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Technology moves quickly and so do the people who create and use it. Here are some predictions for open source tech in 2022 from the Opensource.com community.

Many journeys into open source start with community interactions. Code is an important contribution, but so is sharing knowledge. The community knowledge base is often a person's first exposure to a project.

I love working with the community of authors here at Opensource.com. I have the privilege of visiting with the members in our Correspondents program weekly and am really looking forward to building relationships with authors and readers alike.

It's Software Privacy Day again, the day meant to encourage users everywhere to spare a thought about where their data actually goes when it's posted on, over, or through the Internet. One of the cottage industries around Internet communication that seems to ebb and flow in popularity is the venerable chat application. People use chat applications for all manner of conversations, and most people don't think about what bots are recording and monitoring what's being said, whether it's to effectively target ads or just to build a profile for future use.

Higher education institutions are actively looking for ways to adapt to rapidly improving technology and enable students to use advances in computing to study, collaborate, and learn in new ways. Many institutions have been using open source software to exchange knowledge more easily, ensure a better learning experience, and handle administration with fewer worries.

Demand for open source software in higher education is drastically increasing especially as the need for remote learning grows.

I’ve had many conversations recently that have me looking at a crucial question that impacts neurodivergent corporate employees and their managers: how do we understand, encourage, measure, nurture, and assess the career development of neurodivergent people? Development opportunities, and how managers assess performance, are critical aspects of career growth, financial compensation, morale, feelings of self worth, happiness, employee retention, and the ability of individuals and companies to achieve their goals.

It seems everyone is rushing to get their software on the cloud. The rapid growth of cloud computing has empowered hyperscaler cloud providers to market various technologies to feed the growing demand.

Hyperscalers are now providing full-stack capabilities to increase their footprint and further lock-in customers, making the cloud seem more like a threat than an open communal space. 

What does the cloud actually offer? Quite a lot, based on reports from the field:

One of the primary functions of computers is to parse data. Some data is easier to parse than other data, and voice input continues to be a work in progress. There have been many improvements in the area in recent years, though, and one of them is in the form of DeepSpeech, a project by Mozilla, the foundation that maintains the Firefox web browser. DeepSpeech is a voice-to-text command and library, making it useful for users who need to transform voice input into text and developers who want to provide voice input for their applications.

I like the Groovy programming language a lot. I like it because, in the end, I like Java, even though Java sometimes feels clumsy. And because I like Java so much, I don't find many other JVM languages especially attractive. Kotlin, Scala, and Clojure, for example, don't feel much like Java, pursuing their own perspectives on what makes a good programming language.

Created in 2015, Rocket.Chat is a fully open source and customizable communications platform designed for communities and organizations with high standards for data protection. Rocket.Chat enables communication through federation, and over 12 million people are using it for team chat, customer service, secure file sharing, and much more. Rocket.Chat is in many ways the world's most comprehensive open source communications platform.

Many people aspire to become contributors to open source projects. With a little effort, anyone can. This article shares how I got started with open source contributions and how doing so helped me land a job in an open source organization.

When I started using Linux in the 1990s, I was in my mid-40s and accessibility was not something I gave much thought to. Now, however, as I'm pushing 70, my needs have changed. A few years ago, I purchased a brand new Darter Pro from System76, and its default resolution is 1920x1080, and it's high DPI, too. The system came with Pop_OS!, which I found that I had to modify to be able to see the icons and text on the display. Thank goodness that Linux on the desktop has become much more accessible than in the 1990s.

In November, we shared the article 7 Linux commands to use just for fun and asked you to tell us what "for fun" Linux command you recommend—and why?

Some Opensource.com contributors shared their favorites below.

My favorites:

There are many game design programs and many different possible approaches to game design, but for me, the one that stands out is Bitsy. Created by Adam Le Doux in 2017 and released under an MIT license, Bitsy is, in the words of its creator: "A little editor for little games or worlds. The goal is to make it easy to make games where you can walk around, talk to people, and be somewhere."

The usage of Go is growing rapidly. It is now the preferred language for writing cloud-native software, container software, command-line tools, databases, and more. Go has had built-in support for testing for quite some time now. It makes writing tests and running them using the Go tool relatively easy.

During the implementation of OpenStack workloads, a common issue is fragmentation throughout the network, causing unforeseen performance issues. Fragmentation is normally difficult to address because networks can get complex, so the path of packets can be hard to trace or predict.

On GivingTuesday, the Mautic project—an open source marketing automation platform—shared its intention to allocate part of its budget each year to financially support the other open source projects on which it depends, as part of the Back Your Stack initiative.

These days, we all have a few dozen passwords. Fortunately, the bulk of those passwords are probably for websites, and you probably access most websites through your internet browser, and most browsers have a built-in password manager. The most common internet browsers also have a synchronization feature to help you distribute your passwords between the browsers you run across all your devices, so you're never without your login information when you need it.

PHP is a widely-used programming language on the web, and it's estimated that nearly 80% of all websites use it. My team at CrowdSec decided that we needed to provide server admins with a PHP bouncer to help ward away bots and bad actors who may attempt to interact with PHP files.

This article is a follow-up to my last article Set up a build system with CMake and VSCodium.