Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.18-rc7, released on May 15. Linus said: "So things continue to be fairly calm, and as such this is likely the last rc before 5.18 unless something bad happens next week".

Stable updates have been abundant this week: 5.17.7, 5.15.39, 5.10.115, 5.4.193, 4.19.242, 4.14.278, and 4.9.313 were released on May 12; 5.17.8, 5.15.40, 5.10.116, 5.4.194, 4.19.243, 4.14.279, and 4.9.314 came out on May 15; and 5.17.9, 5.15.41, 5.10.117, 5.4.195, 4.19.244, 4.14.280, and 4.9.315 showed up on May 18.

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Andrew Morton's first pull request

A milestone of sorts passed quietly on the kernel mailing lists this week. Andrew Morton has been a core part of the development process for many years. He played a key role in moving the kernel from multi-year release cycles toward quick integration of new code, a process which culminated at the 2004 Kernel Summit. But, for all of that, Morton has never been a fan of Git and has not used it; rather than sending pull requests to Linus Torvalds, he has sent massive patch-bomb emails instead.

As was discussed at the recent Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, that is changing. The new way of doing things became evident on Friday the 13th, when Morton sent his first-ever pull request to Torvalds. The resulting mainline merge included a note from Torvalds reading: "And yes, that's a real pull request from Andrew, not me creating a branch from emailed patches. Woo-hoo!"

Old dogs, it seems, can eventually learn new tricks after all.

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Quotes of the week

So I think a lot of the kernel's commit message obfuscation and unusual disclosure ideas stem from a sort of collective sigh and desire not to join the circus of security performers. They'll commit the fix, because that's the sensible thing to do from a development perspective and doesn't make a difference anyway, as LTS and distro kernels come with their own long delays. And they'll talk to you privately under an "embargo" for a little bit if you want, so that you don't go berserk that they're not "taking seriously" your beautiful vulnerability. (Also IIRC, OpenBSD won't even pay lip service to embargoes...) But mostly this is designed around that collective sigh, made to minimize drama and maximize productivity in actually getting fixes committed and deployed.

— Jason Donenfeld

By delaying a small bit of time from publicly posting a patch to telling the world that "hey, that was a security fix over there" that allows the community that works in the public added time for review and testing as our testing infrastructure that is NOT public is quite limited and reviews are limited given the huge range of needed developers to do that review.

— Greg Kroah-Hartman

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AlmaLinux 8.6 released

Just one day after the RHEL 8.6 release, AlmaLinux 8.6 Stable has been released. See the release notes for more information.

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is excited to announce that AlmaLinux OS 8.6 Stable is now available. Just like a flash after the beta release. This stable release is for the x86_64, aarch64 and ppc64le architectures and is ready for production installations and to power all your computing needs and workloads. Grab it from the nearest mirror and join us on the AlmaLinux Community Chat to discuss.

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openSUSE Leap Micro 5.2 released

OpenSUSE Leap Micro is a new distribution, described as "an ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system built for containerized and virtualized workloads". The initial release (5.2) is now available. More information can be found in the 5.2 release notes.

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Inkscape 1.2 released

Version 1.2 of the Inkscape drawing tool has been released. New features include multi-page support, editable markers, the ability to flow text around shapes, and more; see the release notes for details.

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Development quotes of the week

[Emacs] was a meaningful name in 1976: E for Editing, Macs for Macros. That was 46 years ago -- since then, the context has changed, but it's unfair to blame me for not foreseeing 46 years of changes back then.

— Richard Stallman

Leaving The Qt Company and in the future spending most of my time outside the Qt ecosystem has been a difficult decision. But in the end, after those 25 years, it does feel very much like the right decision for me. I want to try out something else.

— Lars Knoll moves on.

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SFC v. Vizio remanded back to California state courts

Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced that it succeeded with its motion in US Federal Court to send the case back to California, where it was originally filed. The suit was filed in October 2021 by SFC, as an owner of Vizio televisions, to get the company to comply with the GPL on some of the code in the TVs. Back in November, Vizio had asked to move the case to Federal Court, because the GPL is only a copyright license (which is a dispute handled at the Federal level) and not a contract (that could be adjudicated in state court). Friday's ruling disagreed with that premise:

The May 13 ruling by the Honorable Josephine L. Staton stated that the claim from Software Freedom Conservancy succeeded in the "extra element test" and was not preempted by copyright claims, and the court finds "that the enforcement of 'an additional contractual promise separate and distinct from any rights provided by the copyright laws' amounts to an 'extra element,' and therefore, SFC's claims are not preempted."

"The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleft licensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both as copyright licenses and as contractual agreements," says Karen M. Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy. Sandler noted that many in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) legal community argue incorrectly that the GPL and other copyleft licenses only function as copyright licenses.

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