open source

Open Source Is Good, but How Can It Do Good?

Glyn Moody — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 11:00:00 +0000

Open-source coders: we know you are good—now do good.

The ethical use of computers has been at the heart of free software from the beginning. Here's what Richard Stallman told me when I interviewed him in 1999 for my book Rebel Code:

The free software movement is basically a movement for freedom. It's based on values that are not purely material and practical. It's based on the idea that freedom is a benefit in itself. And that being allowed to be part of a community is a benefit in itself, having neighbors who can help you, who are free to help you—they are not told that they are pirates if they help you—is a benefit in itself, and that that's even more important than how powerful and reliable your software is.

The Open Source world may not be so explicit about the underlying ethical aspect, but most coders probably would hope that their programming makes the world a better place. Now that the core technical challenge of how to write good, world-beating open-source code largely has been met, there's another, trickier challenge: how to write open-source code that does good.

One obvious way is to create software that boosts good causes directly. A recent article on opensource.com discussed eight projects that are working in the area of the environment. Helping to tackle the climate crisis and other environmental challenges with free software is an obvious way to make the world better in a literal sense, and on a massive scale. Particularly notable is Greenpeace's Platform 4—not just open-source software, but an entire platform for doing good. And external coders are welcome:

Co-develop Planet 4!

Planet 4 is 100% open source. If you would like to get involved and show us what you've got, you're very welcome to join us.

Every coder can contribute to the success of P4 by joining forces to code features, review plugins or special functionalities. The help of Greenpeace offices with extra capacity and of the open source community is most welcome!

This is a great model for doing good with open source, by helping established groups build powerful codebases that have an impact on a global scale. In addition, it creates communities of like-minded free software programmers interested in applying their skills to that end. The Greenpeace approach to developing its new platform, usefully mapped out on the site, provides a template for other organizations that want to change the world with the help of ethical coders.

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When Choosing Your Commercial Linux, Choose Wisely!

Vince Calandra — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Vince Calandra

“Linux is Linux is Linux,” is a direct quote I heard in a meeting I had recently with a major multi-national, critical-infrastructure company. Surprisingly and correctly, there was one intelligent and brave engineering executive who replied to this statement, made by one of his team members, with a resounding, “That’s not true.” Let’s be clear, selecting a commercial Linux is not like selecting corn flakes. This is especially true when you are targeting embedded systems. You must be considering key questions regarding the supplier of the distribution, the criticality of the target application, security and life-cycle support for your product.

Choose Wisely

There is a wonderful scene in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when our hero, Indiana, must select the true Holy Grail. Set before him is a multitude of cups ranging from opulent, bejeweled challises to simple clay drinking cups. If you have seen the movie, Indiana reasons out the best choice, and it was a life or death selection. The knight who had been guarding the challises for centuries famously says, “You chose… wisely.” Why bring up this iconic scene? When you are selecting a commercial Linux distribution, you have a multitude of choices all bejeweled with wonderful marketing. The bottom line is that you want to save dollars that you would have otherwise spent on a DIY-Linux approach and ensure the commercial Linux selected fits your particular application. Here are some questions that you will need to keep in mind:

Is this for an IT application?
Is this for an OT (Operational Technology) application?
How long will this system be in the field?
What processes and procedures are used by my supplier to cover security vulnerabilities?
Can my supplier integrate in other Linux packages that support functionality I need going forward?

This is the short list. Other elements to keep in mind are the specific distribution’s origin and the Open Source community upon which it is based. How important is that specific Linux supplier with regard to the Open Source community upon which the distribution is based? These elements need to be part of the thought process.

I’ll Let My Silicon Choose

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Online Censorship Is Coming--Here's How to Stop It

Glyn Moody — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 13:19:15 +0000

by Glyn Moody

EU's upload filters are coming. Why and how the Open Source world must fight them.

A year ago, I warned about some terrible copyright legislation being drawn up in the EU that would have major adverse effects on the Open Source world. Its most problematic provision would force many for-profit sites operating in the EU to use algorithmic filters to block the upload of unauthorized material by users. As a result of an unprecedented campaign of misinformation, smears and outright lies, supporters managed to convince/trick enough Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to vote in favour of the the new Copyright Directive, including the deeply flawed upload filters.

A number of changes were made from the original proposals that I discussed last year. Most important, "open source software development and sharing platforms" are explicitly excluded from the scope of the requirement to filter uploads. However, it would be naïve to assume that the Copyright Directive is now acceptable, and that free software will be unaffected.

