Brief items
Security
Security quote of the week
A university
study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of
freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software,
they're not going to do a very good job at it.
— Bruce
Schneier
[...] I'm sure they grabbed the first thing they found on GitHub that did the job.
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 5.1-rc2, released on March 24. Linus said: "Well, we're a week away from the merge window close, and here's rc2. Things look fairly normal, but honestly, rc2 is usually too early to tell. People haven't necessarily had time to notice problems yet. Which is just another way of saying 'please test harder'."
Stable updates: the large 5.0.4, 4.19.31, 4.14.108, 4.9.165, 4.4.177, and 3.18.137 updates were released on March 24, followed by 5.0.5, 4.19.32, 4.14.109, and 4.9.166 on March 27.
Quote of the week
TCP is done. It's baked. It's finished. There is very little left
we can do to improve it, and we should move on to improving new
transports such as QUIC which have option space left.
— Dave
Täht
Distributions
Distribution quotes of the week
Since we are still on this island among many in this vast ocean of the
Internet, we write this message in a bottle to inform you of the work
we have finished and what lies ahead of us. These deeds that we have
wrought with our minds and hands, they are for all to partake of - in
the hopes that anyone of their free will, will join us in making
improvements.
— FreeBSD 4th quarter Status Report
I would say that
the reason we don't use Java Class-Path is because Java is for old
people.. and not 'sexy' anymore for the next-gen people. Multi-arch is
for old people. UsrMove is what everyone 'should' have done.. but
didn't. When KlaFooBar Linux comes out with PDP-11-128 bit virtual
machines which make functional-object-shard-hyperledger-containers
possible.. we will be tacking as quickly to making the distro to
incorporate that.
— Stephen John Smoogen
Miscellaneous
Scribus team mourns the passing of Peter "mrdocs" Linnell
The team behind the Scribus libre desktop-publishing tool is mourning the passing of Peter Linnell. "It is no understatement to say that without Peter Scribus wouldn’t be what it is today. It was Peter who spotted the potential of Franz Schmid’s initially humble Python program and, as a pre-press consultant at the time, contacted Franz to make him aware of the necessities of PostScript and PDF support, among other things. Peter also wrote the first version of the Scribus online documentation, which resulted in his nickname 'mrdocs' in IRC and elsewhere. Until recently, and despite his detoriating health, Peter continued to be involved in building and releasing new Scribus versions. Scribus was the project he helped to set on track and which marked the beginning of his journey into the world of Free Software development. While it remained at the heart of his commitments to Open Source in general and Libre Graphics software in particular, Peter contributed to Free Software in many other ways as well. For example via contributions to projects related to freedesktop.org, as a package builder of many Free programs for several Linux distributions on the openSUSE Build Service, and later as an openSUSE board member. Peter was also crucial in bringing the Libre Graphics community together by way of sharing his expertise with other graphics-oriented projects and his assistance in organizing the first Libre Graphics Meetings. In the sometimes ego-driven and often emotional world of Open Source development, Peter managed to get along very well with almost everybody and never lost his sense of humour."
OpenStreetMap and Deborah Nicholson win 2018 FSF Awards
The Free Software Foundation has announced the winners of FSF awards, that were presented at the LibrePlanet 2019 conference. OpenStreetMap received the 2018 Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit and Deborah Nicholson received the Award for the Advancement of Free Software.
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