FOSS Training Campaign, Red Hat Aims At $2 Billion & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Highlighting the week’s activities in the FOSS realm is, say it with me, money. You know, the thing that we all want but that most of us never have enough of. Some have it and some need it — making it a good thing we’re about to tell you who is who with this weekend’s wrap up.

Open FOSS Training Indiegogo Campaign: Back home again in Indiana — Martinsville, Indiana, to be exact — Matthew Williams has taken the baton and is running with it when it comes to training folks in the use of free/open source software, or what we lovingly refer to as FOSS.

Williams (and you may know him as the indefatigable Lord Drachenblut) initiated an Indiegogo campaign entitled, appropriately, the Open FOSS Training Campaign to create a library of educational videos for various FOSS programs which may be lacking adequate training materials.

Sad to say, this list is probably longer than it really should be, and Williams has taken on a much-needed project to change that.

“Many Free and Open Source tools are fantastic tools but have a lack of easily accessible materials to help get people started with them,” the campaign site says. “We plan to try to help correct this by primarily producing video content that users will be able to use to help get them started in using these tools. The videos will be released under a Creative Commons license to allow the community to use them widely.”

It’s an impressive endeavor by Mr. Williams, and when payday rolls around I’ll be giving a few coins. I would appreciate if you could do the same (and while you’re at it, there’s a certain web news portal that still needs support, too).

Maybe these guys can help…

Red Hat to reach $2 billion? Well, it seems that if there is a rich relative in the FOSS world, he lives in Raleigh, N.C. According to a variety of articles, including one from Information Week, Red Hat had a solid quarter, up thirteen percent or $504 million for the second quarter of fiscal year 2016.

“We are also thrilled to be the first open source company to achieve an annualized run-rate of $2 billion,” said Jim Whitehurst during the September 21 earnings call.

Red Hat became the first open source company to reach a billion in revenues in 2012. During the earnings call, Whitehurst mentioned two developments during the quarter: “We exceeded the half billion mark in quarterly revenues, for a run rate of over $2 billion annually. Second, we achieved an annualized run rate of $100 million from our Certified Cloud and Service Provider program.”

So, Matthew, maybe you should get on the phone to Raleigh…

Transition from Photoshop to GIMP: Our friend Jim Lynch over at ITworld tells the tale of a redditor who was making the change from Photoshop to GIMP, and with the item, highlighting some of the replies garnered from the Reddit world. With the usual focus for which FOSS folks are sometimes notoriously known, Lynch’s examples meander all over the map, from Krita to Inkscape to Blender and, yes, also GIMP. Remember GIMP? The redditor was asking about GIMP. You can see the entire conversation here.

Quick Takes: Our friends at Autodesk have open-sourced the electronics and firmware of its resin- and DLP-based Ember 3D printer, according to Eric Brown at LinuxGizmos.com. But wait, there’s more: “In releasing the design of its Ember 3D Printer under open source licensing, Autodesk has revealed a mainboard that runs Linux on a customized spin-off of the BeagleBone Black hacker SBC,” the article says…Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote an article this week on ZDNet announcing that Fedora 23 Beta is now out in the wider FOSS world ready for testing, if you so desire. I know I do…Shameless self-promotion: Because I can’t seem to stop writing, I’ve taken a post at DZone.com as a zone leader, writing news stories and editing blogs primarily about Enterprise Integration (exciting!) but I’ll also be covering Linux/FOSS expos as well. I’ll continue to see you here on Fridays, but my Wednesday commentary will be more infrequent going forward.

So, see you next week for the weekly wrap-up.

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