Open-source News

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2022 – The Open Mainframe Project, an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, today announced the launch of the Call for Proposals (CFPs) for the 3rd annual Open Mainframe Summit. The premier mainframe event of 2022, the Summit will take place in person on September 21-22 at Convene at Commerce Square in Philadelphia, PA.

“We are excited to host Open Mainframe Summit in person this year,” said John Mertic, Director of Program Management at the Linux Foundation. “The last two events were successful in that we enabled our messages to reach more users around the world. We hope to continue that momentum while also giving our community a safe place to engage and collaborate face-to-face.”

Open Mainframe Summit is open to students, developers, users and contributors of projects from around the globe looking to learn, network and collaborate. It will feature content tracks that tackle both business and technical strategies for enterprise development and deployment.

Submit a Proposal

The Call for Proposals is now open and will be accepting submissions until Friday, June 10, 2022. Interested speakers can submit proposals in 10 tracks with options for lightning talks, 30-minute sessions and panel discussions. Tracks include:

• AI & Machine Learning
  • From open source projects with a focus on AI, Machine Learning, and Data Analytics that currently run on Z to the AI accelerator on the recently announced IBM Telum processor, the mainframe will continue to be a key component of how organizations process their data. This track will look at projects, tools, and strategies currently used by organizations tackling these topics today.
• Building the Next Workforce
  • Building the next workforce in today’s evolving mainframe and post-COVID environment can be challenging. This track will provide strategies for helping onboard newcomers to the platform to learn from the veterans as well as detailed opportunities for the veterans to learn tooling from the newcomers that can now be leveraged for mainframe!
• Business
• Cloud Native on the Mainframe + Hybrid Cloud
  • Explore the solutions for and benefits of integrating  mainframe into your hybrid cloud environment. Topics range from incorporating mainframe into enterprise DevOps pipelines and enabling the use of popular distributed tooling such as VS Code to running containers directly on z/OS.
• Diversity + Inclusion
• Education + Training
  • Discover opportunities to add more tools to your tech toolkit! Whether you are just getting started with mainframe or you are an experienced veteran, there are programs to expand your skill set & to also share your knowledge with others.
• Languages
  • The mainframe supports a variety of programming languages, both on z/OS and Linux. This track will showcase some of the latest technical updates, usage statistics, and more from several of them.
• Linux on Z
• Open Source Security on Mainframe
  • From security scans performed in the course of software development to security scans and audits that can be done within an organization to make sure all software is in compliance, this track will focus on what software vendors and open source software projects are doing to ensure that software being provided on the mainframe is secure.
• z/OS

Submit a proposal: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-mainframe-summit/program/cfp/.

Meet the Program Committee

A program committee, which includes maintainers, active community members and project leaders, will review and rate the proposals once all the submissions are in. This year, Open Mainframe Project welcomes Alan Clark, CTO Office and Director for Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE, Donna Hudi, Chief Marketing Officer at Phoenix Software, Elizabeth K. Joseph, Developer Advocate at IBM and Michael Bauer, Staff Product Owner at Broadcom, Inc.

Whether a company is a member or contributor of Open Mainframe Project or is sponsoring the event has no impact on whether talks from their developers will be selected. However, being a community leader does have an impact, as program committee members will often rate talks from the creators or leaders of an open source project more highly. A key focus will be on work within Open Mainframe Project’s 21 hosted projects/working groups, or contributions that otherwise add value to the ecosystem.

Early Bird pricing of $500 for general admission or $40 for academic attendees will end July 8. Click here to register.

Sponsor Now

Open Mainframe Summit is made possible with support from sponsors, especially our first Gold Sponsor Vicom Infinity, a Converge Company. To become a sponsor, click here.

For more details about Open Mainframe or to watch the videos for Open Mainframe Summit 2021, check out the Open Mainframe Project 2021 Annual Report.

For more about Open Mainframe Project, visit https://www.openmainframeproject.org/. 

