Patents

Open Invention Network Grows Despite Patent Troll Death Knell 16

snydeq writes Membership in the Open Invention Network, a software community set up to protect Linux against patent aggressors, has grown dramatically in the past year just as the tide seems to be turning on patent trolls. "Why all this interest in OIN? It offers little protection against nonpracticing entities — patent trolls who are organizationally small companies, even if the threat they pose is expensive and large. But it does offer protection against an equally insidious threat: big trolls," writes Simon Phipps. "The big corporations show up with their giant patent portfolios, threatening legal doom if royalties aren't paid. Attaching royalties to product or service delivery is a serious issue for companies, reducing margins long-term — especially in business models where the monetization is separated from the product. But OIN neutralizes that strategy for those building with open source, as the big corporations in the network both license their patent portfolios in and commit not to litigate against the open source software in the Linux System Definition. The bigger it gets, the better it protects."
Linux

What's Been the Best Linux Distro of 2014? 303

An anonymous reader writes With 23% of the year remaining, Linux Voice has donned flameproof clothing to subjectively examine what it feels have been the best distros of the year so far, including choices for beginners, desktop fashionistas and performance fetishists, before revealing a surprising overall winner.
AMD

AMD Building New GPU Linux Kernel Driver To Unify With Catalyst Driver 56

An anonymous reader writes: AMD is moving forward with their plans to develop a new open-source Linux driver model for their Radeon and FirePro graphics processors. Their unified Linux driver model is moving forward, albeit slightly different compared to what was planned early this year. They're now developing a new "AMDGPU" kernel driver to power both the open and closed-source graphics components. This new driver model will also only apply to future generations of AMD GPUs. Catalyst is not being open-sourced, but will be a self-contained user-space blob, and the DRM/libdrm/DDX components will be open-source and shared. This new model is more open-source friendly, places greater emphasis on their mainline kernel driver, and should help Catalyst support Mir and Wayland.
Operating Systems

Systemd Adding Its Own Console To Linux Systems 774

An anonymous reader writes: The next version of systemd is poised to introduce an experimental "systemd-consoled" that serves as a user-space console daemon. The consoled furthers the Linux developers' goal of eventually deprecating the VT subsystem found within the Linux kernel in favor of a user-space driven terminal that supports better localization, increased security, and greater robustness of the kernel's seldom touched and hairy CONFIG_VT'ed code.
GNOME

GNOME 3 Winning Back Users 267

Mcusanelli writes: GNOME 3, the open source desktop environment for Linux systems that once earned a lot of ire, is receiving newfound praise for the maturity of GNOME Shell and other improvements. The recent release of version 3.14 capped off a series of updates that have gone a long way toward resolving users' problems and addressing complaints. One of the big pieces was the addition of "Classic mode" in 3.8, which got it into RHEL 7, and Debian is switching back as well.
Open Source

Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In" 993

An anonymous reader writes "Free software programmer Lennart Poettering has been part of his fair share of controversy in the open source community, and his latest essay may raise the most eyebrows yet. Poettering takes on the idea that the community is one big happy family and has some harsh words for the loudest and most obnoxious members. He says in part: "I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple 'petitions' on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a 'song' on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks. On IRC, people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more."
Programming

Object Oriented Linux Kernel With C++ Driver Support 365

An anonymous reader writes: An effort underway called BOSS-MOOL, the Minimalistic Object Oriented Linux, is designing the Linux kernel with OOP and C++ driver support. Linus Torvalds' opinions on C++ have long been known while developers at the DOS Lab IIT Madras and CDAC Chennai feel redesigning the kernel with object oriented abstractions and C++ driver support will increase maintainability while reducing complexity of the kernel. It doesn't appear though the group will try to mainline these changes.
Open Source

Linux Foundation Announces Major Network Functions Virtualization Project 40

Andy Updegrove writes: The Linux Foundation this morning announced the latest addition to its family of major hosted open source initiatives: the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV). Its mission is to develop and maintain a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform for the telecom industry. Importantly, the thirty-eight founding members include not only cloud and service infrastructure vendors, but telecom service providers, developers and end users as well. The announcement of OPNFV highlights three of the most significant trends in IT: virtualization (the NFV part of the name refers to network function virtualization), moving software and services to the cloud, and collaboratively developing complex open source platforms in order to accelerate deployment of new business models while enabling interoperability across a wide range of products and services. The project is also significant for reflecting a growing recognition that open source projects need to incorporate open standards planning into their work programs from the beginning, rather than as an afterthought.
Graphics

Adobe Photoshop Is Coming To Linux, Through Chromebooks 197

sfcrazy writes Adobe is bringing the king of all photo editing software, Photoshop, to Linux-based Chrome OS. Chrome OS-powered devices, such as Chromebooks and Chromeboxes, already have a decent line-up of 'applications' that can work offline and eliminate the need of a traditional desktop computer. So far it sounds like great news. The bad news is that the offering is in its beta stage and is available only to the customers of the Creative Cloud Education program residing in the U.S. I have a full subscription of Creative Cloud for Photographers, and LightRoom, but even I can't join the program at the moment.
Bug

