Open-source News

Global Linux Operating System Strategic Business Report 2022: 98 ...  Business Wire

Google Kickstarts 2023 With 17 Chrome Security Vulnerability Updates For Windows, Mac & Linux  Forbes

Linux Vs Windows VPS - Which One Is Better For You?  UseTheBitcoin

This new Steam Deck external controller plugin is quite useful  GamingOnLinux

A six month old merge request to Mesa was finally merged today for enabling Radeon Memory Visualizer (RMV) support with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver...

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release. / A thing of beauty  The Register

NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while it's offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving -- in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 over to NetBSD...

The NVK open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs that has seen a lot of progress over the past year is now able to run some games like The Talos Principle, which was the launch title for Vulkan 1.0. While the NVK driver is correctly rendering, it's still slow until the kernel driver side is sorted out with re-clocking...

Linux is All Set to Disable Microsoft's RNDIS Drivers  It's FOSS News

Counterplay Games makes tactical card battler Duelyst completely ...  GamingOnLinux

Google on Tuesday released their first post-holidays update to the cross-platform Chrome web browser...

Introducing Coolita 2.0: Veira Group's Linux-based Smart TV Solutions for the Indian Market  Times Now

While many haven't even moved yet to the very speedy Python 3.11 that was released back in October, for those wanting to do some bleeding-edge testing the fourth alpha of Python 3.12 is already out...

Python 3.12 Alpha 4 Released For Testing  Phoronix

7 interesting metrics about open source in sustainability Tobias Augspurger Wed, 01/11/2023 - 03:00

Open source culture has demonstrated how transparent and collaborative innovation can support modern digital services, data, and infrastructure. Yet, despite its transformative impact and use within an estimated 97% of digital products, the potential of open source for developing environmentally sustainable technologies is not well understood.

Open source software (OSS) accelerates the transition to a sustainable economy by supporting traceable decision-making, building capacity for localization and customization of climate technologies, and most importantly, helping to prevent greenwashing. This transition requires technological innovation and new opportunities for society to participate in developing and adopting technologies.

Opensustain.tech has recently published a study providing the first analysis of the health and vibrancy of OSS in sustainability and climate technology. The analysis covered multiple dimensions, including technical, social, and organizational. The report also highlights key risks and challenges for users, developers, and decision-makers, as well as opportunities for more systemic collaboration.

For the past two years, more than one thousand actively developed open source projects and organizations were collected and systematically analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods as part of the Open Sustainable Technology project and the associated database.

Community engagement

Opensustain.tech found 996 active project repositories on GitHub that had at least one commit or a closed issue in the last year. Although stars are not a perfect metric, we counted 127,038 stars across these projects. Still, a search on GitHub revealed 27 projects have more stars than the entire software in environmental sustainability combined! This is one indicator that open source still plays a minor role as a long-term transformation strategy in sustainability compared to other domains.

Topic

Additionally, half of all identified projects are in data-rich fields such as climate science, biosphere, energy system modeling, transportation, and buildings. Other topics, such as carbon offsets, battery technology, sustainable investment, emission observation, and integrated assessment modeling, show few notable developments. Based on popularity growth, opensustain.tech also identified newly emerging topics, such as green software. Moreover, most identified projects are relatively young, with a median age of 4.45 years.

Image by:

(Tobias Augspurger, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Programming language

The analysis of the number and use of programming languages provided further insight into the coding skills required and the nature of the projects. For example, opensustain.tech found Python dominated the OSS movement for sustainability, and is used in 39.8% of all projects, followed by R (16.7%), and lastly Jupyter notebooks (9.34%). This indicates a strong focus on analyzing large datasets, where Python and Jupyter Notebooks are increasingly dominant and less focused on web applications.

Image by:

(Tobias Augspurger, CC BY-SA 4.0)

License

The use of various licenses revealed potential intellectual property issues related to the use of software packages as well as the general openness of the projects. Opensustain.tech found permissive licenses like BSD, Apache and MIT are the most popular in sustainability. The MIT license was the top choice, used in 26% of the projects, followed by the copyleft license GPLv3 (17.3% of all projects).

Project size

Analysis of knowledge, work, and project governance distribution revealed small, open source communities lead most of the development. On average, open source software projects rely heavily on a single developer responsible for approximately 70% of the contributions to a project. This indicates a higher contributor risk, which may jeopardize the future of many of these projects.

Geography

Most OSS projects (64%) are based in Europe and North America, with a small number of projects from the Global South. Despite having more GitHub users than Europe, Asia accounts for only 1.9% of organizations working in OSS for sustainability.

Image by:

(Tobias Augspurger, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Industry

Academia and several government agencies contribute significantly to open source, while the lack of for-profit organizations and startups with open source business models is remarkable. 

More great content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn advanced Linux commands Download cheat sheets Find an open source alternative Explore open source resources Recommendations

Based on this analysis, opensustain.tech proposes recommendations for those interested in supporting open source software in environmental sustainability more effectively through community building, policy development, and future investment.

