March 13th, 2015

Linus Under Wraps, Fedora Tests Wayland & More…

FOSS Week in Review

To be honest, I’m really not finished going through all the materials I picked up at the Open Compute Project 2015 U.S. Summit this week in San Jose. There is a lot of interesting stuff here to wade through, and I’m still going through it.

Meanwhile, much of what makes the FOSS world interesting didn’t wait for me to finish. Like:

Linus Under Wraps? We all know Linus Torvalds. We “get it” — he’s a guy with a big vocabulary who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Many of us are okay with “Linus being Linus,” though some lately have begun to question how positive his criticisms can be. Earlier this week, Business Insider reported the Linux Foundation appeared to try to rein him in, slapping him on the wrist when they issued a new “Code of Conflict” policy that declared “personal insults or abuse are not welcome.”

The “Code of Conflict” says that if “anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable” while working on Linux, they should report the situation to the Technical Advisory Board who will step in and mediate.”

Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote it and submitted it as a “patch” to the Linux system, which meant ultimately Linus had to see the “patch” to approve it. He did, of course, adding the comment “Let’s see how this works.”

Let’s see, indeed.

Fedora 22 Alpha out: It’s nearly spring, and with the warmer weather and blooming flowers usually comes the even-numbered Fedora releases. The Fedora 22 Alpha is now ready for your test-driving pleasure, should you choose to give it a spin.

Hidden in the release notes in the link above is this morsel: “The login screen now uses Wayland by default. This is a step towards replacing X with Wayland, and users should not actually notice the difference.” Okay, let’s just see about that. If you want to see a preview of what that might look like, you can take a look here.

Fedora 22 Beta is scheduled for release in mid-April.

It’s all in the terminology: I’ve always liked the term “Metal-as-a-Service” (MAAS). It invokes instantly conjuring up Judas Priest or Anthrax (the band, not the livestock disease) at a moment’s notice, though I know that’s not really what it means.

In any case, Canonical trumpets its partnership with Microsoft — yep, Microsoft — this week at the Open Compute Summit, where the Isle of Man reached across to Redmond to demonstrate how Canonical and Microsoft are working together to create scalable, OCP-compliant architecture.

“Canonical is supporting bare-metal provisioning on Microsoft’s OCS hardware with our open source Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) deployment product,” the article states. “This support means Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, SUSE) operating systems, as well as application software on top, can be one-touch provisioned on OCS hardware. At the summit, Canonical is demonstrating how to provision a multi-tier web architecture effectively, including content publishing and database to separate nodes in an OCS chassis.”

What’s mysteriously missing from that parenthetical in the previous paragraph? If you said Red Hat, you’d go on to the bonus round.

Okay then…get a room, you two. See you next week.