FOSSlife

Welcome to FOSSlife

FOSSlife Team — Mon, 18 May 2020 10:54:02 +0000

Welcome to FOSSlife FOSSlife Team Mon, May 18, 2020 - 06:54

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We’re proud to announce the launch of FOSSlife — a new web magazine dedicated to the world of free and open source software.

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We’re proud to announce the launch of FOSSlife – a new web magazine dedicated to the world of free and open source software.

The Free software community has been around for more than 30 years, and it has succeeded beyond anyone’s dreams. Free and open source software drives the Internet, runs the most powerful supercomputers in the world, and lights up the laptops of Fortune 500 executives. In fact, FOSS has become so popular that many people don’t even recognize it as a thing anymore and think of it simply as the way we live.

But FOSS really is a thing, with challenges, threats, opportunities, and plenty of reasons to celebrate. The FOSS life is about community, it is about advocacy, and it is about bringing people together and building sustainable, accessible solutions. Most of all, FOSSlife is about the software: inventive, expressive, powerful software that is able, stable, and refreshingly free of hype.

We created FOSSlife to serve as a destination for everyone who cares about the FOSS community and wants to follow the trends, tools, projects, programs, and people who define the FOSS experience. We also serve as an entry point for those who are new to FOSS and are taking their first steps to explore the exciting world of free software.

Stop by for the latest news, as well as feature articles on FOSS technology and FOSS advocacy. We’ll also bring you FOSS success stories and share our favorite posts, videos, and podcasts on topics of interest to the FOSS community.

If you want a convenient weekly summary of what’s new at the site, sign up for our newsletter. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. We invite you to come back often and share our stories with others you know who are happy to be living the FOSS life!

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How to Manage Technical Debt

FOSSlife Team — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

How to Manage Technical Debt FOSSlife Team Fri, Dec 29, 2023 - 07:00

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The “debt” metaphor for technical debt is particularly apt for startups, says Jacob Kaplan-Moss. “You’re incurring future work to get to market quicker. I’m all for it,” he says.

But, many organizations may be saddled with a “creaky codebase,” so what’s the solution? In this article, Kaplan-Moss details a practical approach for managing tech debt, including these steps:

Measure: There are no great measures for tech debt, but there are several serviceable ones. Pick one, be consistent, and track it over time.
Agree on a tech debt allocation: Determine a percentage of time that engineering will spend working on reducing tech debt.
Monitor and adjust regularly.

“Reducing tech debt works better when it’s a long-term, ongoing, incremental commitment” rather than a sprint, he notes.

Dual Licensing Explained

FOSSlife Team — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Dual Licensing Explained FOSSlife Team Thu, Dec 28, 2023 - 07:00

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Dual licensing often refers to making software available under a choice of two licenses, says Heather Meeker, “generally a copyleft open source license and a commercial license.”

“However, dual licensing can also refer to the scenario where multiple licenses apply simultaneously; in these situations, users are required to comply with the terms of multiple licenses at the same time,” she says.

In this article, Meeker explains why organizations might choose this licensing approach and describes various risks and considerations.

10 Ways to Build Your Future with Open Source

FOSSlife Team — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 14:59:41 +0000

10 Ways to Build Your Future with Open Source FOSSlife Team Wed, Dec 27, 2023 - 09:59

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FOSSlife offers many tips and resources relating to the world of open source software, including career advice, tutorials, and community information.

In this overview, we’ve rounded up top FOSSlife articles that offer useful insight and practical guidance to help you build a future with open source.

10 Guidelines for Secure Software Development from OpenSSF by FOSSlife
In line with the OpenSSF’s Open Source Consumption Manifesto, these principles “describe a series of foundational practices that, if followed, can help provide better assurance and security for organizations leveraging them.”

9 Open Source Tech Careers to Consider by FOSSlife
This roundup of Careers articles describes nine potential open source career paths.

8 Ways to Learn JavaScript Online by FOSSlife
JavaScript is one of the world’s most popular programming languages, and we’ve rounded up eight online courses (including free options) that provide step-by-step instruction.

