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As an open community evolves, so does the way it expresses its identity to others. And having open conversations about how you'd like your community to be recognized is an important component of community engagement.

Simply put, your community's brand is what people (especially potential contributors) see first when they encounter you. So you want to make sure your brand reflects your community—its values, its principles, and its spirit.

In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, an open source microfluidics pump, Germany rolls out an encrypted messaging platform based on Matrix, and more open source news.

In my previous article, I introduced natural language processing (NLP) and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), the NLP toolkit created at the University of Pennsylvania. I demonstrated how to parse text and define stopwords in Python and introduced the concept of a corpus, a dataset of text that aids in text processing with out-of-the-box data. In this article, I'll continue utilizing datasets to compare and analyze natural language.

Collaborating on an open source software project is inherently an online experience. For me, almost all of my interaction has been via email. I'll send someone a patch, and they'll review it and reply to me. Or a user will file a bug, and I'll respond to it via the bug tracker. More commonly, developers in the open source community will discuss ideas via the email list.

There's a saying about the cloud, and it goes something like this: The cloud is just somebody else's computer. While the cloud is actually more complex than that (it's a lot of computers), there's a lot of truth to the sentiment. When you move to the cloud, you're moving data and services and computing power to an entity you don't own or fully control. On the one hand, this frees you from having to perform administrative tasks you don't want to do, but, on the other hand, it could mean you no longer control your own computer.

Open source software is now mainstream; long gone are the days when open source projects attracted developers alone. Nowadays, users across numerous industries are active consumers of open source software, and you can't expect everyone to know how to use the software just by reading the code.

I am mostly a self-taught programmer. When I was growing up in the late 1970s, our elementary school had a small resource room with an Apple II computer. My brother and I fell into a group of friends that liked computers, and we all helped each other learn the system.

The world of networking has undergone monumental shifts over the past decade, particularly in the ongoing move from specialized hardware into software defined network functions (NFV) for data plane1 and packet processing.

The act of breaking something down in order to teach it to others can be a great way to reacquaint yourself with some old concepts and, in many cases, gain new insights.

Crash dump, memory dump, core dump, system dump … all produce the same outcome: a file containing the state of an application's memory at a specific time—usually when the application crashes.

Knowing how to deal with these files can help you find the root cause(s) of a failure. Even if you are not a developer, dump files created on your system can be very helpful (as well as approachable) in understanding software.

This is a hands-on article, and can you follow along with the example by cloning the sample application repository with:

As you navigate the world of IT and technology, there are some terms you come across repeatedly. Some of them are hard to quantify and may take on different meanings as time goes on. "DevOps" is an example of a word that seems (to me) to change depending on the person using it; the original DevOps pioneers might not even recognize what we call DevOps today.

In Sogeti's most recent World Quality Report, software testing ranked No. 1 in terms of its contributions to business objectives and growth, making it a key enabler for business digitalization. Despite this, the software testing industry still reports major pain points related to test maintenance, automation, tooling, and skills. Most of the tooling in common use lacks capabilities, is too complex to integrate, provides insufficient intelligence, or is too difficult to use.

Most POSIX systems come with GNU bc, an arbitrary precision numeric processing language. Its syntax is similar to C, but it also supports interactive execution of statements and processing data from standard in (stdin). For that reason, it's often the answer to the question, "How do I do math in the Linux shell?" This style of response is common online:

Natural language processing (NLP) is a specialized field for analysis and generation of human languages. Human languages, rightly called natural language, are highly context-sensitive and often ambiguous in order to produce a distinct meaning. (Remember the joke where the wife asks the husband to "get a carton of milk and if they have eggs, get six," so he gets six cartons of milk because they had eggs.) NLP provides the ability to comprehend natural language input and produce natural language output appropriately.

The meteoric rise of containerization and microservices has been necessary to meet the growing demand for applications, but getting it right means overcoming some critical network orchestration challenges. Out of the complexities that developers of cloud-native applications face, strategically utilizing Kubernetes ingress controllers is among the most difficult components to understand—and among the most important.

I've been a Fedora Linux contributor for a little over a decade now. Fedora has a large community of developers and users, each with a unique set of skills ranging from being a particularly discerning user to being an amazing programmer. I like this because it inspires and motivates me to develop new skills of my own.

Hackathons are events where developers, product managers, designers, and others come together to tackle problems over a short time period. They have become increasingly popular over the last 15 years after OpenBSD ran the first hackathon in June 1999.

These events provide several benefits—greater engagement across the community, innovation and new ideas, awareness for the organizers, and networking opportunities for participants.

In the first two articles of this series on Mycroft, an open source, privacy-focused digital voice assistant, I covered the background behind voice assistants and some of Mycroft's core tenets.

The team at Anvil recently open sourced the Anvil App Server, a runtime engine for hosting web apps built entirely in Python.

The community reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, and we, at Anvil, have already incorporated lots of that feedback into our next release. But one of the questions we keep getting asked is, "Why did you choose to open source such a core part of your product?"

As part of my role as a principal communication strategist 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 three of my and their favorite articles from that update.