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Tag: Linux Foundation

  • The Linux Foundation to Award 500 Training Scholarships

    The Linux Foundation to Award 500 Training Scholarships

    The Linux Foundation this week announced it will make up to 500 training scholarships available this year.

    Clyde Seepersad, general manager for training at the Linux Foundation, said the number of Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarships being made available is being increased because of both the demand for individuals with particular expertise such as Kubernetes and the fact that more people are spending more time at home. As such, many IT professionals have more time available to advance their skills, said Seepersad.

    Unfortunately, there are going to be many more unemployed IT professionals as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc across the global economy. Many of those individuals will need to attain additional certifications to compete in an IT job market that suddenly has much less demand and a pool of job candidates that has increased seemingly overnight.

    The scholarships being made available by The Linux Foundation are designed to encourage individuals with varying types of backgrounds to develop open source software expertise. They include:

    Open Source Newbies
    Teens-in-Training
    Women in Open Source
    Software Developer Do-Gooder
    SysAdmin Super Star
    Blockchain Blockbuster
    Cloud Captain
    Linux Kernel Guru
    Networking Notable
    Web Development Wiz

    Since 2011, more than 100 training and certification scholarships valued at more than $220,000 have been awarded by The Linux Foundation. The deadline for applying for the latest round of scholarships is April 30.

    The Linux Foundation is also making available its entire catalog of paid eLearning and certification exams available at 30% off through April 7.

    Seepersad said all the courses made available by The Linux Foundation are accessible online. Each exam administered is also recorded. Interestingly enough, Seepersad said the number of potential cheating incidents is far less online than in classrooms mainly because each individual taking an exam is recorded. There’s also more opportunity to potentially share answers in a traditional classroom setting, he noted.

    It’s unclear precisely how the COVID-19 pandemic might impact demand for IT skills going forward. While it’s clear there will be fewer IT professionals employed, there may be an actual increase in demand for individuals with open source expertise. During the last economic downturn many organizations adopted an “open source-first” philosophy to acquiring software as part of an effort to reduce IT costs. Many of those organizations determined they would rather allocate their much-reduced IT budgets to retaining IT staff than paying for commercial software, even if that meant the time and effort required to implement and manage that software was higher.

    At the same time, it’s worth noting many organizations may need to accelerate the rate at which they are modernizing their IT environments. Now that most employees and end customers are spending most of their time at home, many organizations are finding their existing portfolio of applications do not lend themselves easily to being remotely accessed. Some might even take advantage of open source container technologies to lift and shift entire existing legacy applications into the cloud because their IT staff may not be able to physically access a local data center for more than a month.

    Whatever the ultimate outcome, the one thing that is for certain is working in enterprise IT environments will never be the same again.

    — Mike Vizard

  • The Foundational Era of Open Source

    The Foundational Era of Open Source

    Contrary to popular belief, software is not eating the world. Open source software is eating the world. This was very apparent at the Linux Foundation’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event recently in San Diego. Driving this phenomenon is what I call the Foundational era of Open Source.

    This Foundational era of Open Source has replaced what I call the Big Brother era that came before it. The Big Brother era itself replaced what I call the Cathedral and Bazaar era of open source.

    The Cathedral and Bazaar Era

    I first became involved in open source software in the mid-90s. I might have dabbled and used open source software before that as I searched for free tools using WAIS and Gopher. But I really became aware when I founded TriStar Web, an early hosting company. Back then, web server software came in basically three flavors: 1. Netscape Web Server, from the people who brought us the Netscape browser (it was my choice); 2. Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (ISS), which was that era’s version of the Evil Empire; and 3. Apache (I don’t even think there was an Apache Foundation yet), the open source web server that was taking the web by storm. Besides being free, it was a lot more flexible and capable than the other two.

    During this time there was, of course, another open source software vying for dominance in the market. Something called Linux developed by a guy named Linus Torvalds was taking on all of the giants that had their own flavors of Unix, while Bill Gates’ Windows was fighting it out against IBM’s OS/2, which he also developed.

    Yes, those were heady days for open source software. I call those days the Cathedral and Bazaar days of open source. The Cathedral and Bazaar, of course, refers to the collected essays and then the book of the same name by Eric S Raymond. It, more than anything else, laid out for me the power of open source software and the tensions between the worlds of open source “free as in beer, free as in freedom” versus closed source software.

    Let’s be clear, the open source software world would not exist but for the lessons learned, battles fought and wins and losses of this era.

    Anarchy, Chaos or Freedom?

    In those days you had people such as Dr. Richard Stallman advocating for free, open software that you could use, distribute and modify as you wish. There were intellectual debates over the pros and cons of various open source licenses (Apache, GPL, etc). Most of all, it was very difficult to bring open source software into the enterprise. No support, no training, no SLAs … how was the enterprise to use open source?

    Nevertheless, open source prevailed—sometimes on sheer quality, other times on the love of developers who relished in the freedom of open source. It became a force in the tech world. Companies such as Red Hat, Suse and Canonical capitalized on Linux. Other companies tinkered and experimented with models to try and become commercially successful with other open source tools. By and large, it was a rough go, but some did succeed.

    In my own case in InfoSec, we had great open source tools including Snort, Nmap and Nessus. The folks at Tenable did stop developing an open source version of Nessus, but they still offered a free version of it. Yes, it was a great time in open source—or so I thought.

    The Big Brother Era of Open Source

    Sometime in the early 2000s, we passed into what I call the Big Brother era of open source. This was characterized by almost every open source project having a managing or controlling commercial entity dictating its direction and code. While this didn’t happen with Linux, it became the de facto standard.

