Once again, I present a random sample of new stories that I find interesting and on-topic regarding SDR, open source, or technology.
To give this some focus, I will pick exactly 10 stories of the month, not in any particular order.
Microsoft goes back and forth on commercial open source in app store
Sources: sfconservancy.org, Twitter, golem.de
Beginning of the month, MS declared they would not allow profiting from open-source software that is available for free elsewhere. That also included devs themselves selling their own code to fund their development, which caused a lot of criticism, brought forward, among others, by the SF Conservancy. Ultimately, MS simply removed the paragraph regarding Open Source.
My guess is this wasn’t an attack on Open Source by MS, but rather a simple mistake, or maybe even an unfortunate attempt to protect people selling other people’s stuff.
It definitely shows how much even an OSS-savvy company like MS has trouble dealing with OSS in the right way.
SFConservancy: “Devs should eschew Github”
Sources: golem.de, sfconservancy.org, heise.de
More from SFConservancy: Developers should give up Github, according to them. Not that that’s a new development, Open Source advocates always have been critical of Github, and there’s plenty of good reasons to be. After all, Github itself is closed source, and of course tries the usual tactics to vendor-lock users to Github. On the flip side, they have benefited massively from Open Source technologies, among other things, to promote Github in the first place. The GiveUpGitHub page lists plenty of good reasons.
The proverbial straw to break the camel’s back here seems to be the release of Github’s Copilot. They key criticism is the fact that Copilot was trained on Open Source code (it was not trained on the Microsoft internal code, such as the Windows codebase) and it pretty much ignores all licensing.
The request to leave Github is comparable to when many OSS developers left SourceForge, over two decades ago. A key difference though is that Github is really good as a product, and there’s no good alternatives. Gitlab has a similar business model, and the two main suggested alternatives, codeberg.org and source hut are pages I’ve never ever heard of before this.
Fedora no longer allows CC0-licensed software
Sources: hackaday.com, golem.de, heise.de, lwn.net
This might seem like a very minor thing, but this underlines how important it is to know your licenses. The main issue here is that CC0-licensed software doesn’t contain any type of patent clause, making it possible to sue users of said open source software for patent infringement. Most other licenses do just that.
For a similar reason, you should not use public domain source code.
Germany: Something something future & digital
Sources: heise.de
The Bundesministerium für Digitales und Verkehr (BMDV) (basically, Germany’s ministry of infrastructure) published a paper on their strategy for the next years. It contains all the right buzzwords (more open source, we admit Germany’s behind the curve, internet needs to be free and secure, we need better gender equality in tech…) but is light on the details. At this point, it’s safe to say that this is a piece of paper and nothing else.
Google: More open source chip production
Source: googleblog.com
The story of Google and open source HDL toolchain and chip design tools continues to be of interest to me. This month, they announced an open source, Apache 2.0-licensed process development kit for 90nm chips together with their partner SkyWater Technology.
If this seems like a small incremental update, the silicon industry is not something that will be open-sourced in the same way compilers were, so small updates is the best we can hope for.
Google: Also, another programming language
Sources: heise.de,
“Carbon should be to C++ what Kotlin is to Java, Swift is to Objective-C, or TypeScript is to JavaScript”. Unlike Rust, Carbon is highly compatible to C++ (e.g., Carbon and C++ can be compiled together and they can call into each other). The main difference to the goals of Rust seem to be, at first glance, the requirement for excellent C++ interoperability.
As Google usually does, the language was moved out of Google into its own project and governance. According to them, it’s not yet ready for use.
My money is that Carbon will not have the same success that TypeScript and Kotlin had.
And speaking of Rust: It will now be compilable by gcc.
CHIPS Act: USA’s chip manufacturers to become more self-sufficient?
Over the next decade, the US has decided to spend approx. $200 billion for fabs, research, tax reductions for semiconductor companies. Better late than never.
DARPA launches SocialCyber program to better understand Open Source
Sources: technologyreview.com
This really is a no-brainer: Because Open Source, and Linux in particular, are important to national security, it’s worth throwing some millions of Dollars to scrutinize it. What’s interesting is that this is a social study. This effort is to analyze how exactly the people interact, what makes communities healthy, how to identify bad actors and other bad influences. For example, in Linux, there is no sensible way to block contributors that are sanctioned by the USA, and yet, that same code is still running critical infrastructure in lots of places in the US.
A good discussion on the relevance of maintainers of critical projects was also discussed on lwn.net.
Does OpenRAN have a future?
Source: heise.de
The Heise news story linked above starts a discussion on the viability of OpenRAN, based on the fact that a major OpenRAN vendor, Parallel Wireless, is laying off most of their employees. A few issues are discussed: The fact that OpenRAN has not a lot of options to actually reduce costs, that ISPs prefer buying from a single vendor anyway, or the fact that OpenRAN has not yet been very successful commercially.
Google slowing down hiring
Sources: theverge.com, golem.de
This is a reminder that there might be a recession coming, but also, I’ve always been curious what would happen if Google were actually under some serious economic pressure. Many companies are currently slowing hiring, so this is not a huge surprise.