Get best of the week

FOSS News No. 13 - a review of free and open source software for April 20-26, 2020



Hello everyone!

We continue to review the news of free and open source software and hardware (and a bit of coronavirus). All the most important thing about penguins and not only in Russia and the world. The participation of the Open Source community in the fight against COVID-19 (noted by Boston Dynamics), the barriers and opportunities that small and medium-sized businesses open source, the increase in the number of vulnerabilities detected in FOSS projects, the alternative to Zoom, the final release of Python 2, examples of paid GNU / Linux distributions and much more.

Top news


Coronavirus Control




We continue to publish news on the participation of the FOSS community in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Fresh headlines:

  1. Boston Dynamics has launched part of its robotic development to help create robot assistants [->]
  2. [1], [2], [3]
  3. 'handy' – [->]

, Open Source




FOSS technologies are now widely used by industry leaders such as Oracle and Microsoft, who have been implementing it for many years, because such technologies make organizations more efficient and provide an environment with wide possibilities for customization, adaptation and scaling. With large players such as Amazon and IBM, who are focused on using open source as a tool for creating powerful cloud solutions, it may seem that technology is limited to a major league, but small and medium-sized businesses are also gradually getting involved in this process, TechRepublic writes. . Many people realize that open source allows them to compete at the level of larger technology companies and provides the flexibility, interoperability, and cost savings that these solutions provide.But there are also difficulties that are not faced by such big players: the need to search for competent personnel, choosing the right projects to use, operational problems and lack of support.



Open Source 50% 2019. 2020?




According to a WhiteSource team research report, the main source of growth in the number of discovered vulnerabilities in open source products is the increase in the use of such products per se, writes DevOps. There are now more open source projects, code, and community members than ever before. All these kind people are working hard not only to write more code, often with the support of major technology giants, but also to look for vulnerabilities in the code that could put users of their components at risk. The combination of more written code and the number of eyes analyzing the code for these inevitable human errors ultimately leads to the discovery of more vulnerabilities.An increase in the number of vulnerabilities in open source components will have a significant impact on software development. In recent years, we have seen that open source components play an increasingly important role in how developers create their applications. Most estimates suggest that open source components make up 60 to 80% of the code base in most modern applications. When a vulnerability is reported in a popular project, such as Apache Struts or the Linux kernel, then a huge number of developers are suddenly faced with the need to update their programs.that open source components make up 60 to 80% of the code base in most modern applications. When a vulnerability is reported in a popular project, such as Apache Struts or the Linux kernel, then a huge number of developers are suddenly faced with the need to update their programs.that open source components make up 60 to 80% of the code base in most modern applications. When a vulnerability is reported in a popular project, such as Apache Struts or the Linux kernel, then a huge number of developers are suddenly faced with the need to update their programs.



Zoom? Jitsi Open Source




From meetings and parties to dates, we all now live in video conferencing applications, writes Wired. But after a series of privacy and security breaches at Zoom, which became almost synonymous with video conferencing during the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations and individuals are wondering which service is the most secure for our conversations. Emil Ivov says no one needs to be trusted. Yves is the creator of Jitsi's open source software for text and video chat and the head of video collaboration at 8x8, which acquired Jitsi in 2018. The firm sells services based on Jitsi code, but still pays developers to support the open source version. Jitsi Meet is a video conferencing app with convenient features,such as the ability to password protect your appointments or exclude people from the conference. But what sets it apart from most well-known video conferencing services is that it is free and can work completely on your own equipment.





Python 2




Is Python 2 dead? Not really, but from this event he is making a confident step towards his place of honor in the museum of the history of computer technology. On April 20, the last final release of Python 2.7.18 was introduced, which marked the complete cessation of support for the Python 2 branch, writes OpenNET. This event completes an era, as the StackOverflow blog puts it . If you still haven't upgraded to version 3, it's time. However, the 2nd version will continue to live on through the efforts of individual companies, for example, Red Hat will continue to maintain packages with Python 2.7 throughout the life cycle of RHEL 6 and 7 distributions, and for RHEL 8 it will generate package updates in the Application Stream until June 2024 . If this is not your option - you are welcome to see the official transition guide. But it can take a long time, for example Dropbox migrated for 3 years.

