It all starts with a simple plan. You create rooms by creating 2D polygons, just as you would with a drawing app like Inkscape. Select Add walls and you can snap vertical walls onto your creation. As you make all these changes, the 3D preview updates in real time, so you can see what your abode will look like from a first-person view. This extends to when you start furnishing your creation by dragging and dropping elements from the vast library of models that are categorized by room. There are two living room armchair types, for example, and three staircase types. Double-click on one of these objects, and you can change its size, its orientation, its shininess, and even its texture and material. It's easy to lose hours trying to get everything exactly right, or changing options to see what things look like in a different color or with a different theme.

Sweet Home 3D has been in development since 2005, which is why it has such a rich set of features and such a huge library of objects. Version 6 is a major update with lots of new models, many replacing older and more dated versions, all released under a GPL or CC-BY license. This added detail extends to changeable screens on the laptop model and the picture frame, and even a mirror that actually reflects. But our favorite is the mannequin object that you can drop into your scene. Double-click on this and select Modify deformation, and you can drag the mannequin's limbs around to put them into the exact position you need, whether that's lounging on the sofa or playing the arcade machine.

The US’s National Security Agency (NSA) is releasing a software reverse engineering tool for free public use in March, in an unusual step – although the tool had already been leaked by Wikileaks as part of its Vault 7 batch of CIA leaks.

Dubbed GHIDRA and understood to have been in use internally at the NSA for over a decade, it will be publicly demonstrated – and made freely available – for the first time on March 5 at the RSAC 2019 conference by senior NSA advisor Robert Joyce.

[...]

The release will happen in a session at the conference in San Francisco titled “Come Get Your Free NSA Reverse Engineering Tool!”

The session note says the tool provides “an interactive GUI capability [that] enables reverse engineers to leverage an integrated set of features that run on a variety of platforms including Windows, Mac OS and LINUX and supports a variety of processor instruction sets.”

It adds: “The GHIDRA platform includes all the features expected in high-end commercial tools, with new and expanded functionality NSA uniquely developed.”

Only in April of last year did HMD Global start releasing the kernel source code. Back then, the company was widely known for not releasing kernel source code and actively going against the development community. While the company still is doing that, releasing kernel source code is a step in the right direction for sure. HMD Global once said that they would unlock the bootloaders of devices “one model at a time”, yet we’ve only seen one unlocked thus far. It’s possible that the company may eventually unlock more devices, but for now, there’s not a huge amount that can be done with the kernel source code. If you’d like to check it out anyway, you can check out the links below for the Nokia 7 Plus and the Nokia 8.1.

Okay, so we’ve got some quick and dirty business model definitions laid down. The majority of the companies in this space are open core, and it’s not hard to see why. Selling proprietary software is a relatively straightforward model. Customers pay for a license to use, they become dependent on functionality which can only be found in that software, and they usually become locked in, securing a recurring revenue stream of license renewals and forced upgrades to newer versions.

And yet, the most successful company (by financials) in this space, Red Hat, is not open core. Having been at Red Hat since 2001, I think the primary key to our success has been that we have deeply invested in delivering value to our customers and to our open source communities. The open source model allows for us to leverage a development pool far beyond what we can staff in house, incorporate the improvements of the participants in that community, and deliver offerings to our customers that put them entirely in control.

When I was in Red Hat Sales, I learned very quickly that the top value for open source for our enterprise customers was that control. They hated the lock-in model of proprietary software, not because they had to pay, but more specifically, because they were stuck on software that was not entirely meeting their needs and for which the vendor was not providing good value for the money. After all, if your customers are locked in, it is easy to reach a point where you have no real business case for improving the software, either via new features, improved usability, or bug fixing. Customers get wedged in a painful state where it is even more painful to abandon the software, trapped in a poor experience and growing to despise their vendors. Even if a customer was never going to make a change to the source code, or even look at it, the knowledge that they could (or that they could hire anyone else to maintain it for them) was empowering. They paid Red Hat because we delivered value beyond binary deliverables.

The open core model has always seemed odd to me, a sort of “half-pregnant” state. On one hand, companies must believe there is value in the open source development model, otherwise, why not simply work from an entirely proprietary stack? I suppose some companies might see the open source core as a cheap foundation for their offerings, but I think that if they treat it as such, they only get a one-time boost from it, and fail to benefit significantly over time. Regardless, open core assumes that a company could not generate revenue (or could not generate as much revenue) from open source alone. My experiences at Red Hat provide evidence that this is not the case, though, I’m careful not to assert that this is never true.

While the long-awaited Haiku R1 Beta debuted back in September, development activity didn't lighten up after that point but the developers of this open-source BeOS-inspired operating system were very busy through the holidays.

EasySSH lives up to its name and starts SSH connections at the click of a mouse.

Most experienced Linux users are familiar with Secure Shell (SSH), with some being regular users. The protocol supports encrypted connections with remote devices via TCP/IP according to the client-server principle. Typically, you connect to servers that do not have a graphical user interface (GUI). However, with the appropriate bandwidth, you can manage tools with a GUI using X forwarding.

The future of ZFS in FreeBSD, we pick highlights from the FreeBSD quarterly status report, flying with the raven, modern KDE on FreeBSD, many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2, GOG installers on NetBSD, and more.

In the Go language, program parts that run simultaneously synchronize and communicate natively via channels. Mike Schilli whips up a parallel web fetcher to demonstrate the concept.

I often wonder why some developers seem committed to designing new programming languages. Of course, the young guns today are all hungry for slight improvements in the syntax, while hipsters enthuse over smart ideas for compact code. But the effort of building an ecosystem and setting up a community is immense!

Alas, since processors stopped running faster every year some time ago and only simulate more speed with cores running in parallel, one thing is very important: Your choice of language has to be able to coordinate parallel program parts easily. When I visited the WhatsApp team at Facebook in Menlo Park after work a few months ago, I learned what the secret of the small team's success was when they used a handful of machines to text millions of users. They used the old-fashioned Erlang language, which has parallelism as a native feature.

I was reviewing simple algorithms with a view to using some as examples or exercises in my Python programming course. While doing so, I thought of enhancing simple linear search for one item in a list, to make it search for multiple items.

The latest change/feature proposal is to ship Fedora 30 with Go 1.12.

This though should come as little surprise considering Fedora is known for always shipping the latest and greatest packages in its release. With Go 1.12 expected for release in February, it should come as little surprise to find it in the May release of Fedora 30 but the standard Fedora change policies are being followed.