Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 25, 2023

• Why I’m proud to be a non-code open source contributor and you should be too

• The rising role of Open Source foundations and public policy

  The year 2022 marked a significant turning point for public policy affecting the Open Source ecosystem. This transformation has manifested as both a concern about the risks associated with regulations developed in isolation and an opportunity for Open Source and its related domains, such as open science, research, education, and more, to thrive as policymakers contemplate how to foster and endorse greater collaboration in the public interest.

• Measuring Open Source Project Health

  I know it can be exciting to hit some big numbers and celebrate your project’s hundredth or even thousandth star or fork. While popularity measurements might be interesting and exciting, they don’t often provide any real insight into project health or indicate areas of improvement for your project. So feel free to celebrate those milestones, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that they indicate anything meaningful about your project.

• Enhancing Avalanche Forecasts: The Open Avalanche Project

  An avalanche is just a fast-moving mass of snow down a mountain. That may sound simple but it doesn’t make it easy to predict.

  Avalanches can be triggered by fluctuations in the snowpack, including heavy snowfall, a warm spell, an earthquake, or humans. (Some 90 percent of avalanche accidents are set off by the victim.) Annual avalanche accidents and fatalities in the United States have increased steadily, with the average national annual fatality rate climbing five times above the rate in the 1950s.

• Buttondown ☛ The Case of a Curious SQL Query

  Things like this got messier when people actually started using these languages and started caring about properties (say, the order of a result set) of a relational query that the original model didn't have a notion of. Of course, that one is fairly easily resolved, but it is sometimes more difficult, and we get back into the realm of ambiguity.

  Here is my favourite SQL query: [...]

• Kyle E Mitchell ☛ A Short, Simple Template for Scheduled Relicensing

  Separating initial license rules from terms for changing those rules later will improve development and reuse of both. Here’s a form just for scheduling license changes later.

• Red Hat Official ☛ A complete view of system vulnerabilities using Red Hat Insights

  Maintaining and managing the security exposure of your infrastructure can often be an uphill battle. However, Red Hat Insights makes it much easier to do so if your Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers are registered with Insights.

  The Insights Vulnerability service allows users to assess, triage, prioritize and remediate the most critical vulnerabilities affecting their servers with the built-in threat intelligence and the integration to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Over the course of the last few years, the Vulnerability service has been enhanced to continue to provide users with tremendous value. 

• Balancing speed vs. security in the shadow software supply chain

  Modern package management is one of the most transformative aspects of contemporary applications. Application teams have achieved historic efficiency as libraries deal with the repetitive grunt work, freeing corporate developers to focus on high-level domain-specific logic. The explosion of Javascript, Python, Golang and other languages is tightly linked to the vast ecosystems of Open Source libraries available