Climate technology must be open source, available at affordable cost: Prakash Javadekar

Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar on Tuesday said just like the world is unitedly engaged in finding a vaccine for COVID-19, countries should work towards making climate technology an open source which must be available at affordable cost.

He was speaking during the first virtual interaction with 30 countries in the 11th session of the Petersberg Climate Dialogue.

India along with 30 other countries participated in the dialogue, deliberating over ways and means to tackle the challenge of reinvigorating economies and societies after COVID-19, while enhancing collective resilience and catalysing climate action as well as supporting particularly those that are most vulnerable.

Make It Easier For Your Software Project To Accept Contributions

[Flameeyes] has heard complaints (and at times, he admits, has complained himself) about big companies not contributing improvements to projects they seem to find useful, or rolling their own implementation rather than use and contribute to an existing code base. Having recently left Google after seven years, he has some insights into some of the reasons big corporations (at least Google, anyway) may sometimes seem to eschew making code contributions, and some of the reasons might come as a surprise.

There are things a corporation can do differently, but there are also some things that can be done on the project’s end to make accepting contributions easier. [Flameeyes] took some time to write out a few pointers on how to make it easier for others (particularly large corporations) to contribute code to a software project.

Classic Westwood strategy games live on as 'OpenRA' has a new major stable release

OpenRA, the excellent free and open source RTS game engine for playing classic Westwood titles has a huge new release finally out as stable today.

This stable release has been a long time coming too, as it's quite a big overhaul. With a more up to date rendering engine, along with proper zooming support it makes OpenRA feel a lot more modern with niceties you find in newer games. It also includes better HiDPI support with scaling, high-res artwork and other tweaks to be a more comfortable experience. Tiberian Dawn and Dune 2000 gained support for more missions, modding support expanded and the list goes on.

Couchbase goes cuckoo for Kubernetes with v2.0 release of Autonomous Operator

The latest release from Couchbase finally includes support for Kubernetes, which is becoming something of a de facto standard among databases.

Couchbase is a NoSQL database of the document-oriented kind, used by global players such as airline ticketing company Amadeus, American Express, Cisco and eBay.

The Autonomous Operator for Kubernetes 2.0 is designed to allow developers and database managers to deploy Couchbase in any cloud with, so it hopes, as little work as possible.

How to value cloud-based open source software services

The public cloud and open source software are pretty much coupled these days. No matter if you’re running Kubernetes-as-a-service, MySQL, Linux, or that open source text editor you’ve used since college, it’s all there for the taking, as-a-service.

However, it’s really not free. Cloud providers charge for usage, either by time or other resource-units consumed. Indeed, it’s half or more of the cloud computing bills I’ve seen recently.
Some enterprises have not yet used open source on premises, not to mention cloud. Now that they are moving to the public cloud, both developers and infrastructure engineers are finding some very compelling reasons to “go open” in the cloud.

Determined AI makes its machine learning infrastructure free and open source

Now is the time to Embrace Open Source – Servian

I live in New Zealand currently under level 3 lockdown¹ and work for a cloud services company, and I am assisting and supporting our clients through the economic slowdown. I understand that the human cost is more important than the economic price we are paying at the moment but we all need jobs to come back to when we appear out of hibernation in our homes. I hope that all of you are staying home and staying safe where ever you are.

I am working with some essential NZ businesses and Government agencies, and industries that have completely blighted by Covid-19 lockdown like our New Zealand Tourist Industry. We also have a responsibility to our own employees within our own company to keep our business going so that we have a job throughout this crisis and come out the other end.

Interview: Greg and Keith Bentley discuss open source, 4D digital twins and more

3D scanning is a key part of reality capture, but the next phase of “going digital” especially in architecture, engineering, and construction, is to create an ecosystem in which project designs keep up with construction, changes, and can provide valuable information throughout a building or asset’s lifetime. Bentley Systems has been focused on creating solutions that bring together reality capture inputs, but also to start to create “digital twins” that keep up with reality over time – bringing them into 4D.

Latest Version of Open Source IPFS Improves Performance

IPFS is a distributed file system that makes use of a global namespace to connect all computing devices. The fundamental difference between IPFS and other distributed file systems is a decentralized system of operators who hold a portion of the overall data, which serves to create a highly resilient system for storing and sharing files. Any operator on the network can serve a file by its content address, and IT teams can find and request content from any node using a distributed hash table (DHT).

Molly Mackinlay, project lead for IPFS and a senior product manager for Protocol Labs, which provides protocols, systems and tools to improve how the internet works, said the latest 0.5 update to IPFS significantly improves the content routing performance in addition to adding support for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.

Deploying OpenStack: Pick a Distribution With These 7 Qualities

How do you know which is best? It’s an important question because, despite OpenStack’s popularity, companies often face serious challenges when adopting and deploying it. Put simply, OpenStack can be time-consuming and skill-heavy in order to deploy it, unless the chosen distribution is equipped to overcome those challenges.

Thus, anyone planning to deploy OpenStack should make sure the distribution they pick meets the following seven criteria.

Commercial open source software startups will thrive during the coronavirus crisis, VCs say. Here are 31 they believe are poised for success

What Open Source Technology Can and Can't Do to Fix Elections

NEC’s world first open source 5G network could help stimulate Africa’s economy

he world’s first 5G mobile network radios based on open and fully virtualised architecture, built by NEC in partnership with various vRAN platforms for Rakuten Mobile, will cut the costs to build and operate 5G networks, give operators the opportunity to lower tariffs and enable them to deliver a raft of new services to help the economy recover.

Open Source Automation Platform Lets DevOps Teams Define Infrastructure as Code

Open-source DevSecOps company Chef this week released v16 of its Chef Infra infrastructure provisioning automation platform. This release adds half a dozen new features, including support for YAML, a new Unified mode, an automation upgrade for its "cookbooks," and expanded platform support.

Chef Infra is designed to allow DevOps and infrastructure-and-operations teams to define infrastructure as code using simple, declarative definitions for common administrative tasks. Chef Infra "ensures painless migration and management with a single process to manage on-premises and cloud estates," the company says.

Monitor and Tune Your Open-Source Database for Maximum Performance

What to expect from Percona Live Online 2020