• Collaboration: strengthen the interconnectivity of the identified open source communities and connecting projects to local use cases is paramount for the long-term impact and stability of the ecosystem. It's also key to adapt and extend existing open source projects for underrepresented countries in the Global South.
• Funding: further support is required in the form of an open earth intelligence incubator and other support programs for open source software in environmental sustainability, as well as ongoing, dedicated funds for development and maintenance.
• Technical: the OSS community of users and developers should develop better technical interfaces between platforms, data, models, and open-source tools across and within sectors to “stop reinventing the wheel”, and standardize environmental data exchange across different levels of government.
• Advocacy: close the knowledge gap on the environmental impact of companies through open source principles and transforming financial institutions through transparent and scientific decision-making for sustainable investments.

Digital and sustainable transformation must converge as a digital public good if we are to achieve agreed environmental goals and create a safe and equitable corridor for people and the planet. Open sustainability principles can help governments, research institutes, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses move quickly toward science-based decarbonization and conservation of natural resources and ecosystems by providing critical transparency, traceable decision-making, and collaboration on innovation.

Everyone is invited to participate in future studies of this type. By contributing to opensustain.tech in any way, you help us build future reports. Most importantly, you join us in promoting and encouraging open sustainable technology.

Opensustain.tech has recently published a study providing the first analysis of the health and vibrancy of open source software in sustainability and climate technology.

Image by:

Opensource.com

Sustainability What to read next Is sustainability still a thing in open source? 5 open source tips to reduce waste in web design How Linux rescues slow computers (and the planet) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. 31 points | Follow irinimalliaraki | Connect eirinimalliaraki Open Enthusiast Author 32 points

Josh is an entrepreneur, product and data specialist with over a decade of experience in innovation and technology. His focus is on people-centred digital transformation, for the betterment of people and the planet.

With an immense passion for tech for good, Josh works on high-impact initiatives, and has delivered award-winning solutions for leading organisations globally. He is the founding director of Open Corridor, a data-driven non-profit, focused integrated sustainability intelligence.

Josh is a TEDx speaker, EIT (European institute of Innovation and Technology) alumni, associate at Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute (CUSP), and a passionate advocate for open source.

| Follow joshhoppie | Connect hopkins-josh Open Enthusiast Author Register or Login to post a comment.

Why developers choose open source in the hybrid cloud JozefdeVries Wed, 01/11/2023 - 03:00

The biggest barrier to growth and innovation is a stagnant data platform. Legacy proprietary systems aren't technically viable for most enterprises anymore. The enhanced capabilities of adopting a cloud-centric, open source approach to database management systems are critical to thriving in today's business landscape.

I expect to see fully managed databases in the cloud, known as Database as a Service (DBaaS), become the standard in the next few years. In fact, the DBaaS market is expected to be worth over $24 billion by 2025 (up from just $12 billion in 2020). But while DBaaS is enabling innovation, like any new approach, it comes with its challenges.

More opportunity, more potential obstacles

Developers are key decision-makers in the cloud environment and are increasingly influencing businesses' technology choices. In the cloud, developers have more freedom to choose from a plethora of technologies across their stack. But their employers still need to ensure that corporate directives are met, whether it's cost, legal guidelines, or compliance.

[ Related read: Managed services vs. hosted services vs. cloud services: What's the difference? ]

The dynamic playing out across many industries who are embracing the cloud is one where the developers are influencing technology choices. But the business leaders still need to ensure those choices are being made within the guardrails of their corporate governance policies. Unfortunately, what often ends up occurring is that these decision-makers realize too late that their new cloud vendors are imposing similar dependencies on them as their legacy, proprietary systems: and where's the benefit in that?

Explore the open source cloud Free online course: Developing cloud-native applications with microservices eBook: Modernize your IT with managed cloud services Try for 60 days: Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated Free online course: Containers, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift What is Kubernetes? Understanding edge computing Latest articles for IT architects Open source as a solution

Fortunately, open source technologies are giving developers the flexibility and scalability they're seeking. Open source databases, like PostgreSQL, have endured for decades because of their flexibility and extensibility, and they continue to be a top choice for developers in the future.

Postgres' robust and globally distributed community ensures constant innovation at an enterprise scale. Its ability to be audited, improved, and shared, makes it a favorite tool for professional developers. Additionally, Postgres is a proven technology for overcoming obstacles to cloud and multi-cloud adoption. They regularly outperform other databases in the most critical contexts, including technical performance flexibility across the broadest number of mission-critical enterprise applications.

Developers have the opportunity to make their mark on Postgres. They are not dependent on what a traditional database vendor "thinks" should be in the code. They can actually shape and build the code into what they think it should be to meet the specific needs of their company.

The short of it

With open source technologies like Postgres, developers and business leaders alike can reap the benefits of capabilities such as database performance at scale, security, and reliability. Open source technology provides greater flexibility in hybrid and multi-cloud environments so that developers can focus on what's most important—building with greater speed and innovation, all while using a tool they enjoy.

Open source technology provides greater flexibility in hybrid and multi-cloud environments so that developers can focus on what's most important—building with greater speed and innovation, all while using a tool they enjoy.

Image by:

Opensource.com

Databases Cloud What to read next Why it's important to keep the cloud open Getting started with PostgreSQL This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 reach the end of the line – OSnews  OS News

Cider: A worthy Apple Music Desktop app for Windows, Mac, and ...  Dignited

If Learning Linux is Your New Year Resolution, This Humble Bundle ...  It's FOSS News

At today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) more features were approved for the Fedora 38 release coming up in April...