"The Spectre vulnerability that has haunted hardware and software makers since 2018 continues to defy efforts to bury it," reports the Register: On Thursday, Eduardo (sirdarckcat) Vela Nava, from Google's product security response team, disclosed a Spectre-related flaw in version 6.2 of the Linux kernel. The bug, designated medium severity, was initially reported to cloud service providers — those most likely to be affected — on December 31, 2022, and was patched in Linux on February 27, 2023.

"The kernel failed to protect applications that attempted to protect against Spectre v2, leaving them open to attack from other processes running on the same physical core in another hyperthread," the vulnerability disclosure explains. The consequence of that attack is potential information exposure (e.g., leaked private keys) through this pernicous problem....

Spectre v2 — the variant implicated in this particular vulnerability — relies on timing side-channels to measure the misprediction rates of indirect branch prediction in order to infer the contents of protected memory. That's far from optimal in a cloud environment with shared hardware... The bug hunters who identified the issue found that Linux userspace processes to defend against Spectre v2 didn't work on VMs of "at least one major cloud provider."

An anonymous reader shares a report: For Red Hat, which turned 30 on March 27, it was a cause for celebration. From a business that got started in one of its co-founder's wife's sewing room, it became the first billion-dollar pure-play open-source company and then the engine driving IBM. It has been a long strange trip. Sure, today, the tech world is dominated by Linux and open source software, but in 1993, Linux was merely an obscure operating system known only to enthusiasts. Red Hat played a significant role in transforming the "just a hobby" operating system into today's major IT powerhouse. Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, who previously ran a rental typewriter business, was one of those who became intrigued by Linux. In 1993, he established ACC Corporation, a catalog company that distributed Slackware Linux CDs and open-source software.

[...] In 2003, Paul Cormier, then Red Hat's vice president of engineering and now the company's chairman, spearheaded the shift from the inexpensive prosumer Red Hat Linux distribution to the full business-oriented Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). At the time, many Linux users hated the idea. Even inside Red Hat, Cormier said that many engineers were initially opposed to the new business model, causing some to leave the company while others stayed. The change also upset many users who felt Red Hat was abandoning its original customers. However, enterprise clients had a different perspective. Whitehurst, who became Red Hat CEO in 2008, said, "Once RHEL was in the market, we had to fully support it to make it truly consumable for the enterprise." They succeeded, and Red Hat continued to grow. This is the model that turned Red Hat into the first billion-dollar-a-quarter pure open-source company. Impressive for a business built around an operating system once considered suitable only for the "lunatic fringe." Then, in 2018, IBM acquired Red Hat for a cool $34 billion. There was nothing crazy about that move.

[...] Another change that was already present in Red Hat, a shift towards supporting the cloud, has accelerated. Today, while RHEL remains the heart of the business, the Linux-powered cloud has become increasingly important. In particular, Red Hat OpenShift, its Kubernetes-powered hybrid cloud application platform, is more important than ever. Where does Red Hat go from here? When I last talked to Cormier and Red Hat's latest CEO, Matt Hicks, they told me that they'd keep moving forward with the hybrid cloud. After all, as Cormier pointed out, "the cloud wouldn't be here" without Linux and open source. As for Red Hat's relationship with IBM, Cormier said, "The red lines were red, and the blue lines were blue, and that will stay the same."

On Thursday patches were submitted for bringing Rust infrastructure to the Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) framework (within Linux's media subsystem) by Collabora's Daniel Almeida.

Phoronix reports: This provides just enough for working with a prototype VirtIO camera driver written in Rust along with a Rust sample driver. These initial patches are just intended to start the discussion around V4L2 Rust driver support and the actual upstreaming of the Rust support for these camera drivers may still be some ways down the line.

Further adding to the excitement of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window is the mainline kernel seeing the Device Tree (DT) additions for Apple's current M2 devices including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems. From a report: The upstream kernel still has more work to go around the M1/M2 support compared to the downstream state with Asahi Linux, but at least now with this DT support will provide some basic level of upstream kernel support for the Apple M2. Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month. The main addition with this pull request is adding the Apple M2 Device Tree series.

PINE64 has an update about their Star64 single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor: it will be available on April 4th in two configurations: 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99: Let me just quickly reiterate the Star64 features:


- Quad core 64bit RISC-V
- HDMI video output
- 4x DSI and 4x CSI lates
- i2c touch panel connector
- dual Gigabit Ethernet ports
- dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth
- 1x native USB3.0 port, 3x shared USB2.0 ports
- PCIe x1 open-ended slot and GPIO bus pins (i2c, SPI and UART).
- The board also features 128M QSPI flash and eMMC and microSD card slots.