About the Open Mainframe Project

The Open Mainframe Project is intended to serve as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment. With a vision of Open Source on the Mainframe as the standard for enterprise class systems and applications, the project’s mission is to build community and adoption of Open Source on the mainframe by eliminating barriers to Open Source adoption on the mainframe, demonstrating value of the mainframe on technical and business levels, and strengthening collaboration points and resources for the community to thrive. Learn more about the project at https://www.openmainframeproject.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

###

The post Open Mainframe Project Launches Call for Proposals for the 3rd Annual Open Mainframe Summit on September 21-22 in Philadelphia, PA appeared first on Linux Foundation.

OpenBSD 7.1 is out this morning as the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system...

OpenBSD 7.1 Released With Apple Silicon Support "Ready", AMD RDNA2 Graphics  Phoronix

Top Skills Linux SysAdmins Should Ace in 2022  Toolbox tech news

Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish can replace Microsoft Windows 11 on your PC  BetaNews

Longtime Linux users especially those that frequented Linux conferences/events in pre-COVID times are likely familiar with Dirk Hohndel. Dirk has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 90's, good friend and diving buddy with Linus Torvalds, and now somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort...

At the end of last year you may recall the talked about Linux kernel patches for booting systems faster by allowing the parallel bring-up of secondary CPU cores. It's been a while since hearing much about that effort but seems to have hit a snag in that the code is running into problems on early Zen CPUs and older...

How to install a Linux operating system such as Ubuntu in Windows 11  TechRadar India

Linux Operating System Market Analysis By Trends, Size, Share, Company Overview, Growth And Forecast By 2031 – The New York Irish Emgirant  The New York Irish Emgirant

Along with the Raptor Lake P Linux kernel graphics driver support that should work its way to mainline for the v5.19 cycle, merged to Mesa 22.2 today is the Raptor Lake P bits for the Intel OpenGL / Vulkan drivers...

PeaZIP 8.6: new release, new improvements  Linux Adictos

KDE Gear 22.04 Is Here with Kalendar, Many Improvements for Your Favorite KDE Apps  9to5Linux

Chris Lord at Igalia has recently been looking at the WebKit browser engine performance as it concerns embedded devices. From this work he found that WebKit with its WPE port for embedded devices was found to be performing rather poorly on Wayland. Patches are now pending to address two uncovered issues...

A Big Performance Fix Is Pending For WebKit / WPE On Wayland  Phoronix

While GCC 12 (GCC 12.1 stable) will be out in the coming weeks, GCC 11.3 is out today as the latest stable release in the current GCC 11 series...

5 Questions to ask About Your EDR – “Visibility”  Security Boulevard

Mesa 22.1-rc2 is now available as the second weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa3D feature release of this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers...

Canonical Releases Important Ubuntu Kernel Update to Fix Eight Vulnerabilities  9to5Linux

5 open source tips to reduce waste in web design Tom Greenwood Thu, 04/21/2022 - 03:00 Up Register or Login to like.

I started my career in product design, when "product" meant a real thing that you could hold in your hand. When I moved into digital design 15 years ago, I was excited to design digital products that added value to people's lives without any environmental impact. They didn't waste energy, didn't have any wasteful packaging and didn't end up as waste in landfill sites at the end of their lives.

Therefore, I was surprised to later learn that digital products can be wasteful. In this article, I explore how applying a zero waste mindset to digital design and development can help you create an internet that's better for people and the planet.

Programming and development Red Hat Developers Blog Programming cheat sheets Try for free: Red Hat Learning Subscription eBook: An introduction to programming with Bash Bash shell scripting cheat sheet eBook: Modernizing Enterprise Java Waste isn't normal

I think it's fair to say that even if we don't like it, most of us accept waste as a normal part of everyday life. However, waste is anything but normal. In nature no resource is wasted and everything has value. The type of waste that we now think of as being so normal is a relatively new concept.

By the 1980s, waste piling up in landfill sites was already a global problem. Daniel Knapp decided that something must be done. He came up with the concept of Total Recycling, in which nothing should ever go to a landfill or incineration. He coined the term Zero Waste as the goal and co-founded a salvaging operation called Urban Ore. It was a real world experiment to demonstrate how all types of waste could be diverted from landfills and reused in the community.

While Knapp's initiative had some success, the global waste problem kept growing and in the mid-2000s a growing number of individuals began to take things into their own hands, trying to live zero waste lifestyles. This concept was popularized by bloggers such as Bea Johnson and Lauren Singer who shared their experiences trying to live without waste and inspired others to follow their lead.

