Open-source News

Escuelas Linux 8.0: A Major Upgrade for the 25th Anniversary  It's FOSS News

Why Open Source Software ‘Fragments’ - And How To Fix It  Forbes

TuxCare KernelCare Enterprise Integrated with orcharhino Data ...  Business Wire

Inspired by the classic SimTower, build up high with Property Pro  GamingOnLinux

Proposed Linux Patch Would Allow Disabling CPU Security Mitigations At Build-Time  Phoronix

A proposed Linux kernel patch would provide a new Kconfig build time option of "CONFIG_DEFAULT_CPU_MITIGATIONS_OFF" to build an insecure kernel if wanting to avoid the growing list of CPU security mitigations within the kernel and their associated performance overhead...

Going to live my dream of Fifth Element flying cars in MiLE HiGH TAXi  GamingOnLinux

Wine 8.1 released starting another year of Windows to Linux ...  GamingOnLinux

For those making use of the new Radeon RX 7900 series "RDNA3" graphics cards on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver code has seen nearly three dozen patches merged yesterday providing a variety of small updates to this support...

The OpenMPI message passing interface library is ready to completely abandon 32-bit software support with its forthcoming v5.0 release...

As mentioned a few weeks back, Red Hat has been working to arrange a developer "hackfest" to further work out plans and development around HDR display support on the Linux desktop. They are aiming to bring together graphics driver developers, desktop developers, and other Linux stakeholders -- including possibly the likes of Valve -- to work out planning of high dynamic range monitor support over the next year or two for the Linux desktop. That Red Hat HDR hackfest has now been organized to happen in late April...

Red Hat's Display/HDR Hackfest Scheduled For April  Phoronix

OBS Studio 29.0.1 rolls out with many bug fixes  GamingOnLinux

A half-year has passed already since Dbus-Broker 32 was released for this drop-in replacement to the reference D-Bus implementation that is focused on providing better performance and reliability. Today that's been succeeded by Dbus-Broker 33 as a relatively minor update to this software from the BUS1 project...

OBS Studio 29.0.1 Is Out to Fix Linux Crash on Wayland, X11 Capture Issue  9to5Linux

WINE Windows translation layer has matured like a fine... you get the picture  The Register

elementary OS 7 Is Now Available: Here's What's New  MUO - MakeUseOf

Proton 7.0-6 out now fixing EA App, Ubisoft Connect and games on ...  GamingOnLinux

How upstream contributions power scientific research cdelia Fri, 02/03/2023 - 03:00

Horizon Europe emphasizes open science and open source technology. The program evolved from Horizon 2020, which provided financial support for research projects that promoted industrial competitiveness, advanced scientific excellence, or solved social challenges through the process of "open science."

Open science is an approach to the scientific process based on open cooperative work, tools, and diffusing knowledge found in the Horizon Europe Regulation and Model Grant Agreement. This open science approach aligns with open source principles that provide a structure for such cooperation.

The open source principles are:

• Transparency
• Collaboration
• Release early, release often
• Inclusion
• Community orientation

In creating open source software, one of the basic foundational principles of open source software development is an "upstream first" philosophy. The opposite direction is "downstream," and upstream and downstream make up the ecosystem for a given software package or distribution. Upstreams are important because that's where the source contribution comes from.

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Each upstream is unique, but generally, the upstream is where decisions are made and where the community for a project collaborates for the project's objectives. Work done upstream can flow out to many other open source projects. The upstream is also a place where developers can report bugs and security vulnerabilities. If a bug or security flaw is fixed upstream, then every downstream project or product based on the upstream can benefit from that work.

It is important to contribute to the work side-by-side with the rest of the community from which you benefit. By working upstream first, there is the opportunity to vet ideas with the larger community and work together to build new features, releases, content, etc. It's far better if all the contributors work together rather than contributors from different companies, universities, or affiliations working on features behind closed doors and then trying to integrate them later. Open source contributions can outlive the research project duration making a more durable impact.

As an example of such contributions, in the ORBIT FP7 EU project, a feature was developed by Red Hat (lower layers, such as Linux Kernel and QEMU) and Umea University (upper layers, such as LibVirt and OpenStack) and contributed to their related upstream communities. This enabled "post-copy live migration of VMs" in OpenStack. Even though that was done several years ago, that feature is still available (and independently maintained) in any OpenStack distribution today (as well as plain LibVirt and QEMU).

Just as with software development, research under Horizon Europe promotes the adoption of sharing research outputs as early and widely as possible to citizen science, developing new indicators for evaluation research, and rewarding researchers. With open source upstream communities, the research contributed can extend beyond the research project timeline by feeding into the upstream life cycle. This allows future consumption by companies, universities, governments, etc., to evolve and further secure the research's project contribution.

This article originally appeared on The Impact of Upstreaming Research Contributions and is republished with permission.

Just as with software development, research under Horizon Europe promotes the adoption of sharing research outputs as early and widely as possible to citizen science, developing new indicators for evaluation research, and rewarding researchers.

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Leslie Hawthorn has spent her career creating and cultivating open source communities. She has driven open source strategy in Fortune 10 companies, pre-IPO startups, and Foundation Boards including senior roles at Red Hat, Google, the Open Source Initiative, and Elastic. She currently leads the industry verticals community strategy team within Red Hat’s Open Source Program Office. She advocates for creating citizen-centric Smart Cities underpinned by open source and open standards, and spends her spare time on tech for social good projects. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she has called Europe home for the past seven years and resides in Bonn.

