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A few months ago, I read Marco Bravo's article How to use Ansible to document procedures on Opensource.com. I will admit, I didn't quite get it at the time. I was not actively using Ansible, and I remember thinking it looked like more work than it was worth. But I had an open mind and decided to spend time looking deeper into Ansible.

Z-shell (or Zsh) is an interactive Bourne-like POSIX shell known for its abundance of innovative features. Z-Shell users often cite its many conveniences and credit it for increased efficiency and extensive customization.

Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. And it's critical for high-performing teams in open organizations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage today, and its massive impact on the world is still to come, says the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). According to an article on Nanalyze:

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.

The .NET framework was released in 2000 by Microsoft. An open source implementation of the platform, Mono, was the center of controversy in the early 2000s because Microsoft held several patents for .NET technology and could have used those patents to end Mono implementations. Fortunately, in 2014, Microsoft declared that the .NET development platform would be open source under the MIT license from then on, and in 2016, Microsoft purchased Xamarin, the company that produces Mono.

There are many reasons you might need to find out details about your computer hardware. For example, if you need help fixing something and post a plea in an online forum, people will immediately ask you for specifics about your computer. Or, if you want to upgrade your computer, you'll need to know what you have and what you can have. You need to interrogate your computer to discover its specifications.

The easiest way is to do that is with one of the standard Linux GUI programs:

There are many different ways to solve problems in computing. You might "brute force" your way to a solution by calculating as many possibilities as you can, or you might take a procedural approach and carefully establish the known factors that influence the correct answer. In constraint programming, a problem is viewed as a series of limitations on what could possibly be a valid solution.

In this edition of our open source news roundup, Sandboxie's path to open source, update on the Pentagon's adoption of open source, open source in Hollywood, and more!

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Brian Behlendorf is perhaps best known for being a co-founder of the Apache Project, which became the Apache Software Foundation. Today, he's the executive director of the Hyperledger Foundation, an organization focused on enterprise-grade, open source, distributed ledgers (better known as blockchains). He also says he "put the first ad banner online and have been apologizing ever since."

In my series about GNOME Boxes, I explained how Linux users can quickly spin up virtual machines on their desktop without much fuss. Boxes is ideal for creating virtual machines in a pinch when a simple configuration is all you need.

Many sobering lessons from history emphasize democracy is not a finished product. The Roman Empire ended in a dictatorship, while the feudal Middle Ages delivered the Magna Carta and the Renaissance; despite the American Revolution, slavery continued for many years, while the French Revolution resulted in the restoration of the monarchy. That said, more people are living in democracies around the world today than at any time before, and living standards in democracies continue to improve.

On September 27th, dozens of indie developers will come together virtually to develop video games using open source software. This date marks the third annual Open Jam, a three-day, 80-hour online game jam dedicated to indie developers building playful games and advancing the world of open source game development.

In preparation for Open Jam 2019, we wanted to share the story of Open Jams past and preview the exciting new things coming this year!

Object-relational mapping (ORM) makes life easier for application developers, in no small part because it lets you interact with a database in a language you may know (such as Python) instead of raw SQL queries. SQLAlchemy is a Python ORM toolkit that provides access to SQL databases using Python. It is a mature ORM tool that adds the benefit of model relationships, a powerful query construction paradigm, easy serialization, and much more.

In electrical engineering, a transient fault is defined as an error condition that vanishes after the power is disconnected and restored. This is also a workaround many of us unconsciously use when we forcefully power our physical devices off and on when they're performing poorly or frozen on a blue crash screen filled with gibberish.

For a long time, I thought all the files I saw on GitLab and GitHub with an .md extension were written in a file type exclusively for developers. That changed a few weeks ago when I started using Markdown. It quickly became the most important tool in my daily work.

Markdown makes my life easier. I just need to add a few symbols to what I'm already writing and, with the help of a browser extension or an open source program, I can transform my text into a variety of commonly used formats such as ODT, email (more on that later), PDF, and EPUB.

Ansible is an open source IT configuration management and automation platform. It uses human-readable YAML templates so users can program repetitive tasks to happen automatically without having to learn an advanced programming language.

Ansible is agentless, which means the nodes it manages do not require any software to be installed on them. This eliminates potential security vulnerabilities and makes overall management smoother.

Despite my 15 years of experience in the Linux infrastructure space, if you had asked me a year ago what a mainframe was, I'd be hard-pressed to give a satisfying technical answer. I was surprised to learn that the entire time I'd been toiling away on x86 machines in various systems administration roles, Linux was running on the s390x architecture for mainframes. In fact, 2019 marks 20 years of IBM's involvement in Linux on the mainframe, with purely community efforts predating that by a year.

If your day-to-day as a developer, system administrator, full-stack engineer, or site reliability engineer involves Git pushes, commits, and pulls to and from GitHub and deployments to Amazon Web Services (AWS), security is a persistent concern. Fortunately, open source tools are available to help your team avoid common mistakes that could cost your organization thousands of dollars.

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.