Apple Yet To Push Patch For "Shellshock" Bug 208

An anonymous reader writes "Open source operating systems vulnerable to the Shellshock bug have already pushed two patches to fix the vulnerability, but Apple has yet to issue one for Mac OS X. Ars Technica speculates that licensing issues may be giving Apple pause: "[T]he current [bash] version is released under the GNU Public License version 3 (GPLv3). Apple has avoided bundling GPLv3-licensed software because of its stricter license terms....Apple executives may feel they have to have their own developers make modifications to the bash code."" It's also worth noting that there are still flaws with the patches issued so far. Meanwhile, Fedora Magazine has published an easy-to-follow description of how Shellshock actually works. The Free Software Foundation has also issued a statement about Shellshock.
KDE

OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 Released 30

jrepin writes OpenMandriva is proud to announce the release of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system. Most of developers efforts were focused on reducing system boot up time and memory usage. This version brings Linux kernel 3.15.10 (with special patches for desktop system performance, responsiveness, and realtime capabilities), KDE Software Compilation 4.13.3, Xorg 1.15.1, Mesa 10.2.6, LibreOffice 4.3.1, Firefox 32, GNU bash with latest security fixes, and many other updated software packages.
OS X

Flurry of Scans Hint That Bash Vulnerability Could Already Be In the Wild 318

The recently disclosed bug in bash was bad enough as a theoretical exploit; now, reports Ars Technica, it could already be being used to launch real attacks. In a blog post yesterday, Robert Graham of Errata Security noted that someone is already using a massive Internet scan to locate vulnerable servers for attack. In a brief scan, he found over 3,000 servers that were vulnerable "just on port 80"—the Internet Protocol port used for normal Web Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests. And his scan broke after a short period, meaning that there could be vast numbers of other servers vulnerable. A Google search by Ars using advanced search parameters yielded over two billion web pages that at least partially fit the profile for the Shellshock exploit. More bad news: "[T]he initial fix for the issue still left Bash vulnerable to attack, according to a new US CERT National Vulnerability Database entry." And CNET is not the only one to say that Shellshock, which can affect Macs running OS X as well as Linux and Unix systems, could be worse than Heartbleed.
Security

Remote Exploit Vulnerability Found In Bash 399

kdryer39 sends this news from CSO: A remotely exploitable vulnerability has been discovered by Stephane Chazelas in bash on Linux, and it is unpleasant. The vulnerability has the CVE identifier CVE-2014-6271. This affects Debian as well as other Linux distributions. The major attack vectors that have been identified in this case are HTTP requests and CGI scripts. Another attack surface is OpenSSH through the use of AcceptEnv variables. Also through TERM and SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND. An environmental variable with an arbitrary name can carry a nefarious function which can enable network exploitation.
Upgrades

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Premieres On Linux, 2 Years After Windows 93

An anonymous reader writes Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has finally been released for Linux two years after its Windows debut. The game is reported to work even on the open-source Intel Linux graphics drivers, but your mileage may vary. When it comes to the AMD and NVIDIA drivers, NVIDIA continues dominating for Linux gaming over AMD with Catalyst where there's still performance levels and other OpenGL issues.
Red Hat Software

Fedora 21 Alpha Released 37

An anonymous reader writes Fedora 21 Alpha has been released. After encountering multiple delays, the first development version is out for the Fedora.NEXT and Fedora 21 products. Fedora 21 features improved Wayland support, GNOME 3.14, many updated packages, greater server and cloud support, and countless other improvements with Fedora 20 already being nearly one year old.
Operating Systems

Outlining Thin Linux 221

snydeq writes: Deep End's Paul Venezia follows up his call for splitting Linux distros in two by arguing that the new shape of the Linux server is thin, light, and fine-tuned to a single purpose. "Those of us who build and maintain large-scale Linux infrastructures would be happy to see a highly specific, highly stable mainstream distro that had no desktop package or dependency support whatsoever, so was not beholden to architectural changes made due to desktop package requirements. When you're rolling out a few hundred Linux VMs locally, in the cloud, or both, you won't manually log into them, much less need any type of graphical support. Frankly, you could lose the framebuffer too; it wouldn't matter unless you were running certain tests," Venezia writes. "It's only a matter of time before a Linux distribution that caters solely to these considerations becomes mainstream and is offered alongside more traditional distributions."
Open Source

Fork of Systemd Leads To Lightweight Uselessd 469

An anonymous reader writes A boycott of systemd and other backlash around systemd's feature-creep has led to the creation of Uselessd, a new init daemon. Uselessd is a fork of systemd 208 that strips away functionality considered irrelevant to an init system like the systemd journal and udev. Uselessd also adds in functionality not accepted in upstream systemd like support for alternative C libraries (namely uClibc and musl) and it's even being ported to BSD.
Cloud

Native Netflix Support Is Coming To Linux 178

sfcrazy writes: Native support for Netflix is coming to Linux, thanks to their move from Silverlight to HTML5, Mozilla and Google Chrome. Paul Adolph from Netflix proposed a solution to Ubuntu developers: "Netflix will play with Chrome stable in 14.02 if NSS version 3.16.2 or greater is installed. If this version is generally installed across 14.02, Netflix would be able to make a change so users would no longer have to hack their User-Agent to play." The newer version of NSS is set to go out with the next security update.

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