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FOSS News No. 17 - review of free and open source news for May 18-24, 2020



Hello everyone!

We continue to review the news of free and open source software and some iron. All the most important thing about penguins and not only in Russia and the world. This issue turned out to be rich in interesting news and materials: Microsoft goes on the bright side of the force or “Fear Danians donating gifts,” European Parliament stands for FOSS, GNOME defeats the big patent troll, the difficulties of Open Source communities due to a pandemic, legal issues of participating in Open Source for employees of commercial organizations, EA opens the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert code and much more ...

Table of contents


  1. Top news
    1. Does Microsoft switch to the bright side of power or “Fear Danians bringing gifts”?
    2. EU Parliament strongly recommends developing and using open source software
    3. GNOME
    4. Open Source -
    5. Jitsi Zoom
    6. , ? (, nginx)
    7. Open Source 71%
    8. Electronic Arts Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn Red Alert

    3. FOSS



Microsoft « , »?




The news of a statement on the topic of Linux and Open Source by the president (not to be confused with the CEO) Microsoft Brad Smith spread widely around a virtual conversation with representatives of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Unlike former corporate leader Steve Ballmer, who called Linux “cancer” in the field of intellectual property, Smith said the exact opposite, writes Habr: “ Microsoft was on the wrong side of the story when open source broke into our reality at the beginning of the century, and I I can say this about me personally. The good news is that if life is long enough, you can find out ... what you need to change . ”

However, it is worth adding that these words are naturally dictated by the interests of a very large business and, mindful of the old principle of Microsoft EEE (“embrace, extend, and exterminate” - English “to support, build on and destroy”), you don’t really believe that that the interests of the corporation coincide with the interests of the community in the long run. Of course, the world of software has changed a lot, and Open Source is a significant and hardly a short-term trend that is perhaps impossible to stop or reverse.

But it’s important to remember the differences between open and free software. The first is much more convenient for business and the subtleties of its use have already led to difficulties for small companies to compete with giants (see “The future of Open Source licenses is changing” in FOSS News No. 6 habr.com/en/post/491562) The second, very prudently, upon appearance, was protected from such risks and more beneficial to the community, but much less convenient for business. And which pill to choose, red or blue, everyone should choose.

Details [→ 1 , 2 (en) , 3 (en) ]

EU Parliament strongly recommends developing and using open source software




Open Source is increasingly being considered for use by government agencies. The European Pirate Party has published a press release with information on new principles proposed by the party and adopted by the European Parliament, It’s FOSS: “ All IT solutions developed by and for EU structures will first need to be evaluated in terms of the possibility of using open source solutions. . The evaluations will then need to be reported to the Parliamentary Budget Control Committee on an annual basis during the discharge procedure. This is an urgent call to strengthen the right of our important citizens to transparent and reliable information . ” The principle of “public money - public code” (English “public money is a publicly accessible code”), proclaimed by FSFE publiccode.euis getting closer to implementation.

→ Details (en)

GNOME Patent Proceedings Discontinued




The GNOME Foundation announced the successful resolution of the lawsuit filed by the large patent troll Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC, accusing the project of patent infringement, reports OpenNET: “ The parties reached an agreement in which the plaintiff dropped all charges against GNOME and agreed not to bring more lawsuits related to in violation of any patents held by him. Moreover, Rothschild Patent Imaging has committed not to sue any open source project whose code is supplied under an open license approved by OSI. The commitment covers the entire patent portfolio owned by Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC". An impressive victory, especially if we compare the pettiness of the original claim and the restrictions imposed on the patent troll based on the results of the trial. The essence of the claim, according to OpenNET, was that the Shotwell photo manager violated a 2008 patent that describes the wireless connection of an image capture device with an image-receiving device and the subsequent selective transfer of images filtered by date, location and other parameters.

→ Details

Many Open Source Communities Have Serious Challenges Due to Pandemic




Due to coronavirus, many technological events have been canceled. This, in turn, is detrimental to the financial situation of companies and groups that depend on these events. Some Open Source organizations, such as The Linux Foundation, can survive this. Others are not so lucky. Some of them, such as the Drupal Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), Open Source Matters (Joomla) and Ajv JSON Schema validator, are in real trouble, reports ZDNet. Most of them rely on fundraising and financial partnerships. These events simply no longer exist. This is especially unpleasant, given that open source programs drive billions of companies. Many open source projects work with a very limited budget. But there are organizations like Sustain,The Open Collective and the Core Infrastructure Initiative are trying to help those affected and the code they create stay in order.

Details [→ 1 (en) , 2 (en) ]

A look at Jitsi as an open and safe alternative to Zoom




The coronavirus pandemic forced people to stay in their homes and, in turn, forced them to use video conferencing products. In the last couple of months Zoom has become an almost indispensable application, Facebook had to take a step forward and create a competitive product, and Google made its product for corporate conferences free for everyone. During this videoconferencing boom, Zoom's security and privacy concerns made many people skeptical about using this product. In addition, the company was not transparent in reporting its failures - this led many people to look for free, open source products, and Jitsi was the perfect solution for them. About the history of Jitsi, its takeoff, the current state and the difficulties that she faced - in the material TNW.

