Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME’s Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default. Recently there was a Fedora Workstation ticket opened to no longer install the GNOME X.Org session by default. This is just about whether the X.Org session is pre-installed but would continue to live in the repository for those wanting to explicitly install it.

The Fedora Workstation working group decided to go ahead with this change for the Fedora 41 cycle, not the upcoming Fedora 40 release. So pending any obstacles by FESCo, which is unlikely. Fedora Workstation 41 will not be installing the GNOME X.Org session by default. Long live Wayland.

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“Linux gained from 3% to 4% in 8 months,” writes longtime Slashdot reader bobdevine. Linuxiac reports: According to the latest data from StatCounter, a leading web traffic analysis tool, Linux’s market share has reached 4.03%. At first glance, the number might seem modest, but it represents a significant leap. Let’s break it down. It took Linux 30 years to secure a 3% share of desktop operating systems, a milestone reached last June. Impressively, the open-source operating system has surged by an additional 1% in the last eight months.

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Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Back in 2022 Cloudflare announced they were ditching Nginx for an in-house, Rust-written software called Pingora. Today Cloudflare is open-sourcing the Pingora framework. Cloudflare announced today that they have open-sourced Pingora under an Apache 2.0 license. Pingora is a Rust async multi-threaded framework for building programmable network services. Pingora has long been used internally within Cloudflare and is capable of sustaining a lot of traffic while now Pingora is being open-sourced for helping to build infrastructure outside of Cloudflare. The Pingora Rust code is available on GitHub.

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“Documentation authors at Canonical have launched the Open Documentation Academy to offer an easy way to get started contributing to open-source projects,” writes longtime Slashdot reader tykev. From the blog post: Open and inclusive collaboration, and the sharing of ideas, remains the best way to develop software (and to do many other things!), but we also recognise that this “getting involved” step can be difficult. Where do you start? Who do you ask? What needs to be done? We all very much want to help people become open source contributors by building an on-ramp process. It may take some time, and we will need to adapt, but this is exactly why we’ve started our Open Documentation Academy.

To help you get involved, the Open Documentation Academy provides a curated list of documentation tasks. Choose one, let us know, and get started. Tasks include testing and fixing tutorials, updating the outdated, restructuring large documents, and anything else you may want to suggest. Our list is growing, and a big part of the Documentation Academy will be ensuring there’s always a wide range of tasks available, across as many projects and technologies as possible. And of course, we’re here to help. We’ll guide you through your first contributions, provide advice on approaches, and help you build your confidence.

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Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA’s CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn’t any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution — especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level — a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it’s a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this “skunkworks” project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs. […]

For those wondering about the open-source code, it’s dual-licensed under either Apache 2.0 or MIT. Rust fans will be excited to know the Rust programming language is leveraged for this Radeon implementation. […] Those wanting to check out the new ZLUDA open-source code for Radeon GPUs can do so via GitHub.

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Carl Franzen reports via VentureBeat: Hugging Face, the New York City-based startup that offers a popular, developer-focused repository for open source AI code and frameworks (and hosted last year’s “Woodstock of AI”), today announced the launch of third-party, customizable Hugging Chat Assistants. The new, free product offering allows users of Hugging Chat, the startup’s open source alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to easily create their own customized AI chatbots with specific capabilities, similar both in functionality and intention to OpenAI’s custom GPT Builder â” though that requires a paid subscription to ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month), Team ($25 per user per month paid annually), and Enterprise (variable pricing depending on the needs).

Phillip Schmid, Hugging Face’s Technical Lead & LLMs Director, posted the news on the social network X (formerly known as Twitter), explaining that users could build a new personal Hugging Face Chat Assistant “in 2 clicks!” Schmid also openly compared the new capabilities to OpenAI’s custom GPTs. However, in addition to being free, the other big difference between Hugging Chat Assistant and the GPT Builder and GPT Store is that the latter tools depend entirely on OpenAI’s proprietary large language models (LLM) GPT-4 and GPT-4 Vision/Turbo. Users of Hugging Chat Assistant, by contrast, can choose which of several open source LLMs they wish to use to power the intelligence of their AI Assistant on the backend, including everything from Mistral’s Mixtral to Meta’s Llama 2. That’s in keeping with Hugging Face’s overarching approach to AI — offering a broad swath of different models and frameworks for users to choose between — as well as the same approach it takes with Hugging Chat itself, where users can select between several different open source models to power it.

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Long-time open source advocate Matt Asay writes in InfoWorld:

OpenSearch shouldn’t exist. The open source alternative to Elasticsearch started off as Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) answer to getting outflanked by Elastic’s change in Elasticsearch’s license, which was in turn sparked by AWS building a successful Elasticsearch service but contributing little back. In 2019 when AWS launched its then Open Distro for Elasticsearch, I thought its reasons rang hollow and, frankly, sounded sanctimonious. This was, after all, a company that used more open source than it contributed. Two years later, AWS opted to fork Elasticsearch to create OpenSearch, committing to a “long-term investment” in OpenSearch.