7 Steps to Get Started with Git by John SJ Anderson
Git can be difficult to wrap your head around, so this article explains each step you’ll need to take to complete your first contribution.

6 Steps to Teach Yourself System Administration by FOSSlife
This Skills article provides a wealth of resources that will help you on your way to becoming a system administrator. If you’re unfamiliar with what a sysadmin does, we recommend starting with this introduction.

5 Easy Ways to Learn Rust by FOSSlife
If you’re ready to learn Rust, these five easy steps will get you up to speed in no time.

4 Ways to Improve Your Open Source Strategy by Amber Ankerholz
We outline ways to improve your open source strategy and offer resources to help you understand why and how to define your open source approach.

3 Questions to Ask Before Organizing an Online Conference by VM Brasseur
The ongoing pandemic offers conference organizers “a chance to rethink and reboot their existing event to serve their community better.” Vicky Brasseur outlines three key questions to help you build a purposeful path forward.

2 Simple Steps for Securing Your Linux Desktop by Chris Binnie
This article covers two main considerations for securing a desktop machine: frequently running package updates and configuring a few firewall rules to help keep the bad guys out.

1 More Thing: Support Open Source
Open source needs your contributions, advocacy, participation, and support. Consider giving however you can.

Best wishes for open source success!

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How to Detect AI-Generated Content and Why It Matters

FOSSlife Team — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

How to Detect AI-Generated Content and Why It Matters FOSSlife Team Tue, Dec 26, 2023 - 07:00

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One of the many ethical issues around the advancement of generative AI relates to detecting the product of models, writes Stephanie Kirmer.

“When we talk about content being difficult or impossible to detect as AI generated, we’re getting into something akin to a Turing Test. … If I ask you, “was this produced by a human being or a machine learning model?”, and you can’t accurately tell, then we’ve reached the point where we need to think about these issues,” Kirmer says.

Efforts from organizations such as the Content Authenticity Initiative may help identify AI-generated content, she notes. And, “we can use models as tools on our side of the race as well, training models to scrutinize content and determine that it isn’t human generated.”

In this article, Kirmer explains the importance of authentication and describes related efforts, such as the U.S. Executive Order. Ultimately, there’s no easy answer to this problem, she says, but it’s important to have the discussion and to take responsibility “for spreading accurate and accessible information about these issues.”

Linux Command-Line Basics

FOSSlife Team — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Linux Command-Line Basics FOSSlife Team Mon, Dec 25, 2023 - 07:00

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To get started as a Linux user, you need a good understanding of how Linux works and a handle on some basic commands, says Sandra Henry-Stocker.

In the first article of this four-part series, Henry-Stocker starts at the beginning with logging in, listing files, and learning basic commands. Subsequent articles cover:

Part 2 — Helpful commands to know
Part 3 — Brief cheat sheet
Part 4 — Pipes, aliases, and scripts

Most Popular Open Source Licenses by Programming Language

FOSSlife Team — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Most Popular Open Source Licenses by Programming Language FOSSlife Team Fri, Dec 22, 2023 - 07:00

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Overall, MIT and Apache 2.0 are the most popular licenses in terms of programming language, according to data from OSI’s ClearlyDefined project, reports Nick Vidal.

License use varies depending on the package manager, Vidal notes. However, “the simplicity of these licenses, allowing users to modify and distribute code with minimal restrictions without imposing additional requirements, has undoubtedly contributed to their widespread adoption.”

The article also discusses the challenges of unlicensed components and looks at which licenses tend to be associated with particular languages. For example, “the JavaScript community often leans towards the MIT license, while Python developers show a similar affinity for Apache 2.0,” Vidal says.

LF Launches Generative AI Commons

FOSSlife Team — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

LF Launches Generative AI Commons FOSSlife Team Thu, Dec 21, 2023 - 07:00

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The Linux Foundation is entering the generative AI era with the launch of Generative AI Commons, reports Sean Michael Kerner. The project “was quietly launched in September and has progressed steadily in the months since then.”

The LF AI & Data Generative AI Commons now has more than 100 active members, and its mission involves fostering the advancement of “ethical Generative AI open source innovations through neutral governance, open and transparent collaboration and education.”

