News

This newsletter will only cover three stories, but each of them is quite interesting and took some time to research. Firstly, today is the first day of GUADEC, which is similar to last week’s Akademy but for GNOME. Then, we have an API proposal to Chromium that might be quite risky for the future of the internet. Finally, we get back to the Cyber Resilience Act, which has been approved by an EU Committee. Let’s get started! ...

SUSE forks RHEL with $10M, and Oracle heavily criticizes Red Hat too Let’s start with the former: SUSE, the company behind SUSE Linux Enterprise, has invested $10 million to create a fork of RHEL that avoids any lock-in and continues being fully open source. The plan is to contribute the project to an open-source foundation that will preserve free access over time. This is quite big news, especially given the big money commitment from SUSE; it shows that the last move from Red Hat has significantly weakened what RHEL was. ...

Rocky Linux searches for RHEL loophole As covered last week, Red Hat has decided to stop publicly sharing RHEL source code, only leaving CentOS Stream. The source code can still be obtained, but only through a contract that disallows re-use. Rocky Linux, based on RHEL, thus has to search for another place to get the sources from. The first option they have is to use UBI container images that are based on RHEL and available online; using those, it should be easy to reconstruct the source code. ...

RHEL source code isn’t freely available anymore This is pretty big news, and it deserves some explanation. I will do my best to provide some context about this change and explain it truthfully, though there are currently contradicting sources of information. A bit of history: RHEL is Red Hat’s Linux distribution aimed at enterprises; its binaries are available to Red Hat’s customers; some of these are paying for it, though free developer accounts also exist. When signing up for it, you have the right - guaranteed by the GPL license - to see the source code, but Red Hat disallows any form of re-sharing of that code in the agreement. This has never been important, as RHEL’s code has always been open source and publicly available to everyone (customers and non-customers). ...

The Reddit protest goes on, with hacker stories and more Even though the 48-hours mark the protest initially asked for has long passed, ~3000 subreddit are still private or restricted to protest against API changes. This has led Reddit to respond, in some very weird ways. Steve “spez” Huffman (Reddit’s CEO) doubled down on the changes, saying that Reddit API was never designed for third party applications; then, he openly praised Elon Musk management of Twitter as a reference for him. He also said that the blackout “will pass”. However, since it didn’t, Reddit has started threatening the moderators of the communities who won’t re-open. ...

Debian 12, codenamed “Bookworm”, released After two years of development, we have a new release of Debian. The most noticeable changes compared to the previous version are updates to all the packages; Debian 12 uses GNOME 43, the Linux kernel 6.1 (the current LTS), LibreOffice 7.4, Python 3.11, and so on. In fact, Debian 12 even includes roughly ~10k new packages, for a total of ~60k; so, not only have they been updated, but there are also many more. ...

Mozilla awards 100.000$ in “Responsible AI” prizes In March, Mozilla launched the “Responsible AI Channel”, a one-day in-person event to build “trustworthy AI products”. This is extremely important because AI tools currently raise privacy and copyright concerns. So, who won? The top prize, $50k, was awarded to the “Sanative AI” project. The idea here is to “watermark” images through a small amount of visual noise that will make them useless upon training (as “the AI is unable to properly minimize its loss function”). Creating this watermark, which is different for each image, requires a great number of resources, and yet Sanative offers it for free through a queue. This approach has some potential issues: already uploaded images - without this watermark - can still be used for training, and AI organizations might find a way to get around the noise. However, Sanative AI is committed to improving its tool over time to remain effective. ...

Ubuntu will offer an immutable, all snaps Desktop next year This news comes directly from the comments of OMGUbuntu: Canonical developer Oliver Grawert has said that there is already an immutable Ubuntu distro, called “Ubuntu Core”, currently aimed at embedded devices. The next LTS release of Ubuntu, though, a Desktop version of it will also be released, meaning that it will be aimed at normal users and not just IoT devices. Users won’t be able to install applications through apt (as immutable systems disallow changing the system files) but they will have to use snap for anything. ...

The Red Hat Summit is into the second to last day, KDE Plasma announces preliminary HDR support and Kubuntu will releases new Laptop. Keyboard driven browser Nyxt and GNOME settings gets updates. Fedora Budgie Onyx spin has been confirmed! Red Hat Summit 2023 is LIVE! The Red Hat Summit is taking place right now in Boston and I (Brandon Hopkins) have been super lucky to be able to attend. It has been awesome meeting like-minded lovers of open-source software. There are a bunch of booths to connect with various organizations and branches within the Red Hat company. In addition, there have been a ton of keynotes, presentations, and labs to learn and better understand RHEL, Linux, AI, automatization, and containerization. Even if you were not able to attend Red Hat has been live streaming and releasing some of the content from this summit. ...

The latest COSMIC DE update features panels, settings, and more The monthly update on the COSMIC desktop development is out, and it contains lots of user-facing improvements. The first big one is panels that can be freely customized; that is, you can move them around, change their size, have multiple panels, and even make them float. Similarly to KDE Plasma or XFCE, the panels contain applets that can be customized (by adding new ones, removing them, and moving them around). One main difference with Plasma is that each applet lives in its own process, meaning that the desktop would still work even if one of them were to crash. Furthermore, one unique feature is the ability to change the transparency of the panels directly from their settings. The blogpost contains lots of screenshots with different setups, so make sure to check it out if you’re interested. ...