The board will be available in two different RAM configurations — with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively. The Star64 store page ought to already be live when you read this, but will be listed as out of stock until the 4th.
Liliputing offers this summary: The Star64 is a single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor, support for up to 8GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage (as well as a microSD card reader). Developed by the folks at Pine64, it's designed to be an affordable platform for developers and hobbyists looking to get started with RISC-V architecture. Pine64 first announced it was working on the Star64 last summer...
Meanwhile, PINE64's Linux tablets, the PineTab2 and PineTab-V, will launch one week later on Tuesday, April 11th.

Other highlights from this month's community update: there's now a dedicated Debian with GNOME image with tailored settings for grayscale for their Linux-based "PineNote" e-ink tablets. ("Other OSes and desktop environments are being worked on too.")

And the update also includes photos of one user's cool 3D-printed replacement cases for their PinePhone featuring Tux the penguin.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: The Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix distribution has become an official Ubuntu flavor and will join the rest of the flavors starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) release. Created and maintained by members of the Linux community, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix is an Ubuntu derivative that features the modern Cinnamon desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint team. Cinnamon Remix aims to offer a traditional approach to the modern Linux desktop.

Until now, the maintainers of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix did a very good job keeping up with all upstream Ubuntu releases, even offering a custom version of the official wallpaper of each new Ubuntu release to match the Cinnamon desktop environment's style. Ubuntu Cinnamon will not be the only new official Ubuntu flavor this Spring when Ubuntu 23.04 will be released as the maintainers of Ubuntu Unity have also managed to obtain official Ubuntu flavor status last year in September. As with Ubuntu Unity, the next step now for the Ubuntu Cinnamon maintainers is to bake daily ISO images in preparation for the upcoming Lunar Lobster release and maybe even take part in the Ubuntu 23.04 beta release later this week on March 30th. The latest Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix release and can be downloaded here.

An anonymous reader quotes Neowin: Google Project Zero is a security team responsible for discovering security flaws in Google's own products as well as software developed by other vendors. Following discovery, the issues are privately reported to vendors and they are given 90 days to fix the reported problems before they are disclosed publicly.... Now, the security team has reported several flaws in CentOS' kernel.

As detailed in the technical document here, Google Project Zero's security researcher Jann Horn learned that kernel fixes made to stable trees are not backported to many enterprise versions of Linux. To validate this hypothesis, Horn compared the CentOS Stream 9 kernel to the stable linux-5.15.y stable tree.... As expected, it turned out that several kernel fixes have not been made deployed in older, but supported versions of CentOS Stream/RHEL. Horn further noted that for this case, Project Zero is giving a 90-day deadline to release a fix, but in the future, it may allot even stricter deadlines for missing backports....

Red Hat accepted all three bugs reported by Horn and assigned them CVE numbers. However, the company failed to fix these issues in the allotted 90-day timeline, and as such, these vulnerabilities are being made public by Google Project Zero.
Horn is urging better patch scheduling so "an attacker who wants to quickly find a nice memory corruption bug in CentOS/RHEL can't just find such bugs in the delta between upstream stable and your kernel."

Hackaday recently shared some thoughts on "purpose-built" distros: Some examples are Kali for security testing, DragonOS for software-defined radio, or Hannah Montana Linux for certain music fans.

Anyone can roll their own Linux distribution with the right tools, including [Shadly], who recently created one which only loads enough software to launch the 1993 classic DOOM.... It loads the Linux kernel and the standard utilities via BusyBox, then runs fbDOOM, which is a port of the game specifically designed to run on the Linux framebuffer with minimal dependencies.
Their report includes video of the distro booting up and playing Doom.

"The entire distribution is placed into a bootable ISO file that can be placed on any bootable drive."

Liliputing.com has an update about the System76 Meerkat, which they describe as "a compact desktop computer with support for up to 64GB of RAM, up to two storage devices (for as much as 16TB of total storage), and up to an Intel Core i7 mobile processor. It's basically a rebranded Intel NUC." (Escept that System76 offers a choice of Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.)

"Previously available with a choice of 10th or 11th-gen Intel Core processor options, the Meerkat now also supports 12th-gen Intel chips." That means there are a total of 9 different processor options available. Prices start at $499 for an entry-level model with a Core i3-10110U processor, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The prices rises by $50 if you want to go with a Core i3-1135G4 model, while prices start at $599 for a Meerkat mini PC with a 12th-gen Intel Core processor....