Linux System Monitoring with watch and fswatch

Bruce Byfield — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Linux System Monitoring with watch and fswatch Bruce Byfield Wed, Dec 20, 2023 - 06:00

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Bruce Byfield explains the functionality and use of these command-line tools.

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Most users familiar with Linux have probably used cron or at to schedule the running of commands. Both can be useful in their place: cron for repeated scheduling of events and at for scheduling an event once. However, what both lack is the ability to gather system information and respond to it unless you write a specific script. Usually, it is much easier to use watch and fswatch to do both these things. While watch and fswatch can be used simply to gather information or to check for possible security incursions, both can be tweaked to act like a scheduler with little effort and minimal script-writing ability.

watch

The purpose of watch is to follow how a command’s output changes over time (Figure 1). This information can be used for troubleshooting, as well as for keeping a root or regular user informed about system changes as new packages are installed or updated. In limited circumstances, it could also be used as a simpler replacement for at or cron. Several other common uses are shown in Table 1. By default, watch runs every two seconds until closed or interrupted. The basic command structure is:

watch OPTIONS COMMAND

Figure 1: Using watch to track the changes in a directory every 60 seconds.

Table 1: Everyday Uses for Watch
`watch ‑n 5 date`	Display the date every five seconds
`watch ‑n 60 from`	Watch for mail every 60 seconds
`watch ‑d ls ‑l`	Watch changes in a directory
`watch ‑d 'ls ‑l \| fgrep joe'`	Watch files owned by the `joe` account
`watch uname ‑r`	Watch for installation of a new kernel
`watch ‑d free ‑m`	Watch changes in disk spaces

Depending on the command’s contents, watch may need to be inside quotation marks. For example, a command would need quotes if it uses a pipe in order to run less or grep. Alternatively, instead of quotes, you could run ‑‑exec (‑x), so that a new process is not needed when the command contains multiple commands.

Two options set the nature of watch’s behavior. The most important is ‑‑interval SECONDS (‑n SECONDS). The ‑‑interval option overrides the default ‑2 seconds between each time the command is run – an interval obviously chosen for immediate troubleshooting. However, on a computer that is always running, setting the interval to 86,400 would make watch run once per day, and setting the interval to 604,800 would make it run weekly, making watch serve the same function as at or cron. Either a comma or a period can be used to write large intervals; the minimal interval is .1 second. The only difference between watch and other schedulers is that you would need to remember to restart watch if the computer was ever shut down, which is a problem that at or cron do not have. For reasons that are not clear, the interval can be supplemented with ‑‑precise (‑p) to make sure that the interval is precise – perhaps some testing might require that precision.

watch also supports options to customize output and exit behavior. With ‑‑color (‑c), output is color-coded. With ‑‑no‑linewrap (‑w), long lines are truncated, while ‑‑differences (‑d) highlights the latest output that differs from previous output. You can also remove the header showing the interval, command, current date, and time with ‑‑no‑title (‑t). Exit options are equally varied. With ‑‑chgexit (‑g), watch exits when the output changes, which can be an obvious and handy indicator. Possibly, too, you may want ‑‑beep (‑b) for a noise to indicate that watch has just exited with an error or

‑‑errexit (‑e), which stops output after an error occurs but waits to exit until any key is pressed.

fswatch

fswatch monitors changes to directories or files. Ubuntu users can install it via the fswatch package. The simplest way to use it is to run fswatch in one terminal and edit files in another. As you start to use fswatch, you need to know something about how the command is structured and operates. fswatch is capable of using several different utilities. On macOS, it reports on information gathered by FSEvents. On BSD, it relies on the kqueue monitor. On Linux, it uses inotify, a Linux kernel subsystem, by default with the option of the poll monitor, which saves the time at which files were modified. All these monitors give similar information, although fswatch’s man and info pages warn that each has its own strengths and weaknesses, as well as its own bugs, all of which are described in detail in the help pages. You can use the ‑‑list‑monitor (‑M) option to see a list of available monitors and select which one to use with ‑‑monitor NAME (‑m NAME). However, the output, which displays in the terminal in which the command is running, generally differs little with the monitor.

