Free Software Leftovers: Politics, Lawsuits, and FOSS Weekly

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 11, 2023

• Avoiding the success trap: Toward policy for open-source software as infrastructure

  High-profile security incidents involving open-source software (OSS) have brought the ubiquity of OSS and the unique challenges its communities face to the attention of policymakers in the United States, EU, and beyond. For policymakers seeking to support the security and sustainability of OSS as a shared resource, this report builds on an important perspective on open-source software: OSS as Infrastructure. OSS is code published under a license that allows anyone to inspect, modify, and re-distribute the source code. This helps developers share and re-use solutions to common problems, creating such efficiencies that some estimate that 97 percent of software depends on OSS. OSS ranges from small components for illustrating graphs to entire operating systems. Contributors include individuals working in their free time, staff at large companies, foundations, and many others. The ecosystem is community-based, with many governance structures to manage contributions and maintenance.

  This report compares OSS to three infrastructure systems—water management systems, capital markets, and networks of roads and bridges—and draws on existing policy vehicles from each to suggest policy that supports the sustainability and security of OSS as a communally beneficial resource.

• InfluxData raises $81M for IoT database and real time data

  What Kaplan is calling a stack is really just an open source, columnar in-memory ecosystem (that’s the Apache Arrow bit) that has tied in projects such as Flight SQL and DataFusion to handle storage, optimization, queries, etc. across different styles of databases, and Parquet to tie a a super fast in-memory columnar database to a traditional SQL database and move data from in-memory storage to external storage. Kaplan is pitching this “stack” because InfluxDB’s new IOx storage engine uses Apache Arrow’s format for representing data and Parquet to move data to external storage. It also uses DataFusion to add SQL support.

• SFC's Policy Fellow Files Expert Report in Neo4j v. PureThink

  In the ongoing litigation — Neo4j, Inc. v. PureThink, LLC and John Mark Suhy (5:18-cv-07182) — in U.S. federal court in the Northern District of California, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC)'s Policy Fellow, Bradley M. Kuhn, will serve as the Defendants' third-party expert on issues related to the AGPLv3. The Defendants' request for Kuhn's expertise comes after months of public discussion about previous preliminary actions in the Neo4j litigation.

• FOSS Weekly #23.06: Endless OS 5, Rookie Linux Mistakes, Grub Tutorials and More

  This edition of FOSS Weekly is focused on Grub bootloader.