Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.5-rc1, released on July 9. Linus said:

Anyway, none of it looks hugely unusual. The biggest single mention probably goes to what wasn't merged, with the bcachefs pull request resulting in a long thread (we didn't hit a hundred emails yet, but it's not far away).

The curious can read that long thread in the list archives.

Stable updates: 6.4.3 was released on July 11; it contains a handful of fixes, mostly for problems associated with the per-VMA locking code. Anybody running 6.4 probably wants this update.

The 6.3.13 release also happened on July 11. Note that this is the last 6.3.x update.

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Quote of the week

We just sorted the [MAINTAINERS] entries and fields last release, so just out of a perverse sense of curiosity, I decided to see if we can keep things ordered for even just one release.

The answer is "No. No we cannot".

I suggest that all kernel developers will need weekly training sessions, involving a lot of Big Bird and Sesame Street. And at the yearly maintainer summit, we will all sing the alphabet song together.

— Linus Torvalds

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Fedora considers "privacy-preserving" telemetry

The Fedora project is considering a Fedora 40 change proposal to add limited, opt-out telemetry to the workstation edition. The proposal is detailed; it is clear that the developers involved understand that this will be a hard sell in that community.

We believe an open source community can ethically collect limited aggregate data on how its software is used without involving big data companies or building creepy tracking profiles that are not in the best interests of users. Users will have the option to disable data upload before any data is sent for the first time. Our service will be operated by Fedora on Fedora infrastructure, and will not depend on Google Analytics or any other controversial third-party services. And in contrast to proprietary software operating systems, you can redirect the data collection to your own private metrics server instead of Fedora's to see precisely what data is being collected from you, because the server components are open source too.

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SUSE to create a fork of RHEL

SUSE has announced that it is getting into the business of creating RHEL clones and investing $10 million in the project.

SUSE remains fully committed to investing in its highly regarded Linux solutions such as SLE and openSUSE that countless satisfied enterprise customers and the community rely on. At the same time, it acknowledges that enterprises and the open source community deserve choice and freedom from vendor lock-in. SUSE has a long history in empowering and supporting users with mixed Linux environments.

SUSE is committed to working with the open source community to develop a long-term, enduring compatible alternative for RHEL and CentOS users. SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.

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Distributions quote of the week

I’m not a huge fan of the idea that RHEL (and only if it’s bug-for-bug compatible) serves as a de facto standard with Red Hat doing the bulk of the heavy lifting. That’s been the status quo for years, but it’s never seemed equitable or healthy.

Rather than the industry figuring out a way to work together and create a standard reference Linux that is free to all, the default has been to copy RHEL and hope (and complain) that it continues shipping a reference implementation for everybody else. I’ve heard variations on the complaints about Red Hat having too much influence over this or that because it’s doing a lot of the work for years.

— Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier

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Going Rogue (Digital Antiquarian)

After an initial foray into the ways that open-source software has failed to live up to its early hype, this Digital Antiquarian article covers the history of rogue-like games in great detail.

This brings us back around to a statement I made at the outset: that roguelikes are the exception that proves the rule of open-source game development — and just possibly of open-source software development in general. The cast of thousands who contribute to them do so in order to make exactly the games that they want to play, which in the abstract is the best of all possible reasons to make a game. The experience they end up with is, unsurprisingly, much like high-wire programming at its most advanced, presenting players with an immense, multi-faceted system to be explored and mastered.

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Convening public benefit and charitable foundations working in open domains (OSI blog)

Over on the Open Source Initiative (OSI) blog, the organization has announced the Open Policy Alliance (OPA), which is meant to bring together various non-profit organizations to help educate and inform US policy makers about open-source software and its needs:

The need to create such a program is more urgent today due to the rise of new regulations in the software industry and adjacent open domains around the world. Cyber security, the societal impact of AI, data and privacy are important issues for legislators globally. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic drove collaborative development to unprecedented levels and took Open Source software, open research, open content and data from mainstream to main stage. Moving forward, developing these important public policies whilst not harming the ecosystem requires an understanding of how the Open Source ecosystem works. Ensuring stakeholders without historic benefit of representation are included in those discussions becomes paramount to that end.

The OPA will focus on educating public policy makers on Open Source to inform their development and deliberation of new policy concepts. There are unintended consequences that come from a lack of understanding of how open collaboration works in practice. The OPA will address this as well as the historic absence of contribution from underrepresented groups. The interest areas of the OPA community will complement those of Digitable Public Goods Alliance, a UNICEF multi-stakeholder initiative with a mission to accelerate the attainment of sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries that OSI joined earlier this year.

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