mission. To fight, and fight, and fight, to keep the Internet open and free and fair, to preserve it as a place where we can organise to fight the other fights that matter, about inequality and antitrust, race and gender, speech and democratic legitimacy.
If this vote had gone the other way, we'd still be fighting today. And tomorrow. And the day after.
It's hard to believe that many of the Snowden documents are now more than a
decade old.
— Bruce
Schneier
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 4.19-rc4, released on September 16. Linus said: "Nothing particularly odd stands out on the technical side in the kernel updates for last week - rc4 looks fairly average in size for this stage in the release cycle, and all the other statistics look pretty normal too."
The 4.19-rc4 announcement also carried the news that Linus will be taking a break from kernel development to work on personal issues; Greg Kroah-Hartman will see 4.19 through to a conclusion.
Stable updates: 4.18.8, 4.14.70, 4.9.127, and 4.4.156 were released on September 15.
Quote of the week
The can of worms is that you can endlessly debate CoCs. I don't
think this one is the best we could have chosen because it
separates behaviour into "contributing to positive environment" and
"unacceptable" but we have a lot of borderline problem behaviour
that isn't mentioned at all: things like being excessively nit
picking in reviews; being unable or unwilling to reach a compromise
in a code related dispute. However, I think I'd rather have a root
canal than a debate on how to amend the new CoC, so I think it's
good enough, lets just go with it.
— James
Bottomley
Distributions
The first /e/ beta is available
/e/ is Gaël Duval's project to build a privacy-oriented smartphone distribution; the first beta is now available with support for a number of devices. "At our current point of development, we have an '/e/' ROM in Beta stage: forked from LineageOS 14.1, it can be installed on several devices (read the list). The number of supported devices will grow over time, depending on more build servers and more contributors who can maintain or port to specific devices (contributors welcome). The ROM includes microG configured by default with Mozilla NLP so users can have geolocation functionality even when GPS signal is not available."
Distribution quote of the week
<suihkulokki> From Debian PoV it's just easier to consider any SBC [single-board computer]
without open GPU drivers effectively headless
— spotted by Bob Ham in the #debian-arm IRC channel
Development
HHVM ending support for PHP
The HHVM project has announced that the Hack language and PHP will truly be going separate ways. The HHVM v3.30 release, due by the end of the year, will be the last to support code written in PHP. "Ultimately, we recommend that projects either migrate entirely to the Hack language, or entirely to PHP7 and the PHP runtime." HHVM was first announced in 2011 as a compiler for the PHP language.
LLVM 7.0.0 released
Version 7.0.0 of the LLVM compiler suite is out. "It is the result of the community's work over the past six months, including: function multiversioning in Clang with the 'target' attribute for ELF-based x86/x86_64 targets, improved PCH support in clang-cl, preliminary DWARF v5 support, basic support for OpenMP 4.5 offloading to NVPTX, OpenCL C++ support, MSan, X-Ray and libFuzzer support for FreeBSD, early UBSan, X-Ray and libFuzzer support for OpenBSD, UBSan checks for implicit conversions, many long-tail compatibility issues fixed in lld which is now production ready for ELF, COFF and MinGW, new tools llvm-exegesis, llvm-mca and diagtool". The list of new features is long; see the overall release notes, the Clang release notes, the Clang tools release notes, and the LLD linker release notes for more information.
PostgreSQL adopts a code of conduct
The PostgreSQL community has, after an extended discussion, announced the adoption of a code of conduct "which is intended to ensure that PostgreSQL remains an open and enjoyable project for anyone to join and participate in".
Versity announces next generation open source archiving filesystem
Versity Software has announced that it has released ScoutFS under GPLv2. "ScoutFS is the first GPL archiving file system ever released, creating an inherently safer and more user friendly option for storing archival data where accessibility over very large time scales, and the removal of vendor specific risk is a key consideration."
Apache SpamAssassin 3.4.2 released
SpamAssassin 3.4.2 is out, the first release from this spam-filtering project since 3.4.1 came out in April 2015. It fixes some remotely exploitable security issues, so SpamAssassin users probably want to update in the near future. "The exploit has been seen in the wild but not believe to have been purposefully part of a Denial of Service attempt. We are concerned that there may be attempts to abuse the vulnerability in the future. Therefore, we strongly recommend all users of these versions upgrade to Apache SpamAssassin 3.4.2 as soon as possible."
Development quote of the week
Apropos of yesterday's post on learning ancient editors, tareefdev has a post on the Emacs subreddit on why and how he moved from one of those "modern" electron-based editors to Emacs. His problem was a simple one: he had a 6.3 MB file and couldn't open it with his editor. Say what you will about Emacs and large files, it can easily handle files of that size as tareefdev discovered when he opened his file in Emacs with no problems. As his expertise with Emacs grew, he discovered that he could use it for more and more of his tasks and that it made his life easier.
— jcs
This is a quotidian story that normally wouldn't be worth writing about except in light of the argument discussed in yesterday's post that young developers shouldn't waste their time learning ancient editors like Vim and Emacs. Just stick with that flashy new editor that's easy to learn and has a glitzy UI. Except then you find it isn't up to the job and you have to revert to one of those dusty old editors that folks were telling you weren't worth your time.
Miscellaneous
The (awesome) economics of open source (Opensource.com)
Over at Opensource.com, Red Hat's Michael Tiemann looks at open source from the perspective of the economic theories of Ronald Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Economics. Those theories help explain why companies like Red Hat (and Cygnus Solutions, which Tiemann founded) have prospered even in the face of economic arguments about why they should not. "Successful open source software companies 'discover' markets where transaction costs far outweigh all other costs, outcompete the proprietary alternatives for all the good reasons that even the economic nay-sayers already concede (e.g., open source is simply a better development model to create and maintain higher-quality, more rapidly innovative software than the finite limits of proprietary software), and then—and this is the important bit—help clients achieve strategic objectives using open source as a platform for their own innovation. With open source, better/faster/cheaper by itself is available for the low, low price of zero dollars. As an open source company, we don't cry about that. Instead, we look at how open source might create a new inflection point that fundamentally changes the economics of existing markets or how it might create entirely new and more valuable markets."
Lights, Camera, Open Source: Hollywood Turns to Linux for New Code Sharing Initiative (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal covers the new Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), which is a project aimed at open-source collaboration in movie-making software that was started by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the Linux Foundation. "Still at the early stages, the ASWF has yet to develop any of its own projects, but there is interest in having them host a number of very popular projects, such as Industrial Light & Magic’s OpenEXR HDR image file format, color management solution OpenColorIO, and OPenVDB, which is used for working with those hard-to-handle objects like clouds and fluids. Along with promoting cooperation on the development of a more robust set of tools for the industry, one of the goals of the organization moving forward is to put out a shared licensing template that they hope will help smooth the tensions over licensing. It follows that with the growth of projects, navigating the politics over usage rights is bound to be a tricky task."
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