Announcing coreboot 4.9

The 4.9 release covers commit 532b8d5f25 to commit 7f520c8fe6
There is a pgp signed 4.9 tag in the git repository, and a branch will
be created as needed.

In the little more than 7 months since 4.8.1 we had 175 authors commit 2610 changes to master. The changes were, for the most part, all over the place, touching every part of the repository: chipsets, mainboards, tools, build system, documentation.

In that time we also had 70 authors made their first commit to coreboot: Welcome and to many more!

Coreboot 4.9 Released With 2,600+ Changes, Ports To 56 New Motherboards

The Coreboot folks are ending out 2018 with the release of version 4.9 that has 2,610 changes since their previous release just over a half-year ago.

The Coreboot 4.9 release features a number of code clean-ups to the different motherboard ports and all over, the Coreboot documentation is now hosted within the repository, the Intel FSP binaries are now integrated within the build system, and a number of older boards have been deprecated.

Bitnami Unifies Lifecycle Management for Kubernetes Tools

Bitnami has created a curated stack of open source software to provide consistent tools that can be deployed across multiple instances of Kubernetes.

Simon Bennett, vice president of products for Bitnami, says the Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR) open source project is intended to make it easier for IT organizations to deploy the most common tools employed to manage a Kubernetes environment. BKPR includes Prometheus for monitoring, Elasticsearch, Fluentd and Kibana for logging, and cert-manager, oauth2-proxy and NGINX for managing access. BKPR also offers automatic publishing of endpoints on DNS and TLS termination, including automatic and managed issuing of X.509 certificates.

Eco-Friendly Machine Learning: How the Kubeflow Ecosystem Bootstrapped Itself

How do you bootstrap an open source project that aims to provide stability, composability, and portability for machine learning? You use Kubernetes and its rich ecosystem to implement the pieces of infrastructure that you need to deliver a comprehensive ML platform for data scientists and DevOps engineers alike. This talk will explore the various integrations that have enabled Kubeflow to quickly emerge as the de-facto machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes. We’ll look in detail at not only how Kubeflow leverages Ambassador, Argo, Ksonnet, and JupyterHub, but also examine integration with complementary projects such as Pachyderm and SeldonIO. You will leave this talk with a better understanding and inspiration of how a particular project can rapidly achieve its potential by working with other projects, and that those inter-project collaborations enrich the entire Kubernetes community.

Open source support was central to 2018 data deals

series of big mergers and acquisitions among top data vendors marked 2018.

Taken together, these moves point to directions big data may take in 2019. And open source support has staked its place in that future.

A key was the merger in early October of Cloudera and Hortonworks, two leaders in the 10-year-plus rise of large-scale, open source Hadoop distributed data processing.

DataStax reconnects with Apache Cassandra

Breaking up is hard to do. A couple years ago, DataStax vacated leadership of the Apache Cassandra project that it created as the community demanded a bigger voice. New players had to move into new roles, while the annual community event was allowed to lapse. Members of the community voiced their angst.

As the Apache Cassandra community ventures down the homestretch of readying release 4.0 of the open source platform for release, there is light at the end of the tunnel as DataStax has started reconnecting with the community. It's releasing commercial support of the current open source version, reinstating a Cassandra community event, and taking a higher profile on its contributions, which continue to include documentation and free training, plus some stability enhancements for the upcoming Apache 4.0 release.

The Time for Time Series Data

More than four years ago, we launched InfluxDB, an open source time series platform. In the years since, time series technology has become increasingly popular; according to DB-Engines, over the last 24 months time series has been the fastest growing database category. This popularity is fueled by the “sensorification” of the physical world (i.e., IoT) and the rapidly increasing instrumentation requirements of the next generation of software. InfluxDB has millions of downloads, an expanding list of enterprise customers and a growing community that is always finding new ways to deploy and build on our platform and we believe we are just scratching the surface.

W3 Engineers: Developing an Open-Source Messaging Solution Providing Connectivity in Remote Areas

'Big Plans' for RISC-V

Without question, 2018 was the year RISC-V genuinely began to build momentum among chip architects hungry for open-source instruction sets. That was then.

By 2019, RISC-V won’t be the only game in town.

Wave Computing (Campbell, Calif.) announced Monday (Dec. 17) that it is putting MIPS on open source, with MIPS Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and MIPS’ latest core R6 available in the first quarter of 2019.

grep-3.2 released [stable]

This is to announce grep-3.2, a stable release.

There have been 55 commits by 6 people in the 77 weeks since 3.1.
[note also the 867 gnulib-related changes]

See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Forging a DRM-free future with DbD

The Defective by Design (DbD) campaign is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). In an effort to expand our work towards a world without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), we are asking you to donate $10 or become a member of the FSF as part of its yearly fundraising drive.

The state of DRM is as bad as ever -- restricting your rights every day, whether you realize it or not. Intentionally or unintentionally, you are caught by these digital handcuffs. Looking back on 2018, we see new themes around DRM, largely concerning access: Apple created a new chip to limit repairs of Apple products; Amazon released their SPEKE API making it even easier to include DRM on AWS servers; and we saw a year with EME on the Web. These are just a few of the new ways DRM infiltrated our lives in 2018.

In addition to these examples of DRM technology, we've also had to deal with DRM in the policymaking world. I'd like to spend a little time highlighting net neutrality in the United States, a battle still raging in the US House of Representatives, and Article 13 of the European Copyright Directive. Both of these are issues being tackled by DbD's home organization, the Free Software Foundation, and they're just as important to the fight against DRM as they are to other digital rights.