opensource.com

Discussions about open values in the workplace often focus on leaders creating high-level strategies and visions for their teams and organizations. But a unique set of leaders, managers, bears additional responsibilities, such as generating business performance, creating work environments, representing the larger organization to the associate, and coordinating day-to-day operations—and they do this through their relationships with employees.

Nowadays, it is no surprise that a lot of universities, academies, colleges, conservatories, etc. have already implemented open source software in their learning process.

Open source culture and concepts help students, professors, and communities have a better learning experience, being independent of tech giants that always call the shots, and therefore free to share their ideas and build on the work of others.

Let's explore why open source software is so attractive for Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Europe.

Python follows the EAFP (Easier to Ask Forgiveness than Permission) rather than the LBYL (Look Before You Leap) philosophy. The Python philosophy of EAFP is somewhat linked to its "duck typing" style of coding.

If you've ever visited a project on GitHub (for instance) with the intention of understanding how it fits into a larger system, you'll recognise the sigh of relief you experience when you find a diagram or two on (or easily reached from) the initial landing page. This is an article about the importance of architecture and specifically about the importance of diagrams.

If you want to help grow awareness around securing open source software, take the State of Open Source Survey. 

Why it is important, you ask? Every year numerous security vulnerabilities are reported across multiple ecosystems. This report, since 2017, has been a go-to aggregation point of security concerns across application libraries in PyPi, Go (aka Golang), npm, Maven Central, and PHP Packagist.

Has anyone ever sent you a document in a format that just isn't quite right for you? Maybe you don't have access to the application used to create the document, or maybe you don't need the document so much as you need what's in it, or maybe you just flat out don't like the format. There's no wrong reason for disliking a file format. If it's not your preferred format, whether you find it cumbersome to use or you just don't like how its metadata is organized, then that's enough of a reason for you to convert it.

If there's one thing you can say about open source software (OSS), it's that it quietly yet inarguably runs our world. Most of the internet is built on open source software, and, these days, millions of developers build and maintain hundreds of thousands of open source packages in more than 250 programming languages. If that's not enough, enterprise companies continue to grow their investments in open source in 2020.

Today's manufacturing challenges demand integrated systems. As current events in the world unfold, the manufacturing industry is seeing rapidly changing demand, falling capacity to meet demand, and supply bottlenecks that have become difficult to predict and manage. On top of all of this is the global economic downturn, which impacts many manufacturers and suppliers today and for the foreseeable future.

As a systems engineer, I spend a lot of time in data centers configuring servers and other computer equipment. Two of the items I keep in my toolkit are an RS-232 serial-to-USB converter and a standard DB-9 serial cable. These can be indispensable when you have no other way to access a device. You may need to deploy a new router that has not yet been configured for your network. You might need to troubleshoot a firewall appliance that has become inaccessible via SSH.

A good amount of my day-to-day involves creating, modifying, and deploying Helm charts to manage the deployment of applications. Helm is an application package manager for Kubernetes, which coordinates the download, installation, and deployment of apps. Helm charts are the way we can define an application as a collection of related Kubernetes resources. 

In a recent article, I mentioned my 2020 New Year's resolution: no more loops in Java. In that article, I chose a common (and simplified) forest management calculation—determining whether an area is forested, based on a legal definition, by calculating the proportion of ground shaded by tree canopies.

Looking back to the start of the year, we could never have predicted what would befall our world as a result of COVID-19. Back then, the coronavirus was spreading in China, and while there were warnings of its potential to escalate across the world, few could imagine the tremendous shift it would bring to the status quo.

Today, we find ourselves living in a new normal. Working from home has become standard, the global economy is uncertain, hospitals are working harder than ever, and the world is waiting for a vaccine to provide reassurance that we can stop social distancing.

Have you ever thought about how secure your Linux machine really is? There are numerous Linux distros, each with its own default settings, on which you run dozens of software packages with different version numbers, and numerous services running in the background, which we hardly know or care about.

To find the security posture—the overall security status of the software, network, and services running on your Linux machine—you could run a few commands and get bits and pieces of relevant information, but the amount of data you need to parse is huge.

Stuck indoors like most of the rest of the world, a group of Opensource.com editors and correspondents—Seth Kenlon, Matt Broberg, Alan Formy-Duval, Jessica Cherry, and Chris Hermansen—decided to use their far-flung locations and variable-quality internet connections to try out several open source video-conferencing solutions.

How many iterations does it take to get a container configuration just right? And how long does each iteration take? Well, if you answered "too many times and too long," then my experiences are similar to yours. On the surface, creating a configuration file seems like a straightforward exercise: implement the same steps in a configuration file that you would perform if you were installing the system by hand. Unfortunately, I've found that it usually doesn't quite work that way, and a few "tricks" are handy for such DevOps exercises.

An important step towards optimizing energy consumption is knowing your actual consumption. My house was built during the oil crisis in the 1970s, and due to the lack of a natural gas connection, the builders decided to use electricity to do all of the heating (water and home heating). This is not unusual for this area of Germany, and it remains an appropriate solution in countries that depend highly on nuclear power.

Building a homelab can be a fun way to entertain yourself while learning new concepts and experimenting with new technologies. Thanks to the popularity of single-board computers (SBCs), led by the Raspberry Pi, it is easier than ever to build a multi-computer lab right from the comfort of your home.

No one would really consider systemd to be a troubleshooting tool, but when I encountered a problem on my webserver, my growing knowledge of systemd and some of its features helped me locate and circumvent the problem.

The tech sector is quietly having a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Open source developers are getting involved with many aspects of the fight against the coronavirus, using Python to visualize its spread and helping to repurpose data acquisition systems to perform contact tracing.

In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, we see the success of virtual conferences, continued impact of open source on COVID-19, Retropie adds support for Raspberry Pi 4, and more open source news.