I worked at AWS at the time. Privately, I didn’t think it would work.

Rather, I didn’t feel that AWS really understood just how much work was involved in running a successful open source project, and the company would fail to invest the time and resources necessary to make OpenSearch a viable competitor to Elasticsearch. I was wrong. Although OpenSearch has a long way to go before it can credibly claim to have replaced Elasticsearch in the minds and workloads of developers, it has rocketed up the search engine popularity charts, with an increasingly diverse contributor population. In turn, the OpenSearch experience is adding a new tool to AWS’ arsenal of open source strengths….

As part of the AWS OpenSearch team, David Tippett and Eli Fisher laid out a few key indicators of OpenSearch’s success as they gave their 2022 year in review. They topped more than 100 million downloads and gathered 8,760 pull requests from 496 contributors, a number of whom don’t work for AWS. Not stated were other success factors, such as Adobe’s earlier decision to replace Elasticsearch with OpenSearch in its Adobe Commerce suite, or its increasingly open governance with third-party maintainers for the project. Nor did they tout its lightning-fast ascent up the DB-Engines database popularity rankings, hitting the Top 50 databases for the first time.

OpenSearch, in short, is a bonafide open source success story. More surprisingly, it’s an AWS open source success story. For many who have been committed to the “AWS strip mines open source” narrative, such success stories aren’t supposed to exist. Reality bites.
The article notes that OpenSearch’s success “doesn’t seem to be blunting Elastic’s income statement.” But it also points out that Amazon now has many employees actively contributing to open source projects, including PostgreSQL and MariaDB. (Although “If AWS were to turn forking projects into standard operating procedure, that might get uncomfortable.”)

“Fortunately, not only has AWS learned how to build more open source, it has also learned how to partner with open source companies.”

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For Red Hat’s 30th anniversary, North Carolina’s News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles.
In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat’s first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld’s “OS of the Year” award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft’s Windows controlled 85% of the market.
“How is that possible,” Young said, “that one of the world’s biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?” The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at “the beauty” of open-source software.
“Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft’s engineering team on Windows, and I don’t really care how many people they have,” Young would say. “Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison….”

Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It’s pretty primitive, but it’s going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing’s Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. “I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help,” said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. “So we put our two little businesses together.”

Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing’s Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. (“A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.”) And it doesn’t leave out Red Hat’s skirmishes with Microsoft. (“Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. “) “We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us,” says Michael Ferris, Red Hat’s VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and “making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees.”

But there’s also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat’s headquarters in Durham: “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era…” It’s fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like “It started with a student from Finland” and “Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath.”

Something I’d never thought of. 2001’s 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center “destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter.” And by the mid-2000s, “Red Hat was the world’s largest provider of Linux…’ according to part two of the series. “Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies.”
By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat’s kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. “Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally,” Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.
In the 2010s, “open source has won” became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. “There was never gloating,” Tiemann said.

“But there was always pride.”
In 2017 Red Hat’s CEO answered questions from Slashdot’s readers.

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Last year Python’s massive PyPI repository of pre-written software packages had 235.7 billion downloads — a 57% annual growth in its download counts and bandwidth. So now Python’s nonprofit Python Software Foundation has an announcement.
Their director of infrastructure said today that they’re rolling out “the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI, while simultaneously giving our users one of our most requested features: organization accounts.”

Organizations on PyPI are self-managed teams, with their own exclusive branded web addresses. Our goal is to make PyPI easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.

We’re making organizations available to community projects for free, forever, and to corporate projects for a small fee. Additional priority support agreements will be available to all paid subscribers, and all revenue will go right back into PyPI to continue building better support and infrastructure for all our users… Having more people using and contributing to Python every year is an fantastic problem to have, but it is one we must increase organizational capacity to accommodate. Increased revenue for PyPI allows it to become a staffed platform that can respond to support requests and attend to issues in a timeframe that is significantly faster than what our excellent (but thinly spread) largely volunteer team could reasonably handle.

We want to be very clear — these new features are completely optional. If features for larger projects don’t sound like something that would be useful to you as a PyPI maintainer, then there is no obligation to create an organization and absolutely nothing about your PyPI experience will change for you.

We look forward to discussing what other features PyPI users would like to see tackled next…

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The open-source, cross-platform Godot Engine has arrived in the Epic Games store. “Starting today, you can choose to use EGS to download the engine and keep it up to date with every release,” writes the company in a blog post. From the release: Epic Games is a long-time supporter of Godot, and thanks to their contributions we have been able to improve our rendering pipeline as well as our built-in scripting language, GDScript — the fruits of that work are now visible in the newly released Godot 4.0!

The Godot build you can download from EGS is the exact same open source release as on other platforms. Being present on more storefronts opens a new convenient avenue for more users to find the engine and begin their game development journey. You can of course still download Godot Engine from other platforms, or clone its source code from the Git repository and build it yourself. And if you do, you are more than welcome to contribute to Godot’s development too!

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