Open source and the open internet have a symbiotic relationship—each has fed constantly into the other. The upload filters are a direct attack on the open internet, turning it into a permissioned online space. They will create a censorship system that past experience shows is bound to be abused by companies and governments alike to block legitimate material. It would be a mistake of the highest order for the Open Source community to shrug its shoulders and say: "we're okay—not our problem." The upload filters are most definitely the problem of everyone who cares about the open and healthy internet, and about freedom of speech. For example, the GitHub blog points out that false positives are likely to be a problem when upload filters are implemented—regardless of nominal "exemptions" for open source: "When a filter catches a false positive and dependencies disappear, this not only breaks projects—it cuts into software developers' rights as copyright holders too."

So, what can be done?

As the Pirate MEP Julia Reda emphasises in her post summarizing the multi-year battle to improve the text of the Copyright Directive: "My message to all who took part in this movement: Be proud of how far we came together! We've proven that organised citizens can make an impact—even if we didn't manage to kill the whole bill in the end. So don't despair!" Specifically:

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Facebook, Not Microsoft, Is the Main Threat to Open Source

Glyn Moody — Tue, 04 Jun 2019 13:24:19 +0000

by Glyn Moody

In the future, Facebook won't be a social-media site.

Facebook is under a lot of scrutiny and pressure at the moment. It's accused of helping foreign actors to subvert elections by using ads and fake accounts to spread lies—in the US, for example—and of acting as a conduit for terrorism in New Zealand and elsewhere. There are calls to break up the company or at least to rein it in.

In an evident attempt to head off those moves, and to limit the damage that recent events have caused to Facebook's reputation, Mark Zuckerberg has been publishing some long, philosophical posts that attempt to address some of the main criticisms. In his most recent one, he calls for new regulation of the online world in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. The call for data portability mentions Facebook's support for the Data Transfer Project. That's clearly an attempt to counter accusations that Facebook is monopolistic and closed, and to burnish Facebook's reputation for supporting openness. Facebook does indeed use and support a large number of open-source programs, so to that extent, it's a fair claim.

Zuckerberg' previous post, from the beginning of March 2019, is much longer, and it outlines an important shift in how Facebook will work to what he calls "A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking". Greater protection for privacy is certainly welcome. But, it would be naïve to think that Zuckerberg's post is simply about that. Once more, it is an attempt to head off a growing chorus of criticism—in this case, that Facebook undermines data protection. This is the key idea:

I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever.

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The "From Mac to Linux" Issue

Bryan Lunduke — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 15:00:00 +0000

by Bryan Lunduke

What you are reading right now is a Linux magazine—with a focus on Apple computers running macOS. (Or MacOS. Or however Apple is doing the capitalization nowadays.)

I know, it's weird. It's extremely weird—like cats and dogs living together weird.

But we're not here to bash on Apple. Neither are we here to sing praises to those down in Cupertino.

The reality is, many within the Open Source and Free Software worlds do use Macintoshes—at least a portion of the time—and there are some unique challenges that pop up when you need to use both macOS and Linux on a regular basis. Likewise, many people have moved from Mac to Linux as part of their computing journey, and we'd like to offer some tips and ideas to help them out.

(And if we help a few Mac users feel a bit more confident in making the switch over to Linux? Well, that's just gravy on top.)

Never used a Macintosh before? There's some interesting technical tidbits held within these pages that might come in handy when interacting with co-workers that utilize a number of Mac-specific file types and programs. Or, at the very least, the various distinct differences between the platforms are sure to provide a bit of amusement. Who doesn't want to know how Mac filesystems work? You'll be the life of the party!

We kick everything off with a delightful tale we call "Hello Again, Linux" by a gentleman named Richard Mavis who recounts his own story of how he switched from Windows to Mac, then from Mac to Linux. He describes what hardware and software he used, what prompted his change, and how the entire experience went.

Then we get into the meat and potatoes of some of the more "Macintosh-y" things you can do from your Linux desktop.

We begin with "Accessing Those Old MacOS Volumes" by Linux Journal Editor at Large, Petros Koutoupis. In it, Petros walks through the process of how to mount (and read/write) Macintosh volumes (hard drives and so on) that were formatted with "Hierarchical File System Plus" (usually called "HFS+"). This process can be a royal pain in the posterior, so having it written down with step-by-step instructions is simply too handy for words.

Then I cover the various software and packages that allow Linux (and, to a lesser extent, some UNIX variants) to read and write some of the Mac-specific file types out there: DMG files, SIT files, ClarisWorks files and so on. I cover how to open them all, right on your Linux computer. No Mac required.

But let's say you're a Mac software developer. You've got a small mountain of code written in Objective-C using the Cocoa framework. Don't want to lose that massive investment in time and knowledge when you make the move to Linux? Petros Koutoupis provides an introduction to the free software re-implementation of Apple's closed-source frameworks in "Porting Mac OS Applications to Linux with GNUstep".