But the biggest difference is that Intel's 12th-gen processors introduce a hybrid architecture that pairs Performance and Efficiency cores, leading to much higher core counts for better multi-core performance.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

Among the AMDGPU kernel driver changes this round are a number of fixes affecting items such as the UMC RAS, DCN 3.2, FreeSync, SR-IOV, various IP blocks, USB4, and more. On the feature side, mentioned subtly in the change-log are a few power-related additions... These additions are largely focused on Van Gogh APUs, which is notably for the Valve Steam Deck and benefiting its graphics moving forward.

First up, this kernel pull request introduces a new sysfs interface for adjusting/setting thermal throttling. This is wired up for Van Gogh and allows reading/updating the thermal limit temperature in millidegrees Celsius. This "APU thermal cap" interface is just wired up for Van Gogh and seems to be Steam Deck driven feature work so that SteamOS will be better able to manage the thermal handling of the APU graphics....

These power features will be exposed via sysfs while Steam OS will wrap around them intelligently and possibly some new UI settings knobs for those wanting more control over their Steam Deck's thermal/performance.

The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language).

Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson's answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple.

Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay.

And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular.

"AWS has provided you with a cloud-optimized Linux distribution since 2010," notes the cloud service's blog. This week they announced the third generation of Amazon's Linux distro: 'Amazon Linux 2023'. Every generation of Amazon Linux distribution is secured, optimized for the cloud, and receives long-term AWS support.... Deploying your workloads on Amazon Linux 2023 gives you three major benefits: a high-security standard, a predictable lifecycle, and a consistent update experience.

Let's look at security first. Amazon Linux 2023 includes preconfigured security policies that make it easy for you to implement common industry guidelines. You can configure these policies at launch time or run time. For example, you can configure the system crypto policy to enforce system-wide usage of a specific set of cipher suites, TLS versions, or acceptable parameters in certificates and key exchanges. Also, the Linux kernel has many hardening features enabled by default....

When looking for a base to serve as a starting point for Amazon Linux 2023, Fedora was the best choice. We found that Fedora's core tenets (Freedom, Friends, Features, First) resonate well with our vision for Amazon Linux. However, Amazon Linux focuses on a long-term, stable OS for the cloud, which is a notably different release cycle and lifecycle than Fedora. Amazon Linux 2023 provides updated versions of open-source software, a larger variety of packages, and frequent releases.

Amazon Linux 2023 isn't directly comparable to any specific Fedora release. The Amazon Linux 2023 GA version includes components from Fedora 34, 35, and 36. Some of the components are the same as the components in Fedora, and some are modified. Other components more closely resemble the components in CentOS Stream 9 or were developed independently. The Amazon Linux kernel, on its side, is sourced from the long-term support options that are on kernel.org, chosen independently from the kernel provided by Fedora.

Like every good citizen in the open-source community, we give back and contribute our changes to upstream distributions and sources for the benefit of the entire community. Amazon Linux 2023 itself is open source.
Their announcement notes that Amazon Linux is the most used Linux distribution on AWS, with hundreds of thousands of their customers already using Amazon Linux 2.

An anonymous reader shares this report from 9to5Linux: After Canonical's announcement that future Ubuntu releases won't include Flatpak support by default, someone already made an unofficial Ubuntu flavor that ships with support for Flatpak apps preinstalled and working out of the box, called Ubuntu Flatpak Remix.

Meet Ubuntu Flatpak Remix, an unofficial Ubuntu derivative that doesn't feature support for Snap apps and comes with support for Flatpak apps working out of the box. Several key apps are preinstalled in the Flatpak format rather than as a Snap app, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Mozilla Thunderbird email client, and LibreOffice office suite.... Support for the Flathub portal is installed as well, so you'll be able to install more apps with just a few clicks.

An anonymous reader shares this report from Dark Reading: In recent weeks, hackers have been deploying the "IceFire" ransomware against Linux enterprise networks, a noted shift for what was once a Windows-only malware.

A report from SentinelOne suggests that this may represent a budding trend. Ransomware actors have been targeting Linux systems more than ever in cyberattacks in recent weeks and months, notable not least because "in comparison to Windows, Linux is more difficult to deploy ransomware against, particularly at scale," Alex Delamotte, security researcher at SentinelOne, tells Dark Reading....

