LWN.net's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019
| Time |
Event |
| 12:40a |
[$] Some slow progress on get_user_pages()
One of the surest signs that the Linux Storage, Filesystem, and
Memory-Management (LSFMM) Summit is approaching is the seasonal migration of
memory-management developers toward the get_user_pages() problem.
This core kernel primitive is necessary for high-performance I/O to
user-space memory, but its interactions with filesystems have never been
reliable — or even fully specified. There are currently a couple of patch
sets in circulation that are attempting to improve the situation, though a
full solution still seems distant. | | 2:10p |
Chef becomes 100% free software Chef, the purveyor of a popular configuration-management system, has announceda move away from the open-core business model and the open-sourcing of all of its software. " We aren’t making this change lightly. Over the
years we have experimented with and learned from a variety of different
open source, community and commercial models, in search of the right
balance. We believe that this change, and the way we have made it, best
aligns the objectives of our communities with our own business
objectives. Now we can focus all of our investment and energy on building
the best possible products in the best possible way for our community
without having to choose between what is 'proprietary' and what is 'in the
commons.'" | | 3:11p |
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, libssh2, and thunderbird), Debian (firmware-nonfree, kernel, and libssh2), Fedora (drupal7, flatpak, and mod_auth_mellon), Gentoo (burp, cairo, glusterfs, libical, poppler, subversion, thunderbird, and unbound), openSUSE (yast2-rmt), Red Hat (freerdp), and SUSE (bash, ed, libarchive, ntp, and sqlite3). | | 4:12p |
VMware Suit Concludes in Germany Software Freedom Conservancy reports
that the Hamburg Higher Regional Court affirmed the lower court's decision,
which dismissed Christoph Hellwig's case against VMWare in
Germany. Hellwig will not pursue the case further in German courts.
Conservancy's staff also spent a significant amount of time and resources
at each stage of the proceedings — most recently, analyzing what this
ruling could mean for future enforcement actions. The German court made a
final decision in this case on procedure and standing, not on
substance. While we are disappointed that the courts did not take the
opportunity to deliver a clear pro-software-freedom ruling, this ruling
does not set precedent and the implications of the decision are
limited. This matter certainly would proceed differently with different
presentation of plaintiffs or in another jurisdiction.
In addition to VMware committing to removing vmklinux from their kernel, this case also succeeded in sparking significant discussion about the community-wide implications for free software when some companies playing by the rules while others continually break them. Our collective insistence, that licensing terms are not optional, has now spurred other companies to take copyleft compliance more seriously. The increased focus on respecting licenses post-lawsuit and providing source code for derivative works — when coupled with VMware's reluctant but eventual compliance — is a victory, even if we must now look to other jurisdictions and other last-resort legal actions to adjudicate the question of the GPL and derivative works of Linux.
| | 4:29p |
The Debian Project mourns the loss of Innocent de Marchi
The Debian Project sadly announced the passing of Innocent de Marchi. "Innocent was a math teacher and a free software developer. One of his
passions was tangram puzzles, which led him to write a tangram-like game
that he later packaged and maintained in Debian. Soon his contributions
expanded to other areas, and he also worked as a tireless translator
into Catalan." | | 6:54p |
[$] Program names and "pollution"
A Linux user's $PATH likely contains well over a thousand different
commands that were installed by various packages. It's not immediately
obvious which package is responsible for a command with
a generic name, like createuser. There are ways to figure it out, of
course, but perhaps it would make sense for packages like PostgreSQL, which
is responsible for createuser, to give their commands names that
are less generic—and more easily disambiguated—such as
pg_createuser. But renaming commands down the road has "backward
compatibility problems"
written all over it, as a recent discussion on the pgsql-hackers mailing
list shows. |
|