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Hello Again, Linux

Richard Mavis — Fri, 31 May 2019 13:26:34 +0000

by Richard Mavis

My first MacBook was the first computer I really loved, but I wasn't happy about the idea of buying a new one. I decided it's important to live your values and to support groups that value the things you do.

After ten years of faithful service, last year the time finally came to retire my MacBook. Not many laptops last ten years—not many companies produce a machine as durable and beautiful as Apple does—but, if one was available, I was willing to invest in a machine that might last me through the next ten years. A lot has changed in ten years—for Apple, for Linux and for myself—so I started looking around.

The Situation

Prior to 2006, I had used only Windows. Around that time, there was a lot of anxiety about its upcoming successor to Windows XP, which at the time was code-named Project Longhorn. My colleagues and I all were dreading it. So, rather than go through all that trouble, I switched to Linux.

However, my first experience with Linux was not great. Although 2006 was The Year of the Linux Desktop (I saw headlines on Digg proclaiming it almost every day), I quickly learned, right after wiping my brand-new laptop's hard drive to make way for Fedora, that maybe it wasn't quite The Year of the Linux Laptop. After a desperate and miserable weekend, I finally got my wireless card working, but that initial trauma left me leery. So, about a year later, when I decided to quit my job and try the digital nomad freelance thing, I bought a MacBook. A day spent hunting down driver files or recompiling my kernel was a day not making money. I needed the assurance and convenience Apple was selling. And it proved a great investment.

During the next decade, I dabbled with Linux. Every year seemed to be The Year of the Linux Desktop—the real one, at last—so on my desktop at work (freelancing wasn't fun for long), I installed Ubuntu, then Debian, then FreeBSD. An article in this journal introduced me to tiling window managers in general and DWM in particular. The first time I felt something like disappointment with my MacBook was after using DWM on Debian for the first time.

Through the years, as my MacBook's hardware failures became increasingly inconvenient, and as my personal preference in software shifted from big beautiful graphical applications to small command-line programs, Linux started to look much more appealing. And, Linux's hardware compatibility had expanded—companies had even started selling laptops with Linux already installed—so I felt reasonably sure I wouldn't need to waste another weekend struggling with a broken wireless connection or risk frying my monitor with a misconfigured Xorg.conf.

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Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure: an Interview with Canonical

Petros Koutoupis — Thu, 09 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

On April 29, 2019, Canonical made headlines by officially announcing the availability of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure If you are unfamiliar with Canonical and the work that they do:

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as the emerging categories of smart gateways, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support and services to commercial users of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure changes the entire landscape of service offerings for open-source software. Instead of itemizing and charging for each and every component or add-on, Canonical promises its customers a per-node service package, regardless of the technologies running on it. I was able to sit down and chat with Stephan Fabel, who was generous enough to provide a bit more detail around this exciting announcement.

Petros Koutoupis: Tell us about yourself.

Stephan Fabel: My name is Stephan Fabel, and I am Director of Product over at Canonical. So, I am running a team as the Product Manager, and I am responsible for the portfolio of products that go out to our customers.

Petros: For our readers who are unfamiliar, what is Ubuntu Advantage?

Stephan: As you might know, Ubuntu always has been freely available as an open-source Linux distribution for everybody to consume. And, for those users who wish to enter that commercial relationship with Canonical, either because they are interested in our additional bit-streams that we offer like kernel patches, extended security maintenance, FIPS compliance crypto libraries, or because they would like to get support for each of those open infrastructure components that we are covering, Ubuntu Advantage is the program that they would subscribe to.

Petros: What makes this recent announcement of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure so exciting?

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Open Source--It's in the Genes

Glyn Moody — Mon, 06 May 2019 14:06:59 +0000

by Glyn Moody

What happens when you release 500,000 human genomes as open source? This.

DNA is digital. The three billion chemical bases that make up the human genome encode data not in binary, but in a quaternary system, using four compounds—adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine—to represent four genetic "digits": A, C, G and T. Although this came as something of a surprise in 1953, when Watson and Crick proposed an A–T and C–G pairing as a "copying mechanism for genetic material" in their famous double helix paper, it's hard to see how hereditary information could have been transmitted efficiently from generation to generation in any other way. As anyone who has made photocopies of photocopies is aware, analog systems are bad at loss-free transmission, unlike digital encodings. Evolution of progressively more complex structures over millions of years would have been much harder, perhaps impossible, had our genetic material been stored in a purely analog form.

Although the digital nature of DNA was known more than half a century ago, it was only after many years of further work that quaternary data could be extracted at scale. The Human Genome Project, where laboratories around the world pieced together the three billion bases found in a single human genome, was completed in 2003, after 13 years of work, for a cost of around $750 million. However, since then, the cost of sequencing genomes has fallen—in fact, it has plummeted even faster than Moore's Law for semiconductors. A complete human genome now can be sequenced for a few hundred dollars, with sub-$100 services expected soon.