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Have been designing and implementing IaaS/PaaS solutions, namelly OpenStack and Kubernetes/OpenShift, for the last 8 years, and teaching postgraduate courses for the last 7 years.

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How I apply open source principles to filmmaking psubhashish Fri, 02/03/2023 - 03:00

As a nonfiction filmmaker, I have made over nine films, all under open licenses. But that choice always comes at a cost. It's tricky, if not impossible, to release a film under an open license if the film's copyright owner does not fully own the footage used. Films often purchase rights for media produced by others to be able to use in their work legally. As my films are mostly in endangered or low-resource languages with little or no pre-existing media, the option for purchasing existing media is often out of the question.

On the other hand, film productions often record hours of footage and audio but only use a small percentage of those in the film. Footage that might not have an immediate use for a film's production house can be useful for others. In my case, many interviewed marginalized communities have a moral ownership over the footage. But researchers and others who interview them do not always provide communities with direct and open access. For these ethical and practical reasons, it is a good idea to share footage and the film under an open license and inform the communities interviewed or featured.

There are many reasons filmmakers cannot release films under an open license, but this post is for those who somehow can. I often imagined what the open source equivalent would be for films that adhere to the Openness philosophy. Enter "Open Filmmaking," a framework that encourages releasing the source code of a film, i.e., footage under open licenses, and actively uses other practices such as open source software and open multimedia resources.

In my two recent documentary film projects, "The Volunteer Archivists" and "Nani Ma," I utilized media with open licenses and various open source software (FLOSS). The films explore the areas of citizen science, archiving public domain text, documentation of oral history, and the use of open licenses and open source, as well as volunteerism.

The Volunteer Archivists

"The Volunteer Archivists" follows the sixteen-year journey of digital archiving of texts by a volunteer-led group called Srujanika from Bhubaneswar in the Indian state of Odisha. Founded in 1983 by a scientist couple, they have managed with a small workforce to archive over 10,000 volumes of books, magazines, and other periodicals published in the Odia language since the early 1800s. They now host the archived texts online at OdiaBibhaba.in. Their original work includes growing a citizen science community over two decades to promote popular science education outside textbooks, publishing a monthly magazine called "Bigyana Tarang," and several illustrated publications. As scanners became more affordable, they began the process of archiving in 2006, starting with the "Purnnachandra Odia Bhashakosha," a seven-volume lexicon from 1930-1940 that powers the Odia Wiktionary. Srujanika also contributed to the Wikimedia movement by localizing computing terms into Odia and creating a manual for Odia computer translation style and convention. Linux distributions and FLOSS, like LibreOffice, were localized in Odia because of their effort.

Nani Ma

"Nani Ma" is based on oral history that was never recorded in audiovisual media, narrated by the late Musamoni Panigrahi in an early 1900s register of the Baleswari/northern dialect of Odia. Musamoni was my grandmother, and it was quite late by the time I realized how unique her stories, songs, and narration style were. The register, storytelling, and overall oral history are important pieces of history as they were strongly influenced by the Orissa famine of 1866, a direct impact of the British colonization of India.

The entire footage and supporting multimedia files used in "Nani Ma" are now available on the Internet Archive under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License, and the film will be available to the general public after screening in film festivals.

In addition to using openly-licensed media and releasing the production media (video footage, audio recordings, still images, and promotional graphics) from these two films under open licenses, they also saw the use of several FLOSS. Some of the software includes Audacity for audio editing and codec conversion, HandBrake for video conversions, extensive use of Inkscape and GIMP, respectively, for all vector and raster image editing, Scribus for typesetting documents, and typefaces under Open Font License (available on Google Fonts and other places). I also used openly-licensed images from Wikimedia Commons and audio from freesound.org.

Open Filmmaking can be fun and challenging at the same time.

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Recommendations based on technical, ethical, and licensing constraints:

• Most open source software often comes with beta releases which are many steps ahead of their stable releases. While they can add a modern flare to work, they aren't tested like the stable versions are. Use the stable version for mission-critical projects.
• Save your work-in-progress frequently.
• If you're new to open source creative tools, then budget time to learn new software.
• Budget time to create metadata. Audiovisual media without metadata is hard to find.
• Upload media publicly if you have consent from the people featured. B-rolls could sometimes include private data in the audio (as well as in the video). Redact such information before uploading. Uploading raw and unedited video featuring people always needs scrutiny.
• Use a Creative Commons license for releasing audiovisual content you own. But the license spectrum can be confusing. Use a tool like License Chooser to evaluate what license makes the most sense.
• Use open codecs and other open multimedia resources while preparing files for uploading.

Lastly, finding a public hosting platform that shares the Openness movement's values can be intimidating. Internet Archive is my personal choice as it is helpful to create Collections under which files of different kinds can be uploaded (see "The Volunteer Archivists" and "Nani Ma" collections). Happy open-filmmaking!

Open Filmmaking is a framework that encourages releasing the source code of a film, i.e., footage under open licenses, and actively uses other practices such as open source software and open multimedia resources.

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