Also included: Debian developer Kristoffer H. Rose passes, two new distro releases, Apricity OS adds 32-bit, Canonical gets Kubernetes, Snapcraft gets a new release and getting ready for All Things Open.
FOSS Week in Review
Yikes! Remember last weekend when I was so happy that the dog days of summer had left us behind to be replaced with more comfortable autumnal temps? While that’s true, with nights getting chilly enough that I’m going to have to dig out my comforter, I forgot that this time of year is also the peak of the hurricane season. This means that for much of the next week I’m keeping a wary eye to the south, where Hurricane Matthew may or may not have my part of the Carolinas directly in its sights. It looks as if we’ll know better about what it has in mind by Tuesday afternoon.
Tux Paint needs a Mac maintainer: Everybody’s favorite FOSS paint tool is having a little trouble running on Macs these days — specifically on OS X 10.11 El Capitan. Designed with kids in mind, the app is used extensively at schools, with many school systems now upgrading to El Capitan, which was released a year ago.
Bill Kendrick, the app’s lead developer, took to Facebook last week to explain that the upgrade evidently breaks Tux Paint, and the project doesn’t have a good Mac developer on hand to fix the problem. “Tux Paint works fine,” he wrote, “and packages/installers are maintained for Windows all the way back to Win95, Android, iPhone/iPad, and Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/Fedora Linuxes. Are there actually Mac developers who care about open source?”
According to a notice on the Tux Paint website, the bug doesn’t appear to be with the application but is caused by an unknown change made in OS X El Capitan. A bug report on SourceForge states “severe screen corruption during the program start…and program is unstable.”
What this means, of course, is that any Mac devs out there who’d like to help would be welcomed.
Keynoters at All Things Open: If it’s October, that means that the All Things Open conference is just around the corner. True dat. This year’s conference is scheduled for October 26-27, which is a Wednesday and Thursday BTW.
Although ATO’s schedule has been set for a couple of months, conference organizers just recently announced the keynote speakers. The opening keynote will be delivered by Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst, who was quite inspiring as a keynoter at this years LinuxCon in Toronto. It’s not surprising that he’ll be the first to bat, as ATO happens at the Raleigh Convention Center, just blocks away from Red Hat’s Raleigh, North Carolina headquarters.
Also on Wednesday: Kelsey Hightower with Google’s cloud platform; Neha Narkhede, who is co-founder and CTO at Confluent; and a “fireside chat” with Walmart’s CTO, Jeremy King, and Jono Bacon, who needs no introduction.
On Thursday: Scott Hanselman will show more open source love from Microsoft; Mitchell Hashimoto, O’Reilly author and founder of HashiCorp, which builds DevOps tools; and Jackie Yeaney, a marketing person with an engineering background at Red Hat,
There’s been a behind-the-scenes change at this years conference. Since the conference began in 2013, it’s been presented by IT-oLogy, a Columbus, South Carolina-based nonprofit with a focus on education. Beginning this year, it’s no longer connected with the project, having decided it needs to focus its energies on educational issues, its primary mandate.
Never fear, however, as ATO will remain the largest open source, open tech, and open web conference on the East Coast. Expect to see little to no change in continuity, as Todd Lewis, the conference’s head honcho since day one, will still be at the reins.
Do expect to see an expanded conference, however. As it’s done since day one, ATO continues to grow. This year there will be over 180 sessions and the number of tracks has been increased from last year’s 23 to 37. In addition to the DevOps, design and community tracks, which have always been the mainstay at ATO, expect to see more open source hardware and IoT than in years past. There will also be a track each day devoted to blockchains.
That reminds me. It’s time to register.
Passing thoughts: Kristoffer H. Rose, a Debian contributor from the very early days of the project, is being mourned by the Debian community. Rose died on September 17.
Another day, another distro: Qubes OS, which bills itself as “a reasonably secure operating system” by employing “security by compartmentalization” has released version 3.2…. Arch based Apricity OS has released build 09.2016, which includes the addition of a 32-bit image.
Quick takes: Caononical has broadened its enterprise cloud appeal by working with Google to produce its own flavor of Kubernetes…. Snapcraft, Ubuntu’s tool for creating Snap packages, has released version 2.18…. It appears that Firefox OS isn’t even for IoT devices. Mozilla announced last week that it has quit development of the project.
Parting shot: I’d like to take this chance to say goodbye to my old friend Hudson Bradley Keagle III, who passed away on Thursday. I’ve considered Brad my best friend since we met at Toronto’s long gone Rochdale College in 1972. Although I haven’t seen him in person since 1987, we’ve always managed to stay in touch, either by telephone and then through Facebook. I will miss him forever.
That does it for now. Until next time, may the FOSS be with you…
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
“Are there actually Mac developers who care about open source?”
I guess not.
Surely Apple will ride to the rescue, right? I mean that’s why people choose Mac: “It just works.” I also have a bridge for sale…