In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the Mozilla's IoT gateway, a new machine learning platform, Code.mil's revamp, and more.

Open source news roundup for February 4-17, 2018

Mozilla announces Project Things for a more secure IoT

Mozilla wants you to have control over your connected devices. To help you gain that control, they've released Project Things into the wild.

Project Things is a Raspberry Pi-powered gateway that gives "connected things their own Things URLs so they can be discovered and linked to." People using Project Things can issue voice commands to their devices, get a "a floor-plan map of devices in the home," and build complex commands using a rules engine inspired by a service called IFTTT. And that's just the beginning.

You can get started with Project Things by downloading it and running it on your Raspberry Pi. Mozilla cautions that it's an "early preview for hackers, makers and web developers."

Hardware hackers get Linux to run on Nintendo Switch

Linux now runs on yet another piece of hardware that wasn't designed to play nicely with the operating system. The hardware hacking group fail0verflow got Debian to run on the Nintendo Switch portable gaming console.

To do the deed, fail0verflow took advantage of a flaw in the device's boot ROM to insert code into the boot process that allows Linux to run on the Switch. The group did it without "custom modifications or chips which has often been the case with such 'jailbreaking' of games consoles." fail0verflow hasn't release the details of this hack, but if they do "we could see hobbyist hackers get Linux up and running on their Switches and create a homebrew community around the hybrid console."

Open source machine learning platform for Kubernetes debuts

Kubernetes, the popular container orchestration system, has found a new niche to tackle. It now powers Seldon Core, an "open-source platform that enables data science teams to run and manage models in production at scale."

By mating Kubernetes with Seldon Core, data scientists can "deploy models built with any machine learning toolkit or programming language" and can make it easy to integrate those models "into business apps and services that need predictions." If you're interested, you can find the code for Seldon Core on GitHub.

US Department of Defense overhauls its open source website

Moving from closed source to open isn't always a smooth process. That's a lesson the United States Department of Defense (DoD) learned in 2017. While the DoD's developers were chomping at the bit to go open source, "the guidance on how to release code as code open source just wasn’t very accessible or clear."

To fix that problem, the DoD relaunched its Code.mil site so it "provides much clearer guidance with specific steps, links, and differing paths based on project status," said the DoD's Jordan Kasper. The site now includes "a step-by-step guide showing users how to get permission for projects, choose a license and more."

In other news

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