Brief items

Security quote of the week

And, of course, this kind of thing wouldn't be complete without a bogus claim of the great innovation incentive that patents bring.

Finally, the suspension of vaccine-related IP rights fundamentally undermines the global innovation regime that brought us these miraculous drugs in the first place — wildly effective vaccines developed in absolute record time.

That's bullshit. The incentive to produce these vaccines was not patents, but saving the damn world. Second, the first of those vaccines, from Moderna, was developed in just two days because Chinese researchers uploaded the details of the coronavirus and made it openly available to researchers, rather than locking it up. In other words, it wasn't locking down information with patents that got us this vaccine, it was the opposite.

— Mike Masnick

Comments (42 posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.15-rc1, released on September 12. Linus said:

So 5.15 isn't shaping up to be a particularly large release, at least in number of commits. At only just over 10k non-merge commits, this is in fact the smallest rc1 we have had in the 5.x series. We're usually hovering in the 12-14k commit range.

That said, counting commits isn't necessarily the best measure, and that might be particularly true this time around. We have a few new subsystems, with NTFSv3 and ksmbd standing out.

After the -rc1 release, Linus merged a change raising the minimum GCC version to 5.1. This change addresses a lot of annoying warning issues and also opens the door for the use of C11 features in the kernel someday.

Stable updates: 5.14.3, 5.13.16, 5.10.64, and 5.4.145 were released on September 12, followed by 5.14.4, 5.13.17, 5.10.65, and 5.4.146 on September 15.

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Quotes of the week

When you have to go read the compiler sources to figure things like this out, you know you are too deep.

— Linus Torvalds

In my experience we don't build communities by merging everything, we build them by saying No more and pushing back on companies with education and cross-vendor cooperation. Responsible kernel maintenance shouldn't end at the kernel boundaries.

— Dave Airlie

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GDB 11.1 released

Version 11.1 of the GDB debugger is out. There are a number of new features, and somebody will surely be disappointed to see that support for debugging Arm Symbian programs has been removed.

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Cro: Maintain it With Zig

This blog post by Loris Cro makes the claim that the Zig language is the solution to a lot of low-level programming problems:

Freeing the art of systems programming from the grips of C/C++ cruft is the only way to push for real change in our industry, but rewriting everything is not the answer. In the Zig project we’re making the C/C++ ecosystem more fun and productive. Today we have a compiler, a linker and a build system, and soon we’ll also have a package manager, making Zig a complete toolchain that can fetch dependencies and build C/C++/Zig projects from any target, for any target.

(LWN looked at Zig last year).

Comments (52 posted)

Development quotes of the week

I know what you're gonna say, and maybe I did just say zink was done a week or two ago.

I'm not saying I didn't.

But that was practically last year at the speed with which zink's codebase moves and its developer community sits in my office eating cookies between Mesa builds, and it was also before I set off on my journey to make the rest of those zany Phoronix benchmark games run instead of crashing or whatever.

— Mike Blumenkrantz

The situation you are all left in is that the largest companies have figured out how to operate a resource-extraction paradigm, in which they obtain the maximal utility from the Open Source community. much as if they were mining or logging a natural resource. Community members - be they companies or individuals, are their unpaid employees.

— Bruce Perens (Thanks to Thorsten Glaser)

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The Open Source Initiative's new executive director

The Open Source Initiative has announced the appointment of Stefano Maffulli as its executive director. "'Bringing Stefano Maffulli on board as OSI’s first Executive Director is the culmination of a years-long march toward professionalization, so that OSI can be a stronger and more responsive advocate for open source,' says Joshua Simmons, Board Chair of OSI."

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A disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark

This release on PostgreSQL.org describes an ongoing disagreement over the PostgreSQL trademark:

In 2020, the PostgreSQL Core Team was made aware that an organization had filed applications to register the 'PostgreSQL' and 'PostgreSQL Community' trademarks in the European Union and the United States, and had already registered trademarks in Spain. The organization, a 3rd party not-for-profit corporation in Spain called 'Fundación PostgreSQL,' did not give any indication to the PostgreSQL Core Team or PGCAC that they would file these applications.

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SPDX Becomes Internationally Recognized Standard for Software Bill of Materials

The Linux Foundation has announced that Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) has become an international standard (ISO/IEC 5962:2021). SPDX has been used in the kernel and other projects to identify the licenses and attach other metadata to software components.

Between eighty and ninety percent (80%-90%) of a modern application is assembled from open source software components. An SBOM [software bill of materials] accounts for the software components contained in an application — open source, proprietary, or third-party — and details their provenance, license, and security attributes. SBOMs are used as a part of a foundational practice to track and trace components across software supply chains. SBOMs also help to proactively identify software issues and risks and establish a starting point for their remediation.

SPDX results from ten years of collaboration from representatives across industries, including the leading Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors – making it the most robust, mature, and adopted SBOM standard.

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