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Netflix has joined the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) and will begin contributing to the OpenTimelineIO (OTIO) project originally created by Pixar, the ASWF said today. OTIO is an open-source API and interchange format for collaboration between story, editorial and production departments, making it easier to track changes in shot length, notify collaborators when shots are added or removed, and conform new renders into a cut.

Jiří Kosina, the Czech Linux kernel developer in charge of the floppy drive driver, said he  no longer had working hardware. "Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find, and while Willy was able to test this, I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint.  The hardware that is still sold seems to be mainly USB-based, which doesn't use this legacy driver at all,” wrote Linus Torvalds on a discussion thread.

Arduino, one of the biggest open-source hardware and software ecosystem, has chosen Auth0 as the identity management platform of choice. With a global community of 30 million “makers”, Arduino will use Auth0 to replace its own Single Sign-On solution for all of its public-facing web properties, including Arduino Create and community apps. (Source: Yahoo! News)

If you use GitHub's online services in a country facing US sanctions, you could be about to be kicked off all but the most basic offerings. GitHub this week told Anatoliy Kashkin, a 21-year-old Russian citizen who lives in Crimea, that it had "restricted" his GitHub account "due to US trade controls". (Source: ZDNet, GitHub)

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has launched an open source user computer environment for Amazon Cloud called Galahad. UTSA is also working to expand its capabilities to support OpenStack software. The software was originally created by Star Lab Corp. for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, which is a division of the Office of National Intelligence. (Source: Biz Journals)

Allied Vision, a provider of industrial camera solutions and Antmicro, a software-driven embedded technology company developing open-source based edge computing systems, have announced a strategic partnership to drive their common goals in building complex and portable vision systems.

IBM’s Center for Open-Source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT) recently unveiled a pair of carefully curated databases designed to provide machine learning developers models and datasets for AI projects. MAX, or Model Assets Exchange, is an online open-source repository for trainable/deployable AI models. You don’t necessarily have to be an AI expert to use the database – there’s even a tutorial that’ll walk you through developing an AI that can write captions – but some of the models available will probably only appeal to enterprise developers.

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), Red Hat CTO Wright dishes on open-source and the future of Red Hat products and technologies with IBM. Responding to a question about Red Hat's products being lost in IBM the way Sun's programs were after its acquisition by Oracle, Wright said: "Red Hat remains an independent entity, and we continue to do what we do best: engage with customers, partners, and open-source communities to build open-source solutions.  Those solutions focus on our hybrid cloud strategy.

Alibaba’s chip-making subsidiary Pingtouge launched its first product on Thursday: chip processor XuanTie 910, which uses open-source architecture.  The processor uses the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA)—key programming infrastructure that decides how a device functions. Developers are allowed to build their own products using the Berkeley-based open-source ISA, with few intellectual property restrictions.

British Telecom has chosen Ubuntu OpenStack, developed by open-source specialist Canonical, as the cloud platform that will help support the introduction of 5G and fibre-to-the-premises connectivity in the UK. As part of the deal, Canonical will provide the open-source virtual infrastructure manager (VIM) that will enable BT – and by extension, its mobile network EE - to run network functions as code, reducing the need for specialized telco hardware. (Source: The Registrar)

Roughly five months following the debut of Ludwig, Uber’s open source and no-code deep learning toolkit, the ride-hailing company today detailed improvements with the latest version: Ludwig 0.2. Among them are new tools and over 50 bug fixes, plus Comet.ml integration, the addition of Google’s BERT natural language model, and support for new feature types including audio, speech, geospatial, time, and date. (Source: VentureBeat)

Red Hat has released a minor beta update to RHEL 8 to improve manageability and add new security enhancements and new drivers to the operating system. RHEL 8 was announced in May this year as a successor to RHEL 7. One of the highlights of RHEL 8 was an image builder, which helps users to create custom system images in a variety of formats. With RHEL 8.1 Beta, Image Builder is extended to support more configuration options for adding users and SSH keys. New image formats have also been added to support cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud.

Red Hat has released a minor beta update to RHEL 8 to improve manageability and add new security enhancements and new drivers to the operating system. RHEL 8 was announced in May this year as a successor to RHEL 7. One of the highlights of RHEL 8 was an image builder, which helps users to create custom system images in a variety of formats. With RHEL 8.1 Beta, Image Builder is extended to support more configuration options for adding users and SSH keys. New image formats have also been added to support cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud.

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 5.3-rc1. He wrote in the mailing list, “This is a pretty big release, judging by the commit count. Not the biggest ever (that honor still goes to 4.9-rc1, which was exceptionally big), and we've had a couple of comparable ones (4.12, 4.15 and 4.19 were also big merge windows), but it's definitely up there. Source: LKML

Ubisoft will join the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a corporate Gold member.

The OpenWhisk open source serverless platform hit graduation status as a Top-Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation. The designation comes as the serverless ecosystem continues its rapid evolution in meeting the production needs of organizations. The OpenWhisk project itself was initially born out of IBM, which donated its beta-level code into the Apache Incubator project in late 2016.

Microsoft is working to standardize data-sharing terms via pre-designed licensing agreements, the first of which now are available for preview and comment. Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief IP Counsel Erich Andersen said that Microsoft is trying to bring open-source-license-like structure to data-sharing agreements. The OSI maintains a number of pre-approved licenses, such as the Apache License, BSD License, MIT License, etc., which companies can use to license their source code.

IBM recently developed three artificial intelligence tools that could help medical researchers fight cancer. Now, the company has decided to make all three tools open-source, meaning scientists will be able to use them in their research whenever they please, according to ZDNet.

In an effort to bolster the development of cars capable of driving themselves around without human supervision, Lyft today released an autonomous vehicle data set that the company is calling the largest of its kind. It’s freely available in the existing nuScenes format, which was initially developed by Aptiv.