Open Source

I've been having some thoughts recently on the paths that many open source projects seem to follow and who they are really designed for, the developer or the users?

One Day the World Ended is designed to be an open source and collaborative work of fiction. Most of this will come later when I have more material ready, but <a href="https://github.com/ChrisChinchilla/One-Day-the-World-Ended-Jekyll" target="_blank">the code of the website is on GitHub</a> and you're more than free to issue pull requests if you want to.

One of the best things about being an open source community is the unexpected contributions that appear.

Flexera Software offers tools for producers and consumers of open source software to help ensure compliance and security of open source software in enterprise.

Just how far are you willing to go not to use software that you disagree with? Chris Ward takes a look down the rabbit hole.

FOSS Backstage is a new conference for open source developers and managers. Find out more information about the conference here.

Find out the important roles that software foundations play in providing longevity and structural support for open source projects.

Zone Leader Chris Ward give a recap on some of the highlights of the FOSS Backstage Conference, on security, cost, empathy, and more.

Since content has been created, companies have been attempting to monetize it. Read about this new way that one ad blocking companie is making money.

In this interview, see what one company's philosophy about open source products and development for enterprise apps holds.

Here's a walkthrough of Pengwin, a custom Linux distro built specifically with Windows in mind.

Check out this great introduction to Microsoft's open-source Bosque language as well as hear from its creator.

Stop pushing and start pulling with this new continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes, straight from IBM at KubeCon.

As the year draws to a close, it’s time to gaze into the crystal command line and see what 2020 might hold.

As open-source projects grow in use and popularity, many of their maintainers face a challenge to understand how and how many people use their tools.

Nestled amongst the port of Hamburg, the sound of cranes loading containers of a different kind onto vast cavernous ships, I’m at my first in-person conference in about 18 months. It’s taking place on an old cargo ship, the HMS Bleichen (German), a ship obsoleted by the arrival of containerization and now home to talks about containers of a different kind.

Distributed tracing tools help you track a request through an application or system that consists of multiple applications, services, and infrastructure. This gives you a deeper understanding of what is happening within the system through graphical representations of how much time the request took on each step. A span is the building block of any distributed trace, with each component in a service contributing a span to the distributed workflow. There are a handful of well known open source tracing tools, and another handful of lesser known ones. Most work in similar ways, with one or two nuanced differences, and this post walks through most of them to help find the right tracing tool for you.

Navigate what open source monitoring standards are available, where in the ecosystem they fit, and how interoperable they are with each other.

Open source is at a crossroads. For the past few years, venture capital has directly or indirectly paid for many of the contributors and much of the infrastructure it needed to keep going.

Open source projects dominated by a single vendor are a hallmark of "open source in name only." Rather than filling the traditional role of open source fostering innovation and decision-making from a diverse community, "open source in name only" projects are often used as marketing tools for proprietary platforms. These projects are also seen as riskier than community-driven projects because a single vendor is more apt to abruptly terminate long-term support, restrict contributions, or switch from an open-source license to a more restrictive one (forcing some previous contributors to pay for the project they helped build). In these projects, critics claim that investments are often lopsided and heavily skewed toward onboarding, marketing, and brand-related support. As a result, technical contributions are frequently less developed, opaque, undocumented, or lacking in real substance, often manifesting merely as a superficial "ease of entry and onboarding." Because of these underlying gaps in documentation and codebase depth, developers are routinely forced to reverse-engineer functionality simply to get the tools to work correctly.

A tour of Linux Foundation Energy's project portfolio, and a look at what was announced and demoed at LF Energy Summit Europe in Berlin.