"[M]any Linux systems are servers," Delamotte points out, "so typical infection vectors like phishing or drive-by download are less effective." So instead, recent IceFire attacks have exploited CVE-2022-47986 — a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the IBM Aspera data transfer service, with a CVSS rating of 9.8.

Delamotte posits a few reasons for why more ransomware actors are choosing Linux as of late. For one thing, she says, "Linux-based systems are frequently utilized in enterprise settings to perform crucial tasks such as hosting databases, Web servers, and other mission-critical applications. Consequently, these systems are often more valuable targets for ransomware actors due to the possibility of a larger payout resulting from a successful attack, compared to a typical Windows user."

A second factor, she guesses, "is that some ransomware actors may perceive Linux as an unexploited market that could yield a higher return on investment."
While previous reports had IceFire targetting tech companies, SentinelLabs says they've seen recent attacks against organizations "in the media and entertainment sector," impacting victims "in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, which are typically not a focus for organized ransomware actors."

"On March 7, 2003, a struggling company called The SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM," writes LWN.net, "claiming that the success of Linux was the result of a theft of SCO's technology..."

Two decades later, "It is hard to overestimate how much the community we find ourselves in now was shaped by a ridiculous lawsuit 20 years ago...." It was the claim of access to Unix code that was the most threatening allegation for the Linux community. SCO made it clear that, in its opinion, Linux was stolen property: "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts". To rectify this "misappropriation", SCO was asking for a judgment of at least $1 billion, later increased to $5 billion. As the suit dragged on, SCO also started suing Linux users as it tried to collect a tax for use of the system.

Though this has never been proven, it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. To SCO's management, it may well have seemed like a good idea at the time. IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort. So the company, instead, directed its not inconsiderable legal resources to squashing this attack. But notably, so did the development community as a whole, as did much of the rest of the technology industry.

Over the course of the following years — far too many years — SCO's case fell to pieces. The "misappropriated" technology wasn't there. Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn't even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over. The level of buffoonery was high from the beginning and got worse; the company lost at every turn and eventually collapsed into bankruptcy.... Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. Magazines like Forbes were warning the "Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement" that they "should wake up". SCO was suggesting a license fee of $1,399 — per-CPU — to run Linux.... Such an effort, in less incompetent hands, could easily have damaged Linux badly.

As it went, SCO, despite its best efforts, instead succeeded in improving the position of Linux — in development, legal, and economic terms — considerably.
The article argues SCO's lawsuit ultimately proved that Linux didn't contain copyrighted code "in a far more convincing way than anybody else could have." (And the provenance of all Linux code contributions are now carefully documented.) The case also proved the need for lawyers to vigorously defend the rights of open source programmers. And most of all, it revealed the Linux community was widespread and committed.

And "Twenty years later, it is fair to say that Linux is doing a little better than The SCO Group. Its swaggering leader, who thought to make his fortune by taxing Linux, filed for personal bankruptcy in 2020."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Now, leaders from the GNOME Foundation and KDE Foundation, along with Debian Linux, are considering [...] building an app store on top of Flatpak, a universal Linux software deployment and package management program. This idea of replacing traditional but not very friendly ways of delivering Linux desktop apps, such as DEB and RPM package management systems, has been around for a while. Besides being easier to use, Flatpak and its rivals, such as Appimage and Snaps, can also run on any Linux distribution. All the programs do this by containerizing applications with all their necessary libraries and associated files.

Now, as laid out in former Google chairman Eric Schmidt's Plaintext Group, the proposal is to "Promote diversity and sustainability in the Linux desktop community by adding payments, donations, and subscriptions to the Flathub app store." Behind this idea are several Linux desktop leaders, such as GNOME president Robert McQueen; former GNOME executive director and Debian project leader Neil McGovern; and KDE president Aleix Pol. Flatpak, unlike the earlier store attempts, works on essentially all Linux distros. This makes it much more interesting.

Why Flakpak, instead of its chief rival, Snaps? They explained, "Flathub is a vendor-neutral service for Linux application developers to build and publish their applications directly to their end users. A healthy application ecosystem is essential for the success of the open-source software desktop, so end-users can trust and control their data and development platforms on the device in front of them." [...] Be that as it may, while the proposal for a paid Flathub app store remains just an idea, it's still one that may garner support. If this plan can generate enough support, and then the revenue, to cover its costs, it may create the first popular universal Linux app store. Then, who knows, maybe the Linux desktop will finally become broadly popular. Stranger things have happened.

