Website publishers using the popular free and open source WordPress content management system (CMS) woke up this morning to find that their sites had been upgraded to version 4.2.2. Users who’s sites somehow missed being automatically upgraded are urged to update immediately, as this update addresses several important security issues. According to Wordfence, maintainers of a popular WordPress security plugin, this release fixes one recently discovered vulnerability and further hardens a security issue that was addressed in version 4.2.1.
Posts published in “News”
This week I had been pursuing a story on a virtualization development which was prematurely suggested/whispered/uncovered at LinuxFest Northwest. However, I understand from those who know more about the subject than I do — which is just about everyone — it was apparently not as groundbreaking as I thought. With my knowledge of virtualization ranking just slightly above my non-existent grasp of quantum physics, I had to put that one aside thanks to a ever-approaching deadline.
But never mind: Something better came along, and the virtual lemons now become lemonade.
We’ll take a walk down memory lane in a minute, but Jason Hibbets and his team of scribes at Opensource.com published a story today announcing a new page on the site to introduce everyone — from the curious to the not-yet-enlightened and beyond — to Linux/FOSS.
After a 25 year gestation, Hurd has finally been born. It was a difficult birth and it’s now being kept in an incubator under the care of Debian.
For many years GNU’s always almost ready to be born operating system microkernel, Hurd, has been the butt of many jokes and Facebook memes, so it came as something of a surprise to read in Larry Cafiero’s Friday column that it’s now ready enough for Debian, which is offering a somewhat experimental and unstable release of Debian/GNU Hurd. An earlier attempt at a Hurd based distro, by Arch, seems to have died on the vine back in 2011, although a 2013 posting promises that development is still underway, with no news since.
You were warned: I wrote on Wednesday that it would be a good idea to get your badges at the Hampton Inn at game night…
FOSS Week in Review
Larry’s hanging out up near the 49th parallel, in Bellingham, Washington, for the LinuxFest Northwest conference. He’ll be filing reports over the weekend and possibly on Monday, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, I get to do the Week in Review — because the boss likes me best.
OSCON’s packing its bags
Speaking of conferences, OSCON’s making a big move. Although the annual conference presented by publisher O’Reilly Media started in my old stomping grounds of Monterey, California in 1999, the event has been held in Portland, Oregon every year since 2003, except for 2009 when it made a one-off stop in San Jose. This year OSCON will once again be held in Portland, on July 20-24, then that’s it, for at least a year.
Late last week, Rachel Roumeliotis reported in a blog on the OSCON website that after this year’s event, the conference will be packing up and making a move. In 2016, OSCON will unfold it’s tents in Austin, Texas, with the conference being held May 16=20.
Why Austin? Cited for reasons are the city’s many software communities, such as All Girl Hack Night and Google Development Group Austin, as well as Texas based tech firms such as Rackspace, Dell, SoftLayer, Continuum, and OpenStack. It doesn’t look like this move will be permanent, however. According to the post: “As with OSCON in Amsterdam…we want to explore these communities and offer those software engineers and architects the OSCON experience.”
Today’s the day that Canonical will release the stable version of Ubuntu 15.04, also known under the human readable name Vivid Vervet.
Like it or not, during the second decade of the 21st century Ubuntu has been the operating system to watch. This, despite the fact that its gathered a large base of followers who loyally despise it. While it’s true that much of this animosity is deserved, just as much is because we love to hate a big shot, and our jealousy over the success of others is made worse when success comes to those who don’t act according to our plans.
This would definitely describe Ubuntu. From it’s exchange of GNOME for Unity to it’s dropping Wayland for Mir, Canonical doesn’t seem to march to anyone’s orders but its own, something that’s been true since day one.
Perhaps we see that with the continuation of the Ubuntu desktop.
By now, we might expect that in the name of profitability, Ubuntu would be making plans to drop its desktop to concentrate solely on servers and the cloud, where money is undoubtedly easier to make. This is the path forged by Red Hat and SUSE, both of which long ago quit developing mainstream desktop editions in favor of “community developed” distros, which are mainly testing grounds for their respective enterprise stacks. Ubuntu doesn’t seem to be interested in going that route — not yet, anyway.
Why? Because the desktop fits neatly into Canonical’s plans.
Sure there’s a lot going on right now: A report posted on the OSCON site this week has the show — which everyone assumed would be in Portland forever — moving to Austin and being rescheduled to May in 2016. Let’s call that AusCON from here on in.
Then there’s the release of Ubuntu 15.04, complete with the adjective and animal beginning with the same letter — Vivid Vervet this time around.
But what’s more important than those two items at the moment — we can deal with those later — is that LinuxFest Northwest is ramping up its 15th annual show in Bellingham, Washington, this week.
LinuxFest Northwest — just south of the border (the Canadian one, that is) — is like Old Man River: It just keeps rolling along. Shows come and go, they grow and move, but the oldest community-run expo has put down some solid roots at Bellingham Technical College. The show has grown over the years, and so has the college. With recent improvements over the last few years, LFNW has grown to be a top-notch destination for speakers, exhibitors and attendees, with around 80 presentations being part and parcel of LFNW’s weekend fare.
Last week in Columbia, South Carolina, the developers’ conference POSSCON went through something of a reboot. Last year the conference was cancelled to allow It-oLogy, the organization behind the event, to put its energy behind launching the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. This year, with last year’s successful premiere of the Hotlanta event under its belt, IT-oLogy pulled-out all the stops to reestablish POSSCON.
Putting a popular conference on hold for a year could easily have proved to be a big mistake, especially since POSSCON takes place in IT-oLogy’s hometown. Not to fear, however, as the crowds returned, like the swallows to Capistrano, to Columbia’s Vista district where the conference is held.
FOSS Week in Review
Death and taxes: I avoided the first and completed the second. Metric tons of thanks to Christine Hall for standing in for me while I was recovering from what seemed for awhile there to be a terminal case of the flu as well as an appointment to do paperwork for our friendly Internal Revenue Service.
The best news of the week, of course, is that we’re everywhere. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote a story in ZDNet yesterday reporting on the results of the ninth annual Future of Open Source Survey. There’s an upside and a downside, as Steven reports: Enterprise is adopting open source like crazy, but they’re not managing it worth a darn.