How does this apply to web design?

Several years ago, I embarked on some research to understand whether or not web products have an environmental impact. I was shocked by what I found. When taken as a whole, the internet produces more carbon emissions each year than the global aviation industry, thanks to the huge amount of electricity required to power data centers, telco networks, and billions of end user devices. Not to mention the fact that all of that equipment needs to be manufactured and maintained. The internet is not virtual at all, it is very much physical.

It turns out that despite their basic functionality and appearances, early websites were super efficient, with tiny file sizes and requiring hardly any computing power. As computers got more powerful and internet speeds increased, websites became increasingly bloated, eroding the benefits of advances in computer hardware. As a result, the modern web is no faster than it was 10 years ago, and is far more polluting.

In an article for National Geographic about people living zero waste lifestyles, journalist Stephen Leahy wrote that contrary to his prior assumption, "These are not wannabe hippies, but people embracing a modern minimalist lifestyle. They say it saves them money and time and enriches their lives."

What if we applied a zero waste mindset to digital design? Could it help us create a modern, minimalist web that saves people time, money, and enriches people's lives? I think it could.

1. Pictures are more than a thousand words

A picture tells a thousand words, but the truth is that a picture uses a lot more data than 1000 words of text, and in turn it uses a lot more energy to store, transmit, and render.

Research by NielsenNorman Group found that website visitors completely ignore images that are not relevant to the content, making generic stock photos on websites a literal waste of space and of data. It's better to use images mindfully and only include them in designs that truly add value.

Even if you are going to include photos in your designs, how you use them can often be wasteful. For example, there is roughly a square law when it comes to image dimensions and file size. If you double the width and height, you almost quadruple the file size. And that's assuming you've written the code to load the correct size of image rather than loading large image files and displaying them to appear small.

You can also find waste within the images, in the form of detail that doesn't need to be there. Removing detail by blurring out parts of an image, using photography with shallow depth of field, photographing objects on plain backgrounds, or using monochrome images are just a few ways to reduce image file sizes. If the detail isn't needed, then it's waste.

Even if you design images efficiently, there's still potential waste in the image files themselves. Using indexed color in your image editing application can strip out unnecessary data from image files with no visual loss of quality.

2. Choose your file format wisely

You can also use more efficient file formats. For example, WebP image files are typically 30% smaller than JPEG and AVIF image files are roughly half the size of JPEGs.

Vector graphics such as SVG can also be much more efficient alternatives to photography on websites. You can optimize your SVG files by stripping out unnecessary layers in the design files and simplifying vector paths. The size of an SVG file can be reduced as much as 97% simply by spending a few minutes cleaning up the design file.

3. Stop autoplaying video

Autoplay videos consume far more data and energy than other content types. New York Times journalist Brian Chen wrote an article about the scourge of autoplay videos on the web, stating that they "demand your attention while burning through your data plan and sucking up your batteries." They waste a user's data plan (and therefore their money), they waste energy, and they slow down web pages. Use video sparingly, and put a play button on it to allow users to opt in.

4. Zero waste fonts

System fonts might not be popular with designers, but they already exist on every user's device so they don't need to be loaded, making them truly zero waste. For example, a travel website might use a system font to deliver an efficient user experience for its users, many of whom may be abroad and using slow, expensive roaming data.

The font-family CSS property provides some generic family names you can use to designate fonts that are already installed on the host system:

• serif
• sans-serif
• cursive
• system-ui

If you do use web fonts, the easiest place to look for waste is to identify characters in the font file that your website doesn't use. For example, some fonts supply thousands of characters, yet the English language only needs about one hundred. There are a number of font subsetting tools available online that can take any font file and strip out characters not used in your target languages.

When selecting the font to use, a browser doesn't stop at the first font in your CSS list. Font selection is actually done for each character on the webpage under the assumption that when one font lacks a specific glyph, another font in your list might provide it. If you know you need a font for a set of special characters, add that font only after you've set the main font choice to a system font.

Just like images, you can save more data by using efficient file formats. WOFF2 font files can be about 30% smaller than WOFF files, and as much as 75% smaller than TTF files.

