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Open source software has come a long way since the Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998. Back then, the thought of releasing source code anyone could change scared many commercial software vendors. Now, according to Red Hat's 2019 State of Enterprise Open Source survey, 99% of IT leaders say open source software plays at least a "somewhat important" role in their enterprise IT strategy.

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The idea that internet privacy is important only if you have something to hide is a misconception, says Nathan Handler. Privacy is something we should all care about to protect ourselves and the people we communicate with, whether or not we're doing anything wrong or embarrassing, he says.

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In this edition of our open source news roundup, we share Facebook's choice to open source two algorithms for finding harmful content, Apple's new role in the Data Transfer Project, and more news you should know.

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A file path is the human-readable representation of a file or folder’s location on a computer system. You’ve seen file paths, although you may not realize it, on the internet: An internet URL, despite ancient battles fought by proprietary companies like AOL and CompuServe, is actually just a path to a (sometimes dynamically created) file on someone else’s computer.

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While science is supposed to be about building on each other's findings to improve our understanding of the world around us, reproducing and reusing previously published results remains challenging, even in the age of the internet. The basic format of the scientific paper—the primary means through which scientists communicate their findings—has more or less remained the same since the first papers were published in the 18th century.

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Whether you are a maker, a teacher, or someone looking to expand your Python skillset, the BBC:Microbit has something for you. It was designed by the British Broadcasting Corporation to support computer education in the United Kingdom.

The open hardware board is half the size of a credit card and packed with an ARM processor, a three-axis accelerometer, a three-axis magnetometer, a Micro USB port, a 25-pin edge connector, and 25 LEDs in a 5x5 array.

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Understanding Linux permissions and how to control which users have access to files is a fundamental skill for systems administration.

This article will cover standard Linux file systems permissions, dig further into special permissions, and wrap up with an explanation of default permissions using umask.

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One of GitHub's superpowers is the ability to magically turn your documentation into a website. If you configure a GitHub Page for your docs/ folder on your AwesomeProject website, you'll end up with yourname.github.io/awesomeproject, showing your documentation, all for free.

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DevOps is just another term for value stream development. What does value stream mean?

Value is what arises during our interactions with customers and stakeholders. Once we get into value stream development, we quickly realize that value is not an entity. Value constantly changes. Value is a process. Value is a flow.

Hence the term stream. Value is only value if it's a stream. And this streaming of value is what we call continuous integration (CI).

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A Bash alias is a method of supplementing or overriding Bash commands with new ones. Bash aliases make it easy for users to customize their experience in a POSIX terminal. They are often defined in $HOME/.bashrc or $HOME/bash_aliases (which must be loaded by $HOME/.bashrc).

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In Part 1, I laid out the structure for a multi-file C program called MeowMeow that implements a toy codec. I also talked about the Unix philosophy of program design, laying out a number of empty files to start with a good structure from the very beginning. Lastly, I touched on what a Makefile is and what it can do for you.

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Corey Quinn opened his lightning talk at the 17th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 17x) with an apology. Corey is a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, writes Last Week in AWS, and hosts the Screaming in the Cloud podcast. He's also a funny and engaging speaker.

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"Access to computers and the Internet has become a basic need for education in our society."‒U.S. Senator Kent Conrad, 2004

I spent seventeen years working in higher education, both as a campus technology leader and as an adjunct professor. Today, I continue as an adjunct professor. I know firsthand that educational technology is invaluable to the teaching and learning mission of universities—and that it changes at a rapid pace.

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So, you know how to use git. You have a GitHub repo and can push to it. All is well. But how the heck do you contribute to other people's GitHub projects? That is what I wanted to know after I learned git and GitHub. In this article, I will explain how to fork a git repo, make changes, and submit a pull request.

When you want to work on a GitHub project, the first step is to fork a repo.

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As a technical search engine optimizer, I am always looking for ways to use data in novel ways to better understand how Google ranks websites. I recently investigated whether Google's Natural Language API could better inform how Google may be classifying a site's content.

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Linux is fully capable of running not weeks, but years, without a reboot. In some industries, that’s exactly what Linux does, thanks to advances like kpatch and kgraph.

For laptop and desktop users, though, that metric is a little extreme. While it may not be a day-to-day reality, it’s at least a weekly reality that sometimes you have a good reason to reboot your machine. And for a system that doesn’t need rebooting often, Linux offers plenty of choices for when it’s time to start over.

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It has often been said that the art of computer programming is part managing complexity and part naming things. I contend that this is largely true with the addition of "and sometimes it requires drawing boxes."

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At DevFest DC in June, Sara Robinson, developer advocate at Google Cloud, gave the most seamless live demo I've ever witnessed.

Sara live-coded a machine model from scratch using TensorFlow and Keras. Then she trained the model live, deployed it to Google's Cloud AI platform, and used the deployed model to make predictions.

With the exception of perhaps one small hiccup, the whole thing went smoothly, and I learned a lot as an audience member.

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You know you're a sysadmin if you are either knee-deep in system logs, constantly handling user errors, or carving out time to document it all along the way. Yesterday was Sysadmin Appreciation Day and we want to give a big "thank you" to our favorite IT pros. We've pulled together the ultimate list of tasks, resources, tools, commands, and guides to help you become a sysadmin superhero.

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Sysadmins spend a lot of time preventing and fixing problems. There are certainly times when a sysadmin becomes a hero, whether to their team, department, company, or the general public, though the people they "saved" from trouble may never even know.

Enjoy these two stories from the community on sysadmin heroics. What does it mean to you?

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