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Russian OS Producer Astra Linux Plans Moscow IPO -Vedomosti  U.S. News & World Report

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Meet Free Software Foundation Executive Director Zoë Kooyman Seth Kenlon Fri, 07/08/2022 - 03:00 3 readers like this 3 readers like this

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) started promoting the idea of sharing code way back in 1985, and since then it's defended the rights of computer users and developers. The FSF says that the terms "open" and "closed" are not effective words when classifying software, and instead considers programs either freedom-respecting ("free" or "libre") or freedom-trampling ("non-free" or "proprietary"). Whatever terminology you use, the imperative is that computers must belong, part and parcel, to the users, and not to the corporations that owns the software the computers run. This is why the GNU Project, and the Linux kernel, Freedesktop.org, and so many other open source projects are so important.

Recently, the FSF has acquired a new executive director, Zoë Kooyman. I met Zoë in 2019 at an All Things Open conference. She wasn't yet the executive director of the FSF at that time, of course, but was managing their growing list of major events, including LibrePlanet. I was captivated by her energy and sincerity as she introduced me to a seemingly nonstop roster of people creating the freedom-respecting software I used on a daily basis. I had stumbled into an FSF meetup and ended up hanging out with the people who were actively defining the way I lived my digital life. These were the people who ensured that I had what Zoë Kooyman and the FSF calls the four essential freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

When I heard about Zoë's appointment as executive director, I emailed her for an interview and she was kind enough to take some time out of her very busy schedule to have a chat.

Seth Kenlon: You're the executive director of the FSF! How did you get here?

Zoë Kooyman: In my working life, I started out as an event organizer, traveling the world while producing some of the world's biggest music shows. Working with so many different cultures in ever-changing locations is exciting, as is making all the different elements of production come together, whether that's the show, technique, or the other live elements. It's a juggling game to have everything fall into place at the right moment. I spent a lot of time living and working in different countries, and learning a lot about organization and communication thanks to this work. I also studied, and worked with different forms of media, how they are experienced, and their relationship with society.

It was in university that I first learned about copyleft. About how we can use existing structures to our benefit, and drive change. It was also then that media (as well as the Internet, and software) landscapes started changing rapidly with encroachments on freedom as a consequence. Moving to the US changed things for me. In the US, I developed a much stronger sense of urgency for matters of social responsibility, and so I decided to act on it. I was thankful to John Sullivan (the FSF executive director at that time) for hiring me based on what I knew about free software and my organizing experience, and allowed me to bring the two together.

Seth: How did you get into Free Software?

Zoë: We tend to expect technical people to be the main people affected by free software, but free software is a movement to defend freedom for anyone using a computer. Actually, software freedom affects members of marginalized communities who are unable to have regular access to a computer. Software shapes their lives as well.

What the concept of copyleft, as well as the GNU Project, has achieved is exceptional. To truly observe the direction society was heading in, and say, "It doesn't have to be this way. We can take matters in our own hands." That changed my outlook on life early on. I started working on the idea of using already existing materials and reintroducing it to different subcultures. In the entertainment industry you see this all the time, the inspiration from and building on other people's work, and the result is a reflection of the time we live in, as well as a nod to history. True progression cannot happen without that freedom.

As a commentary on copyright for film, I spent time working with the National Film Institute in the Netherlands to create a compilation of "orphaned footage" that was shown at a large scale dance event for thousands of young people in an area with a 170m panoramic screen and a live DJ playing to it. They have continued to play it regularly at events like the Dutch Museumnacht.

Not being a technical person, I expressed these ideas culturally, but over the years, I was confronted with the ideas of free software more and more, and I realized that with the continued integration of software into our lives (and sometimes our bodies), the fight for free software is becoming more relevant every day. In a world where proprietary software prevails, our society will progress in a way that favors profit and the progression of the few over the freedom of many. Without free software, there are so many aspects of life, so many important social causes that cannot truly succeed.

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Seth: When did you start with the FSF?

Zoë: Early 2019, one week before the last in-person edition of LibrePlanet.

Seth: What attracted you to the Executive Director role?

Zoë: The FSF is just one organization that is trying to move the needle towards a more equitable, more collaborative, and more software-literate society, but it has been at the core of the movement for a long time. Society is changing rapidly, and most people are not being properly prepared in how to deal with the digital building blocks of today's society i.e. software. This is all incredibly important work, and there are not enough people doing this work. It is important to have an organization that can handle the different challenges that lay ahead.

The executive director role, is in a way, merely a facilitating role for the staff and the community to be able to make significant changes toward free software. I believe it is vitally important that we continue to spread the free software message, and with the team we have at the FSF, I believe we can make a real difference. I believe I can use the lessons of working with so many different cultures and people, organizing really challenging projects globally, to help get the best out of all of us. The support I received from staff, management, the community, and the board in this decision, convinced me it was a good decision to take this on.

Seth: What do you see as the biggest challenges in software freedom today? What should the FSF's role be in addressing those challenges?

Zoë: As software has integrated itself more and more into the basic fabric of society, it's also become more invisible. Software is now so widespread, and we've been conditioned to overlook it. We focus on what a program can do, not how it does it, let alone if it respects you as a user. And in the meantime, software is proliferating more rapidly than ever before. If people don't understand the fabric out of which a program is made, and all they do, all day, is use these programs, then how can we even begin to explain to them that they are being treated unjustly?

The FSF's role is to bring every conversation back to this logic of user freedom, to remind us that the tools we use are not benign. Education and government adoption are important focus areas for that reason. If we get people to focus on the issue of software freedom in those areas, we will truly make a difference. Education will help make sure future generations have a chance at freedom, and free software in government is about protecting citizens from unjust influences through proprietary software (maintaining digital sovereignty).

