opensource.com

Previously in this series on open organizations and talent management, I’ve discussed the importance of cultivating an organization’s open leaders by getting out of their way and letting them flourish.

I've attended many open source conferences over the years, and I usually find at least one session that discusses burnout, stress, or work-life balance. I've found many of these sessions helpful—not just personally, but I've also learned some important lessons for managing open source communities.

Google v. Oracle has finally concluded in a sweeping 6-2 decision by the US Supreme Court favoring Google and adding further clarity on the freedom to use application programming interfaces (APIs). Software developers can benefit from this decision.

The telnet command is one of the most popular network troubleshooting tools for anyone from systems administrators to networking hobbyists. In the early years of networked computing, telnet was used to connect to a remote system. You could use telnet to access a port on a remote system, log in, and run commands on that host.

Giving friends and neighbors a bootable USB drive containing your favorite Linux distribution is a great way to introduce neophyte Linux users to the experience we all enjoy. There are still a large number of folks who have never heard of Linux, and putting your favorite distribution on a bootable USB drive is a great way to break the ice.

Let's get one thing straight up front: there's nothing open about the Star Wars franchise in real life (although its owner does publish some open source code). Star Wars is a tightly controlled property with nothing published under a free-culture license.

Over the years, I have read many articles and posts about how systemd is trying to replace everything and take over everything in Linux. I agree; it is taking over pretty much everything.

But not really "everything-everything." Just "everything" in that middle ground of services that lies between the kernel and things like the GNU core utilities, graphical user interface desktops, and user applications.

Lisp was invented in 1958, which makes it the second-oldest computer programming language. It has spawned several modern derivatives, including Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp (Elisp), Clojure, Racket, Scheme, Fennel, and GNU Guile.

April was full of exciting news in the world of open source. Keep reading for some of the more interesting tidbits, including Linux out of this world... on Mars.

Linux had a big moment on April 19: The open source operating system powered Ingenuity, a NASA helicopter that was the first powered aircraft to fly on Mars.

The lives we led before we arrived where we are now sometimes feel like a distant land full of memories we can't quite recall. And sometimes we have lived experiences that we'll just never forget. Many times those experiences teach us and help us appreciate where we are today. We may even wish for those days as we recount our past lives.

What did you do before tech? Tell us in the comments.

In my last week of high school in 1996, I quit my job at Carl's Jr. because I thought maybe without school, I'd have time to learn enough skills to get hired at a PC shop or something. I didn't know that I actually had incredibly marketable skills as a Linux sysadmin and C programmer, because I was the only tech person I'd ever known (except the people I chatted with on Undernet's #LinuxHelp channel).

In the words of Dan Kaminsky, the legendary DNS hacker, "the Internet's proven to be a pretty big deal for global society." For the Internet to work, computers must be able to find one another on the most complex network of all: the World Wide Web. This was the problem posed to government workers and academic IT staff a few decades ago, and it's their solutions that we use today.

Open source is living through a curious moment: just like sharing movements in academia and communities once helped develop open source, open source is now inspiring the development of communities.

To the average user, a terminal window can be baffling and cryptic. But as you learn more about the Linux terminal, it doesn't take long before you realize how efficient and powerful it is. It also doesn't take long for you to want it to be even more efficient, though, and what better way to make your terminal better than to put more terminals into your terminal?

Encryption is a way to encode a message so that its contents are protected from prying eyes. There are two general types:

If you work with different operating systems, it's handy to be able to share files between them. This article explains how to set up file access between Linux (Fedora 33) and Windows 10 using Samba and mount.cifs.

Exploring and validating data from an environment is a common practice for preventing service disruptions. You can choose to run the process periodically or on-demand, and the data you're checking can come from different sources: telemetry, command outputs, etc.

Programming languages and frameworks continuously evolve to help developers who want to develop and deploy applications with even faster speeds, better performance, and lower footprint. Engineers push themselves to develop the "next big thing" to satisfy developers' demands for faster deployments.

In my article on identifying Linux performance bottlenecks using open source tools, I explained some simple ways to monitor Linux performance using open source graphical user interface (GUI) tools. I focused on identifying performance bottlenecks, situations where a hardware resource reaches its limits and holds back your PC's performance.

A computer's operating system and applications use the primary memory (or RAM) to perform various tasks. This volatile memory, containing a wealth of information about running applications, network connections, kernel modules, open files, and just about everything else is wiped out each time the computer restarts.