5. Find the waste in your code

The tool CSSstats.com allows you to visualize what is actually in your CSS files and see how often you duplicate the same styles. Seeing this waste can help you clean it up, and implementing a modular design language with repeatable styles can help you maintain clean, efficient CSS over the long term.

When choosing libraries, frameworks or tracking scripts, you should ask yourself whether they're really necessary, and whether smaller alternatives are available. For example, jQuery might only be 30kb, but it's possible to build an entire web page in less than 30kb. If you can avoid adding it, you should. Likewise, the basic Google Analytics tracking script is 17kb but an alternative like the open source Plausible analytics is less than 1kb and is designed to respect people's privacy.

Some programming languages are also more wasteful than others in terms of the energy efficiency with which they can perform tasks. JavaScript is seven times more energy efficient than PHP. You should keep this in mind when deciding what new languages to learn and what technologies to specify for future projects.

Reducing waste on the web is good for everyone

It's true that eliminating waste in our web projects requires a bit of extra attention to detail, but when you do so you can create web experiences that are not only better for the environment, but deliver faster, more accessible user experiences too. Who doesn't want that?

So perhaps you should ask yourself this question from Urban Ore: "If you're not for zero waste, how much waste are you for?"

Achieve zero waste web design with these open source tools and tips.

Image by:

Opensource.com

Web development Science What to read next This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

Linux KDE receives first-ever eco-certification for Okular Seth Kenlon Thu, 04/21/2022 - 03:00 Up Register or Login to like.

The open source community KDE recently received the German Blue Angel (Blauer Engel) ecolabel for energy efficiency. The software, Okular, is a universal document viewer designed to work on multiple platforms with a wide variety of file formats.

As a longtime member of the KDE community and a happy Plasma Desktop user, I asked Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss of the KDE Eco group about the ways KDE and open source can help computing be eco-friendly.

More Linux resources Linux commands cheat sheet Advanced Linux commands cheat sheet Free online course: RHEL technical overview Linux networking cheat sheet SELinux cheat sheet Linux common commands cheat sheet What are Linux containers? Our latest Linux articles

Q: KDE has announced that sustainability is a top priority. People don't typically consider software a factor in contributing to physical waste, so what does it mean for an application to be eco-friendly?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: Software can produce waste in many ways. Software that reduces this waste is software that is more sustainable. User autonomy and transparency, the pillars of Free and Open Source Software, are factors that the Blauer Engel ecolabel recognizes as critical for sustainable software.

I can illustrate with some examples.

A computer may be rendered hardly usable, or not usable at all, due to inefficient software design, feature creep, and other forms of software bloat that users may not need or even want. Yet vendors force users to buy newer, more powerful hardware. When updates for a device, like a mobile phone or tablet, are discontinued, most people discard the device as e-waste because continued use would be a security risk. This e-waste can have huge environmental costs.

According to a report in Anthropocene Magazine, the production of a smartphone accounts for 85% to 95% of its annual carbon footprint due to the energy-intensive processes required to mine the metals. Giving users autonomy in how their software runs, what is installed or uninstalled, which devices are supported, and so on is critical for reducing hardware waste.

Q: I imagine the way software interacts with hardware can also be inefficient. Does KDE take this into consideration?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: Software can waste energy, which in turn drives up electricity bills and drains the battery. For example, advertisements or tracking data transmitted in the background are common causes of excess energy use. Users are usually powerless to opt out of such background computations, and in many cases these wasteful processes have nothing to do with the primary functions of the software.

Consider a report from the German Environment Agency, which found that two text editors performing the same task had drastically different energy demands: To get identical end results, one text editor consumed 4 times the energy compared to the other!

In probably every country in the world, every student, official, and everyday user uses a text editor. If you increase software efficiency by 4 times for billions of users worldwide, the numbers quickly add up. Choosing the more energy-efficient text editor would mean nontrivial energy savings, but transparency about software's energy demands is necessary to make such choices.

KDE Eco views eco-friendliness in terms of a range of factors that reduce waste and increase sustainability. The Blue Angel award criteria for software, which is a focus of the Blauer Engel 4 FOSS (free/open source software) project, provides an excellent benchmark for evaluating the eco-friendliness of software.

