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As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

For the past four years, I've been managing my personal finances with GnuCash, and I'm quite satisfied with it. The open source (GPL v3) project has been growing and improving since its initial release in 1998, and the latest version, 3.8, released in December 2019, adds many improvements and bug fixes.

In my last article in this series, I introduced monitoring with Prometheus, the leading open source metric instrumentation, collection, and storage toolkit. While Prometheus has become the de facto standard for monitoring Kubernetes for many users, there may be reasons why you might choose another approach for metric telemetry.

It can be frustrating when a mainstream software tool is proprietary. This is a common problem at work. Many companies default to Slack for chat, Adobe Photoshop for creative editing, and Salesforce for customer relationship management. We are faced with this issue at home, too. Our friends and family are likely to use the most popular social media platforms which tend to be closed source. With tax season coming up here in the United States, we are reminded that the go-to home finance software is proprietary. 

Linux does a great job automatically recognizing, loading, and exposing attached hardware devices from countless vendors. In fact, it was this feature that, many years ago, convinced me to insist that my employer convert its entire infrastructure to Linux. The pain point was the way a certain company in Redmond couldn't load drivers for the integrated network card on our Compaq desktops while Linux did it effortlessly.

Early on, software development didn't really fit under a particular management umbrella. Then along came waterfall, which spoke to the idea that software development could be defined by the length of time an application took to create or build.

Terminator is a single-window split-screen terminal multiplexer that allows you to send identical keystrokes to all terminals at once. This means you can SSH into any number of machines, run the same commands simultaneously, and see them all at the same time.

Install Terminator with: sudo apt install terminator

Editor's note: This article is part of a series on working with mental health conditions. It details the author's personal experiences and is not meant to convey professional medical advice or guidance.

When I installed Apple's MacOS Mojave, it slowed my formerly reliable MacBook Air to a crawl. My computer, released in 2015, has 4GB RAM, an i5 processor, and a Broadcom 4360 wireless card, but Mojave proved too much for my daily driver—it made working with GnuCash impossible, and it whetted my appetite to return to Linux. I am glad I did, but I felt bad that I had this perfectly good MacBook lying around unused.

Bridging the old world and the new, this month we came across articles on VMware, Docker, and some helpful tips and tricks. And Ansible's own community data scientist, Greg Sutcliffe, has been crunching some more numbers to tell us about the global meetup scene.

If you spot an interesting Ansible story on your travels, please send us the link via Mark on Twitter, and the Ansible Community team will curate the best submissions.

Kubernetes is a thriving open source container orchestration platform that offers scalability, high availability, robustness, and resiliency for applications. One of its many features is support for running custom scripts or binaries through its primary client binary, kubectl. Kubectl is very powerful and allows users to do anything with it that they could do directly on a Kubernetes cluster.

When we think about what needs to be in place for an open source project to function, one of the first things to come to mind is probably a license. For one thing, absent an approved Open Source Initiative (OSI) license, a project isn’t truly open source in the minds of many. Furthermore, the choice to use a copyleft license like the GNU General Public License (GPL) or a permissive license like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) can affect the sort of community that grows up around and uses the project.

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look ProtonVPN apps going open, Microsoft's code analysis tool, Mozilla Thunderbird's new home, and more!

People wanting to use the internet securely and privately do the deed using a Virtual Private Network (VPN). But which VPNs can you really trust? The company behind the popular ProtonVPN service made a big move to gain that trust by releasing the source code for all its apps.

There are two ways to play a tabletop role-playing game (RPG): You can play an adventure written by the game's publisher or an independent author, or you can play an adventure that is made up as you go. Regardless of which you choose, there's probably prep work to do. One player (generically called the game master) must gather monster or enemy stats, loot tables, and references for rules, and the other players must build characters and apportion (pretend) equipment.

Are you just getting started with machine/deep learning, TensorFlow, or Raspberry Pi?

I created rpi-deep-pantilt as an interactive demo of object detection in the wild, and in this article, I'll show you how to reproduce the video below, which depicts a camera panning and tilting to track my movement across a room.

Every open source community wants to make it easier for community members to participate and contribute. Typically, there are discussions on cultural aspects of the community to lower barriers to entry, such as fostering a friendly and welcoming environment, onboarding processes, mentorship, code of conduct, etc. However, in my discussions with several open source communities (e.g., Freedesktop, GNOME, KDE, etc.), I found that one of the key criteria when selecting new tools for code, CI, bug tracking, etc.

Way back in 2005, a company called Vyatta was founded by Allan Leinwand. It offered the first commercially supported, open source router and firewall solution. Named after the ancient Sanskrit for "open," the company's goal of bringing open source networking products to the market was so successful that it was purchased by competitor Brocade. This effectively killed Vyatta, but because Vyatta's product was open source, it didn't stop it.

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

I've used Ansible since 2013 and maintain some of my original playbooks to this day. They have evolved with Ansible from version 1.4 to the current version (as of this writing, 2.9).