Without any options, fswatch only records the files that have changed, but other options can add additional information, such as the event detected, and, optionally, the time the event was detected. Event types are self-explanatory. One action may have more than one event type. fswatch event types include:

Created
Updated
Removed
Renamed
OwnerModified
AttributeModified
MovedFrom
MovedTo
IsFile
IsSymLink
Link

To help organize the output, you can use ‑‑batch‑marker CHARACTER to separate out each loop of the command. In addition, ‑‑print0 (‑0) can be used to ensure that lines are separated for easier reading.

The basic command structure is

fswatch OPTIONS PATHS

As well as specific paths, you can use select paths with regular expressions using ‑‑include REGEX (‑i REGEX) or ‑‑exclude REGEX (‑e REGEX). Searches can be made case insensitive with ‑‑insensitive (‑I) and include subdirectories with ‑‑recursive (‑r). If the watched files include symbolic links, fswatch will follow them if the ‑‑follow‑links (‑L) option is added. You can also use ‑‑timestamp (‑t) to add the local time to the output or ‑‑utf‑time (‑u) to add the time in UTC format. With either time option, you can structure the date using ‑‑format‑time FORMAT (‑f FORMAT), using the strftime codes. Other useful options are ‑‑one‑event (‑1), which exits fswatch after one set of events, and ‑‑latency SECONDS (‑l SECONDS), which must be at least .1 seconds. Unlike watch, fswatch does not give any output, except for briefly outlining the tab of another terminal whose present working directory is open.

Often, the basic information generated by fswatch is useful by itself. However, like watch, fswatch can be used to issue commands. It does so by piping it through xargs, whose purpose is to issue other commands. Table 2 shows four common examples cribbed from fswatch’s online help.

Table 2: fswatch and xargs
Action	Command	Comments
Run a Bash command	`fswatch FILE‑PATH \| xargs ‑n 1 COMMAND`	Usually for creating, updating, or deleting files
Watch one or more files and/or directories	`fswatch PATHS */.js \| xargs ‑n 1 bash_command`	–
Print the absolute paths of the changed files	`fswatch PATH \| xargs ‑n 1 ‑I {} echo {}`	–
Filter by event type	`fswatch ‑‑event DIRECTORY‑PATH \| xargs ‑n 1 bash_command`	Usually for creating, updating, or deleting directories

Two More For the Toolbox

If you prefer to work from a desktop environment, Gnome offers command‑runner‑applet with approximately the same functionality as watch and fswatch. But command‑runner‑applet is not a single command; according to its GitHub page, it takes over the desktop while running, although mouse and keyboard actions will run after it completes.

Both watch and fswatch, on the other hand, offer a wider range of functionality within a single command, and fswatch in particular offers in-depth reporting options. The main difference, of course, is that watch provides a unified way to monitor with commands, while fswatch is concerned mainly with the management of directories and files. Each, though, is yet another example of how the command line can offer more than the desktop. Although relatively unknown, each is a useful addition to the administrative toolbox.

This article originally appeared in Cool Linux Hacks and is reprinted here with permission.

Want to read more? Check out the latest edition of Cool Linux Hacks.

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How EU’s AI Act Will Affect Businesses

FOSSlife Team — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 12:00:00 +0000

How EU’s AI Act Will Affect Businesses FOSSlife Team Tue, Dec 19, 2023 - 07:00

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If passed into law, the EU’s comprehensive AI Act will affect all enterprise businesses using AI with operations in the EU, reports Makenzie Holland. And, the act may also provide an example to other governments of how to regulate AI.

According to the latest agreement, the act includes safeguards to ensure that fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability are protected from high risk AI. These include:

Prohibiting biometric categorization systems that use sensitive characteristics (e.g., political, religious, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, race)
Bans on social scoring and AI used to manipulate or exploit user vulnerabilities
Right of consumers to launch complaints and receive meaningful explanations
Fines up to 35 million euros or 7% of global turnover