→Details (en)

Commit in open source as a developer? We deal with the rights (hi, nginx)




The recent history of the claims of the already little-known Rambler Group to a company developing one of the most popular Nginx web servers in the world is known to everyone. How not to get into such troubles and how to divide work into business with participation in Open Source projects - this is new material on Habré. It addresses such questions as “What is copyright to the code?”, “Who is the copyright holder?”, “Does the existence of an employment contract mean that all my code belongs to the employer?” other.

→ Details

Deprecated Open Source Libraries Make 71% of Applications Vulnerable




Dark Reading raises the topic of Open Source security. Managing open source libraries is a serious problem for secure development. This is because seven out of ten applications use at least one problematic open source library, inheriting vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited, according to a new study of more than 81,000 applications from Veracode, an application protection company. Developers should focus not only on fixes, but also on the approach to application security that is appropriate for the environments they work with, said Chris Eng, research director at Veracode.

→ Details (en)

Electronic Arts will open the code for the new edition of the games Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert




Electronic Arts announced a decision to open under the GPLv3 license the source code for the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll libraries that underlie the Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert games (a picture from another game in the series, it’s just cooler - Gim6626) from the updated edition Remastered Collection. The discovery of the code was a response to a community request for the opportunity to create modifications to Command & Conquer games. Electronic Arts went further and, to simplify the creation of modifications, decided to immediately open the code for the base libraries under a free license, OpenNET reports.

→ Details

Short line


Implementations


  1. Transfer of UIS to the use of free software [→]
  2. Industry and banks will be given six months to switch to domestic software [→]


  1. Microsoft Fluid Framework [→ (en)]
  2. Microsoft GW-BASIC MIT [→]

FOSS


  1. Linux Foundation [→ (en)]
  2. SUSE Open Source - [→ (en)]
  3. WordPress $4.6 , Matrix- Riot [→]


  1. Ubuntu Budgie 20.04: , [→ (en)]
  2. Ubuntu Server 20.04 Live [→ (en)]
  3. Windows 10 WSL, GPU [→1, 2 (en)
  4. Linux 5.8 [→ (en)]
  5. Repology, [→]


  1. 5 Open Source , Kubernetes [→ (en)]
  2. LanguageTool: [→ (en)]
  3. OpenStreetMap : «OpenStreetMap » [→]
  4. Orchestrator MySQL: [→]


  1. CrowdStrike Falcon Linux [→ (en)]
  2. memcpy ARMv7 Glibc [→]
  3. Apache Tomcat, [→]
  4. NXNSAttack, DNS- [→]
  5. qmail [→]
  6. BIAS — Bluetooth, [→]
  7. Ubuntu Server [→]
  8. [→]
  9. Checkpoint Safe-Linking, [→ 1, 2 (en)]
  10. Linux Lynis [→]


  1. Open Source [→ (en)]
  2. IBM Open Source Equal Access Toolkit [→ (en)]
  3. Xs:code Redis Labs Open Source [→ (en)]
  4. : Linux Lite [→ (en)]
  5. Git ( ) [→]


  1. Linux: Open Source [→ (en)]
  2. Firefox 84 Adobe Flash [→]
  3. Ack grep [→]


  1. Microsoft MAUI, Maui Maui Linux [→]
  2. Linux Ubuntu $100 [→]



  1. Astra Linux Common Edition 2.12.29 [→]
  2. BackBox Linux 7, [→]
  3. Finnix 120 [→]
  4. OpenBSD 6.7 [→]
  5. Solaris 11.4 SRU21 [→]
  6. Q4OS 3.11 [→]


  1. Enlightenment 0.24 [→]
  2. psi-notify 1.0.0 [→]


  1. D 2.091.0 [→]
  2. Electron 9.0.0, Chromium [→]
  3. Haxe 4.1 [→]
  4. UI MauiKit 1.1.0 [→]


  1. Audacity 2.4 [→]
  2. dav1d 0.7, AV1 VideoLAN FFmpeg [→]
  3. DXVK 1.7, Direct3D 9/10/11 API Vulkan [→]
  4. OpenBGPD 6.7p0 [→]
  5. OpenWrt 19.07.3 [→]
  6. VirtualBox 6.1.8 [→]
  7. Wine 5.9 [→]


  1. FlightGear 2020.1 [→]
  2. «Half Life: Alyx» Linux [→]


  1. Chrome 83 [→]
  2. BitTorrent- Transmission 3.0 [→]
  3. XMPP- UWPX 0.25.0 Windows 10X [→]


  1. Zabbix 26 [→]
  2. online- Linux 25 [→]


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 materials and messages about new releases are taken from their site.

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

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