Brief items
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 5.9-rc8, released on October 4. "So things have been pretty calm, and rc8 is fairly small. I'm still waiting for a networking pull with some fixes, so it's not like I could have made a final 5.9 release even if I had wanted to, but there was nothing scary going on this past week, and it all feels ready for a final 5.9 next weekend."
Stable updates: 5.8.13, 5.4.69, 4.19.149, 4.14.200, 4.9.238, and 4.4.238 were released on October 1, followed by 5.8.14, 5.4.70, and 4.19.150 on October 7.
Development
Edmundson: Plasma and the systemd startup
On his blog, David Edmundson writes about a new optional mechanism for starting up the KDE Plasma desktop using systemd. "Another big motivating factor was the ability for customisation. The root of Plasma's startup is very hardcoded. What if you want to run krunner with a different environment variable set? or have a script run every time plasmashell restarts, or show a UI after kwin is loaded but before plasma shell to perform some user setup? You can edit the code, but that's not easy and you're very much on your own. Systemd provides that level of customisation; both at a distro or a user level out of the box. From our POV for free."
Python 3.9 released
Version 3.9 of the Python programming language has been released. The changelog, "What's New in Python 3.9" document, and our recent article have lots more information on the release. "Maintenance releases for the 3.9 series will follow at regular bi-monthly intervals starting in late November of 2020. OK, boring! Where is Python 4? Not so fast! The next release after 3.9 will be 3.10. It will be an incremental improvement over 3.9, just as 3.9 was over 3.8, and so on."
U-Boot v2020.10 released
U-Boot (the Universal Boot Loader) v2020.10 is out. "With this release we have a number of 'please migrate to DM [Driver Model [PDF]]' warnings that are now 1 year past their warning date, and well past 1 year of those warnings being printed. It's getting up there on my TODO list to see if removing features or boards in these cases is easier."
Development quotes of the week
Digital Ocean, the cloud services company, runs a marketing campaign every October where they give out T-shirts to people who have opened a certain small number of pull requests on GitHub for any open source projects. It seems that in previous years this has been fairly successful: many projects have gotten at least somewhat useful contributions, and some even new long-term contributors, and DO has gotten people to wear their marketing material.
— Lars
Wirzenius
This year, a lot of people are opening entirely useless PRs, some just adding space characters, in order to get the T-shirts. This has upset some of the open source project maintainers, who feel their time is being wasted: it takes time to reject a PR. I'm inclined to agree with them.
The tendency to involve other people's computers in doing jobs that
you could do on your own computer is a fundamental wrong turning in
computing practice.
— Richard Stallman
Last week 2nd Quadrant was purchased by edb. While this is
certainly good news for these companies, it can increase risks to
the Postgres community. First, there is an unwritten rule that the
Postgres core team should not have over half of its members from a
single company, and the acquisition causes edb's representation in
the core team to be 60% — the core team is working on a solution
for this.
— Bruce
Momjian
Miscellaneous
Conservancy Announces New Strategy for GPL Enforcement and Related Work, Receives Grant from ARDC
The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that it is embarking on "a new strategy toward improving compliance and the freedom of users of devices that contain Linux-based systems". That includes GPL enforcement, an effort to create alternative firmware for embedded Linux devices, and collaboration with other organizations "
to promote copyleft compliance as a feature for consumers to protect their privacy and get more out of their devices". The work is being sponsored by an initial $150,000 grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC). "
We take this holistic approach because compliance is not an end in itself, but rather a lever to help people advance technology for themselves and the world. Bradley Kuhn, Conservancy’s Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence remarked: 'GPL enforcement began as merely an education process more than twenty years ago. We all had hoped that industry-wide awareness of copyleft’s essential role in spreading software freedom would yield widespread, spontaneous compliance. We were simply wrong about that. Today, we observe almost universal failure in compliance throughout the (so-called) Internet of Things (IoT) market. Only unrelenting enforcement that holds companies accountable can change this abysmal reality. ARDC, a visionary grant-maker, recognizes the value of systemic enforcement that utilizes the legal system to regain software freedom. That process also catalyzes community-led projects to build liberated firmware for many devices.'"
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