Q: Is there a benefit to users for their software to be sustainable?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: Both software that conserves energy by reducing unnecessary background processes and software that is more energy-efficient with identical results can lead to lower electricity bills, longer battery usage, extended hardware life, higher software responsiveness, and so on. And you can save money by continuing to use functioning hardware with up-to-date software.

Most important of all, using software that is sustainable may reduce the environmental impact of digitization and contribute to more responsible use of shared resources.

Q: When programming, what things can a developer keep in mind to make their code sustainable?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: I'm not a coder, but measuring energy consumption is an important first step in achieving more sustainable software. Once the numbers are known, developers can drive down the code's energy demands on hardware. This is why KDE Eco is working on setting up a community measurement lab to make measuring energy consumption accessible to FOSS projects.

The SoftAWERE project from the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance, which KDE Eco has been collaborating with, is looking to make energy consumption measurements part of the CI/CD pipeline. These tools help developers make their code more sustainable.

Q: Have you had to make trade-offs when programming Okular to make it more sustainable? In other words, have you had to sacrifice quality or features for sustainability?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: In terms of the Blue Angel ecolabel, with its emphasis on transparency in energy and resource consumption and user autonomy, Okular was already quite close to compliance.

Most of the work was in measuring the energy and hardware demands when using Okular and analyzing the results—carried out by researchers at Umwelt Campus Birkenfeld—as well as documentation of fulfillment of the award criteria. In some cases, we lacked documentation simply because we in the FOSS community may take many aspects of user autonomy for granted, such as freedom from advertising, uninstallability, or having continuous updates provided free of charge. In this respect, there was no sacrifice in quality or features of the software, and in some cases we now have better documentation after completing the application for eco-certification.

We will see what the future brings, however: In order to remain compliant, the energy demand of Okular must not increase more than 10% compared to the value at the time of application. It is possible this could require trade-offs at a future date. Or not!

Q: The Plasma Desktop isn't generally considered a lightweight desktop, especially when compared to something like LXQt. If an aging computer can't handle the full desktop, can I still benefit from K apps such as Okular?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: Yes, I believe there is a benefit to using Okular and other KDE apps over less efficient alternatives regardless of the desktop.

Q: Why do you think Okular got the attention of the Blue Angel project instead of other KDE applications like Gwenview, Dolphin, Elisa, and so on?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: Everybody needs a PDF and general document viewer! And Okular is multiplatform software, with downloads available for GNU/Linux, Plasma Mobile, Android, and Windows. This made Okular an attractive candidate for a Blue Angel application.

Please keep in mind, however, that we are working on certifying other KDE software in the near future. We already have energy consumption measurements for KMail and Krita, thanks to the work of the Umwelt Campus Birkenfeld, and we are preparing to measure Kate and GCompris in our coming community lab at KDAB (Klaralvdalens Datakonsult AB) Berlin. Moreover, we have begun reaching out to the wider FOSS community regarding measuring and improving energy efficiency and possible Blue Angel eco-certification.

Q: How important is open source to the idea of sustainable computing?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: Free and open source software can promote transparency and give users control over the software they use, rather than companies or device manufacturers. This means users, and their communities, can directly influence the factors that contribute to sustainable software design, whether when using the software or developing it.

Q: What are your future plans for KDE Eco?

Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss: In the coming weeks, we will set up the first community lab at KDAB Berlin for measuring the energy consumption of Free Software. Once the lab is set up, we will have a measure-athon to measure Kate, GCompris, and other Free Software applications. We plan to publish the results, and over time we hope to push more and more developers, FOSS or otherwise, to be transparent about the energy demands of their software products.

With more software measured, we hope to attract developers to help us develop tools to make energy consumption measurements more accessible. For instance, there is a great data analysis tool—OSCAR (Open source Software Consumption Analysis in R)—but it will need maintenance. Perhaps there are other data analysis tools we could develop for this work. Moreover, our long-term vision for the lab is to have an upload portal where developers can upload their software and usage scenarios, and the entire measurement and data analysis process is automated.

We look forward to working with the FOSS community to make these kinds of toolsets a reality!

The open source document viewer is just one element of KDE's initiative to make software more sustainable.

Image by:

(Image by KDE.org)

Linux Science What to read next Why I love KDE for my Linux desktop This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.