Details

GNU / Linux Paid Distributions




Obviously, for all of us, free and open source means free. But there are companies that, based on FOSS projects, release paid binary assemblies, raising money to support or add special features. As an exception, we cite material entirely devoted to such projects. The following examples of paid GNU / Linux distributions are discussed in the text:

  1. Zorin OS Ultimate
  2. Red hat enterprise
  3. Astra Linux Special Edition
  4. DEW
  5. ClearOS
  6. Zentyal server
  7. Parted magic

Details

Short line



  1. By the release of Ubuntu 20.04:
    1. What's New in Ubuntu 20.04 [1] , [2]
    2. 16 things to do after installing Ubuntu 20.04 [->]
    3. Ubuntu 20.04 [->]
  2. Lenovo Fedora Linux ThinkPad [->]
  3. web- Kiwi [->]
  4. 18 GitLab [->]
  5. Debian, Git [->]
  6. - Squid, [->]
  7. Tor - [->]
  8. Open Source -: 3 [->]
  9. 5 Open Source [->]
  10. MystiQ: FOSS / [->]
  11. MindSpore: Huawei Open Source [->]
  12. AWS Facebook , PyTorch [->]
  13. Istio, Open Source Google Cloud, [->]
  14. Librem Mini Linux PC Purism [->]
  15. postmarketOS iPhone 7 [1], [2]
  16. Fishtown Analytics $12.9M A- Open Source [->]
  17. GNU/Linux [->]
  18. GNU/Linux [->]
  19. Pacman Arch Linux [->]
  20. Debian [->]
  21. Firefox WebGPU [->]
  22. OpenBSD rpki-client [->]
  23. Panfrost 3D- GPU Bifrost (Mali G31) [->]
  24. Facebook slab Linux [->]
  25. RubyGems 724 [->]
  26. rebuilderd Arch Linux [->]
  27. FreeBSD ipfw [->]
  28. GNU/Linux [->]


  1. Linux Foundation AGL UCB 9.0 [->]
  2. DXVK 1.6.1, Direct3D 9/10/11 API Vulkan [->]
  3. Git [->]
  4. KolibriN 10.1 MenuetOS 1.34, [->]
  5. Linux Lite 5.0: [->]
  6. LXQt 0.15.0 [->]
  7. Mattermost 5.22 – , [->]
  8. nginx 1.18.0 [->]
  9. NixOS 20.03, Nix [->]
  10. njs 0.4.0, Rambler Nginx [->]
  11. JavaScript- Node.js 14.0 [->]
  12. Kdenlive 20.04 [->]
  13. OpenSSL 1.1.1g , TLS 1.3 [->]
  14. Pixman 0.40 [->]
  15. Postfix 3.5.1 [->]
  16. PyTorch 1.5.0 [->]
  17. RSS – QuiteRSS 0.19.4 [->]
  18. ROSA Fresh R11.1 [->]
  19. Rust 1.43 [->]
  20. Scientific Linux 7.8 [->]
  21. GNU Shepherd 0.8 [->]
  22. - Snort 3 [->]
  23. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS [->]
  24. Visopsys 0.9 [->]
  25. Wine 5.7 [->]
  26. wolfSSL 4.4.0 [->]


That's it, until next Sunday!

Thanks to Linux.com for their work, a selection of English sources for my review is taken from there. I also express many thanks to OpenNET , a lot of news material was taken from their site.

If anyone is interested in writing reviews and has the time and opportunity to help, I’ll be glad to write to the contacts listed in my profile or in private messages.

Subscribe to our Telegram channel or RSS in order not to miss the new issues of FOSS News.

Previous issue

More articles:


All Articles