As costs have fallen, new services have sprung up offering to sequence—at least partially—anyone's genome. Millions have sent samples of their saliva to companies like 23andMe in order to learn things about their "ancestry, health, wellness and more". It's exciting stuff, but there are big downsides to using these companies. You may be giving a company the right to use your DNA for other purposes. That is, you are losing control of the most personal code there is—the one that created you in the boot-up process we call gestation. Deleting sequenced DNA can be hard.

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Open Source Is Eternal

Glyn Moody — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

Open source has won the present, but what about the future?

In the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal, I wrote an article taking a look back over the previous decade. An astonishing amount has changed in such a short time. But as I pointed out, perhaps that's not surprising, as ten years represents an appreciable portion of the entire history of Linux and (to a lesser extent) of the GNU project, which began in August 1991 and September 1983, respectively. Those dates makes the launch of Linux Journal in April 1994 an extremely bold and far-sighted move, and something worth celebrating on its 25th anniversary.

For me, the year 1994 was also memorable for other reasons. It marked the start of a weekly column that I wrote about the internet in business—one of the first to do so. In total, I produced 413 "Getting Wired" columns, the last one appearing in April 2003. I first mentioned Linux in February 1995. Thereafter, free software and (later) open source become an increasingly important thread running through the columns—the word "Linux" appeared 663 times in total. Reflecting on the dotcom meltdown that recently had taken place, which wiped out thousands of companies and billions of dollars, here's what I wrote in my last Getting Wired column:

The true internet did not die: it simply moved back into the labs and bedrooms where it had first arisen. For the real internet revolution was driven not by share options, but by sharing—specifically, the sharing of free software.

...

The ideas behind free software—and hence those that powered the heady early days of the internet—are so ineluctable, that even as powerful a company as Microsoft is being forced to adopt them. Indeed, I predict that within the next five years Microsoft will follow in the footsteps of IBM to become a fervent supporter of open source, and hence the ultimate symbol of the triumph of the internet spirit.

You can read that final column online on the Computer Weekly site, where it originally appeared. It's one of several hundred Getting Wired columns still available there. But the archive for some years is incomplete, and in any case, it goes back only to 2000. That means five years' worth—around 250 columns—are no longer accessible to the general public (I naturally still have my own original files).

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Open Source Is Winning, and Now It's Time for People to Win Too

Reuven M. Lerner — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 13:11:05 +0000

by Reuven M. Lerner

Teaching kids about open source? Don't forget to teach them ethics as well.

Back when I started college, in the fall of 1988, I was introduced to a text editor called Emacs. Actually, it wasn't just called Emacs; it was called "GNU Emacs". The "GNU" part, I soon learned, referred to something called "free software", which was about far more than the fact that it was free of charge. The GNU folks talked about software with extreme intensity, as if the fate of the entire world rested on the success of their software replacing its commercial competition.

Those of us who used such programs, either from GNU or from other, similarly freely licensed software, knew that we were using high-quality code. But to our colleagues at school and work, we were a bit weird, trusting our work to software that wasn't backed by a large, commercial company. (I still remember, as a college intern at HP, telling the others in my group that I had compiled, installed and started to use a new shell known as "bash", which was better than the "k shell" we all were using. Their response was somewhere between bemusement and horror.)

As time went on, I started to use a growing number of programs that fit into this "free software" definition—Linux, Perl and Python were the stars, but plenty of others existed, from Emacs (which I use to this day), sendmail (pretty much the only SMTP server at the time), DNS libraries and the like. In 1998, Tim O'Reilly decided that although the "free software" cause was good, it needed better coordination and marketing. Thus, the term "open source" was popularized, stressing the practical benefits over the philosophical and societal ones.

I was already consulting at the time, regularly fighting an uphill battle with clients—small startups and large multinationals alike—telling them that yes, I trusted code that didn't cost money, could be modified by anyone and was developed by volunteers.

But marketing, believe it or not, really does work. And the term "open source" did a great job of opening many people's minds. Slowly but surely, things started to change: IBM announced that it would invest huge amounts of money in Linux and open-source software. Apache, which had started life as an httpd server, became a foundation that sponsored a growing array of open-source projects. Netscape tumbled as quickly as it had grown, releasing its Mozilla browser as open-source software (and with its own foundation) before going bust. Red Hat proved that you could have a successful open-source company based on selling high-quality services and support. And these are just the most prominent names.

With every announcement, the resistance to using open source in commercial companies dropped bit more. As companies realized that others were depending on open source, they agreed to use it too.

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