We can show people that today's society is teaching us a faulty lesson: that it is normal to be subjected to encroachments on your freedoms for reasons "too complex to understand." If you want convenience, connection, or just to do your job, you need to trust these organizations and abide by their will. That is not true. We have an entire community of people who believe we can have a society that doesn't ask you to surrender your freedoms to function in it. And we have this legal framework that supports our ideas. People of all backgrounds and skill levels join our conversations daily, more and more people care about their freedom, and everyone has their own reasons. We learn new things every day about how we can protect ourselves and others, and I look forward to a freer future.

Find out what the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is all about.

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Photo by Rob Tiller, CC BY-SA 4.0

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NVIDIA Accelerates DPU Adoption via Linux Foundation Project  Wccftech

Umbrel: Unique Linux for Self Hosting Open Source Software  It's FOSS

The rewritten NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver with a focus on improving performance for old Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware has been merged! This also allows proper FP64 usage finally for the Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" series graphics cards...

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The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to contributors who successfully complete a free and open source software coding project during the summer. Launched in 2005, GSoC takes place from May to August. Project ideas are submitted by host organizations involved in open source software development, though students can also propose their own project ideas.

This year, the program was opened to anyone 18 years or older – not just students and recent graduates. Participants get paid to write software, with the amount of their stipend depending on the purchasing power parity of the country where they are located.

This is also the first time the Zephyr Project is participating in GSoC under The Linux Foundation umbrella. Please join us in welcoming these contributors and their projects:

Project #1: Arduino module based on Zephyr

1 contributor full-size (350 hours).

Arduino’s popularity is renowned as a popular framework for providing a simplified interface to program embedded devices. Recently, Arduino adopted mbed OS as the base RTOS for some of their newer devices. With that work, they separated out Arduino Core as an independent abstraction layer from Arduino Core for mbed. This opens up the possibility for leveraging Arduino Core on other OSes. The project idea is to create a Zephyr module that leverages the Arduino Core so that a developer can use Zephyr as the underlying OS when they use the Arduino framework on Arduino-compatible devices. The benefits to the user include:

• Access to Arduino APIs as well as advanced Zephyr capabilities
• Broader set of devices than the standard Arduino ecosystem thanks to Zephyrs’ device support
• Ability to re-use Arduino tools like the Arduino IDE and wealth of libraries

Arduino Core is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License and Zephyr is licensed under Apache 2. That means this project will most likely need to be developed out of tree and in a separate repo to keep code and license separation. See #22247 for a historic discussion & soburi/arduino-on-zephyr for an earlier attempt prior to the Arduino Core architecture.

The contributor’s task is thus:

• Implement a bare-bones Module based on Arduino Core that can compile for any target (no functionality, possibly in QEMU)
• Implement a common peripheral from the Arduino API based on Zephyr such as Serial
• Target one physical board, such as the Arduino Zero

Mentors:

• Jonathan Beri – CEO of Golioth and Zephyr TSC
• Alvaro Viebrantz – Founding Engineer of Golioth and Google GDE

Code License: LGPL

Contributor Details:

• Name: Dhruva Gole
• Project Blog: https://dhruvag2000.github.io/Blog-GSoC22/
• Project Poster:

About the contributor: Dhruva is an undergraduate student   majoring in Electrical engineering. He has a broad range of interests from embedded software development to hardware design and has experience in working on SBCs, microcontrollers, and embedded Linux platforms.

Project #2: Apache Thrift Module for Zephyr

1 contributor full-size (350 hours).

Apache Thrift is an IDL specification,RPC framework, and code generator that abstracts away transport and protocol details to let developers focus on application logic.It works across all major operating systems, supports over 27 programming languages, 7 protocols, and 6 low-level transports. Originally developed at Facebook in 2007, it was subsequently shared with the Apache Software Foundation. 

Supporting Thrift in the Zephyr RTOS would benefit the community greatly. It would lead to new software and hardware technologies, new products, and additional means for cloud integration. Thrift can be used over virtually any transport as well and for that reason, it is a natural choice for the many different physical communication layers supported by Zephyr. The project idea is to get the proof-of-concept Thrift for Zephyr Module into shape for upstreaming. To achieve that, the contributor must:

• Perform additional integration for Thrift features (protocols, transports)
• Author additional sample applications using supported boards or Qemu
• Author additional tests and generate coverage reports using the Zephyr Test Framework
• Ensure the module follows appropriate coding guidelines and satisfies module requirements
• Contribute any necessary improvements back to the Apache Thrift Project.
• Contribute any necessary improvements back to the Zephyr Project.

Mentors:

• Christopher Friedt – SWE / ASIC FW at Meta and Zephyr TSC member
• Stephanos Ioannidis – Zephyr CXX Subsystem Maintainer

Code License: Apache 2.0.

Contributor Details:

Name: Young

About the contributor: Young is a student majoring in  communication engineering, and he will pursue his Master’s degree in computer engineering. He has a broad range of interests from front-end development to hardware design, and has experience in working on the Web, IoT and embedded platforms. A low-cost single-board computer with a RISC-V 64 processor designed by him in 2021 was reported by several geek media.

The post Google Summer of Code + Zephyr RTOS appeared first on Linux Foundation.

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Back in Linux 5.17 the AMD P-State "amd_pstate" driver was introduced for Ryzen and EPYC systems as an alternative to the ACPU CPUFreq frequency scaling driver with an emphasis on delivering better power efficiency for modern AMD Zen 2 and newer systems. Since the mainlining there hasn't been too much change to this driver but now a new patch series has been sent out with some updates...

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Akamai Linode now offers Kali Linux instances  ZDNet

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