Last week ZDNet reported Linux had added upstream support for the Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips and then concluded that "newer Mac owners can look forward to running Linux on their M1-powered machines."

Saturday Asahi Linux called ZDNet's story "misleading and borderline false," posting on Twitter that "You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up." We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet.

While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds. No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge.

Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support. As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels. In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially). This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages.

But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right. We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!

From an opinion piece in the Register: Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed who's doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found that the top open source contributors were all companies — Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft....

Aiven looked at three metrics within the GitHub archives. These were the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to, and the number of commits made by the contributors. These were calculated using Google Big Query analysis of PushEvents on public GitHub data. The company found that Microsoft and Google were neck-and-neck for the top spot. Red Hat is in third place, followed by Intel, then AWS, just ahead of IBM.... Red Hat is following closely behind and is currently contributing more commits than Google, with 125,012 in Q4 2022 compared to Google's 94,961. Microsoft is ahead of both, with 128,247 commits. However, regarding contributed staff working on projects, Google is leading the way with 5,757 compared to Microsoft's 5,513 and Red Hat's 3,656....

Heikki Nousiainen, Aiven CTO and co-founder, commented: "An unexpected result of our research was seeing Amazon overtake IBM to become the fifth biggest contributor." They "came late to the open source party, but they're now doubling down on its open source commitments and realizing the benefits that come with contributing to the open source projects its customers use." So, yes, open source certainly started with individual contributors, but today, and for many years before, it's company employees that are really making the code....

Aiven is far from the only one to have noticed that companies are now open source's economic engine. Jonathan Corbet, editor-in-chief of Linux Weekly News (LWN), found in his most recent analysis of Long Term Support Linux Kernel releases from 5.16 to 6.1 that a mere 7.5 percent of the kernel development, as measured by lines changed, came from individual developers. No, the real leaders were, in order: AMD; Intel; Google; Linaro, the main Arm Linux development organization; Meta; and Red Hat.
The article also includes this thought-provoking quote from Aiven CTO's. "Innovation is at the heart of the open source community, but without a strong commitment from companies, the whole system will struggle.

"We can see that companies are recognizing their role and supporting all who use open source."

Phoronix reports: While Ubuntu Linux hasn't provided Flatpak support out-of-the-box due to their preference of using their own Snap app packaging/distribution format, Ubuntu flavors/spins have to this point been able to pre-install Flatpak support if they desired. However, for the 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" cycle and moving forward, Ubuntu flavors will no longer be permitted to install Flatpak packages by default.

Flatpak support for Ubuntu and its flavors will remain available in the Ubuntu archive so those wanting to install Flatpak support can easily do so post-install.

This change going into effect with the 23.04 cycle is making it so no Ubuntu flavors will have Flatpak support installed by default / out-of-the-box: they are supposed to center around Debian packages and Snaps for their out-of-the-box packaging support to align with Ubuntu.
From the blog OMG Ubuntu: Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package set across all eight of Ubuntu's official flavors, as of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release.

Ubuntu says the decision will 'improve the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience' for new users by making it clearer about what an "Ubuntu experience" is....

As far as Ubuntu is concerned, only deb and snap software is intrinsic to the 'Ubuntu experience', and that experience now needs to be offered everywhere. Flavor leads (apparently) agree, and have all agreed to mirror regular Ubuntu by not offering Flatpak features in their default install for future releases....

Flatpak will not be uninstalled or removed when user makes the upgrade to Ubuntu 23.04 from a version where Flatpak is already present.

The Linux Foundation's European off-shoot has formally launched the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort designed to support interoperability between digital wallets through open source software. From a report: The launch comes some five months after the Linux Foundation first revealed plans to set up the OWF, shortly before it spun out a region-specific entity called the Linux Foundation Europe which is where the OWF will now officially reside. While the likes of PayPal, Google, and Apple are among the most recognized digital wallet providers, allowing consumers to conduct financial transactions in-store or online, digital wallets are increasingly being used to store all manner of virtual goods from student ID to driving licenses. On top of that, burgeoning technologies such as the metaverse and crypto are giving rise to greater use-cases for digital wallets.

But one thing all these various environments have in common is that the incumbent digital wallets, for the most part, don't play nicely with each other: an Apple Pay die-hard can't send money to their Google Pay brethren. And that is why the OWF is setting out to create an "open source engine" that can power interoperable digital wallets across myriad use-cases including identity, payments, and storing personal credentials such as employment and education certification.