Tuesday, December 8th, 2015

Time	Event
12:12a	It’s actually open source software that’s eating the world (VentureBeat) For a far-outside view, it's hard to beat this VentureBeat article, wherein a venture capitalist talks about how "open-source companies" are taking over. "The OSS companies that will be pillars of IT in the future are the companies that leverage a successful OSS project for sales, marketing, and engineering prioritization but have a product and business strategy that includes some proprietary enhancements. They’ve figured out that customers are more than happy to pay for an enterprise-grade version of the complete product, which may have security, management, or integration enhancements and come with support. And they also understand that keeping this type of functionality proprietary won’t alienate the community supporting the project the way something such as a performance enhancement would." (Comment on this)
1:53p	NetHack 3.6.0 released Version 3.6.0 of the NetHack dungeon adventure game has been released. This is the first official release in over ten years. "Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development. Those of you expecting a huge raft of new features will probably be disappointed. Although we have included a number of new features, the focus of this release was to get the foundation established so that we can build on it going forward." There has been enough change, though, that old save files will not work with this version. (Comment on this)
4:58p	Security updates for Tuesday CentOS has updated libxml2 (C6: multiple vulnerabilities). Debian-LTS has updated bouncycastle (invalid curve attack) and linux-2.6 (multiple vulnerabilities). Fedora has updated audiofile (F22: buffer overflow), LibRaw (F23: two vulnerabilities), and python-django (F23: information disclosure). openSUSE has updated thunderbird (Leap42.1: multiple vulnerabilities). Oracle has updated libxml2 (OL7; OL6: multiple vulnerabilities). Red Hat has updated git (RHEL7: code execution) and kernel (RHEL7: denial of service). SUSE has updated java-1_7_0-ibm (SLE11SP3: many vulnerabilities). Ubuntu has updated libsndfile (multiple vulnerabilities). (Comment on this)
5:55p	[$] Checksum offloads and protocol ossification Given the processing requirements for high-speed networking, it is not surprising that there is interest in offloading some of that work to dedicated hardware. Linux has always carefully limited the support provided for such offloading, though; it has been just over ten years since support for TCP offload engines was definitively blocked from entering the Linux network stack. That rejection was driven by a number of concerns, with a reluctance to entrust network-protocol processing to closed-source, unextendable, unfixable software being near the top of the list. Nearly ten years later, offload engines are again the topic of fierce discussion. The hardware has changed, but the concerns have not; indeed, some of the problems being worked around now show why those concerns were valid in the first place. (Comment on this)
8:07p	German court addresses GPLv3 section 8 termination provisions (Opensource.com) Opensource.com takes a look at a court case in Germany addressing the GPLv3 termination provisions. "In the Halle court case, the defendant, a higher education institution in Germany, offered certain software for download to its employees and students. The plaintiff provided a written warning of copyright infringement based on a GPL violation to the defendant, including a cease-and-desist declaration with a penalty clause. The defendant refused to sign the declaration but removed the software from its website. The plaintiff filed for a preliminary injunction. The court ruled that the plaintiff was entitled to a preliminary injunction. The defendant had made the plaintiff's copyrighted software publicly available and was in violation of both GPLv2 and GPLv3 as the defendant had not accompanied the software with the license text and the complete corresponding source code." (Comment on this)
8:55p	Mozilla Will Stop Developing And Selling Firefox OS Smartphones (TechCrunch) TechCrunch reports that the Firefox OS phone experiment has come to an end. "Firefox OS proved the flexibility of the Web, scaling from low-end smartphones all the way up to HD TVs. However, we weren’t able to offer the best user experience possible and so we will stop offering Firefox OS smartphones through carrier channels." (Comment on this)

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