    Companies were spun up by the founders of an open source project and while the project itself remained open, it was owned lock, stock and barrel by the commercial entity. The company would sell training and support and in some cases open core versions of the software with “freemium” modules available for a price. Eventually, SaaS-based, hosted versions of the open source software would be another business model companies used to monetize open source.

    Issues regarding who owned the code, who contributed to these projects and where the community fit in often caused conflicts. But by and large, the open source communities counted on the benevolence of the Big Brother to make sure the open source versions of the software remained viable.

    In retrospect, though, this era stifled contribution by other entities: Who would want to contribute code to an open source project for the benefit of the controlling entity? Many companies forked their project so they could control their own versions, resulting in the Balkanization of many of these projects, with the community being the big loser.

    The Foundational Era of Open Source

    Between 2012 and 2015, though, we passed into a new, modern era of open source software that I call the Foundational era of open source. Open source projects were given to community-owned, non-profit foundations to manage and nourish—organizations such as the Linux Foundation, the folks behind Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Continuous Delivery Foundation; Cloud Foundry Foundation; The Apache Foundation; and the Eclipse Foundation (one of the early entrants, even if IBM did come to dominate it) took over the stewardship of many open source projects.

    This has ushered in a truly golden age of open source software that has seen open source become the dominant form of software in the world. The Foundational era of open source has flourished for several reasons. For one, now multiple commercial entities can contribute code without worrying that it is for the exclusive benefit of just one company. What’s more, these foundations have a mix of vendors, practitioners and large enterprise users that really do allow for the democratization of open source at levels not seen before. Also, there is a process of incubation to graduation that these projects are put through that help them evolve and grow.

    Not to be underestimated is the new generation of developers who have grown up with open source and only want to work in open software. They are putting their influence into practice. Instead of sneaking open source in the back door, they are knocking down the front door with it.

    There are other reasons, but the result is that open source today is now in use at well over 90% of enterprises and it is by far the dominant form of software. It is leading the way in the move to the cloud and in business transformation, and it is literally changing the world.

    Long live open source.

    — Alan Shimel

  • The Reactive Foundation Launches To Support Next Phase of Software Architecture

    Architecture 

     Alibaba, Lightbend, Netifi and Pivotal establish a new, neutral open source foundation to accelerate the availability of reactive programming specifications and software

     

    SAN FRANCISCO, September 10, 2019 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the launch of the Reactive Foundation, a community of leaders established to accelerate technologies for building the next generation of networked applications. The foundation is made up of Alibaba, Lightbend, Netifi and Pivotal as initial members and includes the successful open source RSocket specification, along with programming language implementations.

    The aim of reactive programming is to build applications that maintain a consistent user experience regardless of traffic on the network, infrastructure performance and different end user devices (computers, tablets, smartphones). Reactive programming uses a message-driven approach to achieve the resiliency, scalability and responsiveness that is required for today’s networked cloud-native applications, independent of their underlying infrastructure.

    The Reactive Foundation establishes a formal open governance model and neutral ecosystem for supporting open source reactive programming projects.

    “From the beginning of our work on RSocket during my time at Netflix, our intent was to have an open system that encouraged broad adoption, which is essential for networking technology. We’re thrilled to be hosted at the Linux Foundation with commitment from leaders and disruptors in the industry, and are excited to make progress enabling reactive programming,” said Ryland Degnan, Co-Founder and CTO at Netifi and Foundation community chair.

    “With the rise of cloud-native computing and modern application development practices, reactive programming addresses challenges with message streams and will be critical to adoption,” said Michael Dolan, VP of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation. “With the Reactive Foundation, the industry now has a neutral home for supporting the open source projects enabling reactive programming.”

    RSocket is an open source protocol that builds upon reactive streams to provide application flow control over the network to prevent outages and increase resiliency of applications. It is designed to support reactive programming and today’s modern microservices-based and cloud-native applications as a high-performance replacement of traditional HTTP. RSocket allows the use of a single connection, through which messages are passed as streams of data. It enables long-lived streams across different transport connections, which is particularly useful for mobile to server communication where network connections drop, switch, and reconnect frequently.

    Additional Quotes:

    “RSocket is designed to shine in the era of microservice and IoT devices,“ said Andy Shi, Developer Advocate at Alibaba. “We believe the projects built on top of RSocket protocol and reactive streams in general will disrupt the landscape of microservices architecture. The Reactive Foundation is the hub of these exciting projects.”

    “The RSocket application protocol is an essential replacement for HTTP, delivering resilience and high performance for networked cloud-native applications and microservices communication,” said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Netifi. “The Reactive Foundation will extend efforts to build a broader open source community around RSocket and reactive programming.”

    “Many observers, from industry analysts to decision makers and developers are recognizing the positive impact of designing reactive software,” said Stephane Maldini, Project Reactor Lead at Pivotal. “After more than a decade of innovations, the reactive ecosystem is making it into mainstream adoption with Project Reactor, Spring Boot and the Spring Framework accelerating its adoption. The Reactive Foundation could not come at a better time for consolidating this position with defining projects like RSocket. Together, we can build hyper efficient, scalable distributed systems by rethinking the way we design them and by using the right protocol to coordinate them. The Reactive Foundation is an invitation for everyone ready to embark on this transformative journey.”

    “When I co-wrote the Reactive Manifesto in 2013, we anticipated a major industry shift in building systems that react to modern demands on services and since then more than 26,000 people have signed on,” said Jonas Bonér, CTO and Co-Founder of Lightbend. “The Reactive Foundation is a critical milestone in bringing together technology industry leaders to embrace a message-driven architecture to support cloud-native applications built to be robust, resilient, flexible and written with modern hardware, virtualization, rich web clients and mobile clients in mind.”

    To find more information on the Reactive Foundation or get involved in the project, please visit: https://reactive.foundation/

    About the Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

    # # #

    The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

  • The Linux Foundation Breathes New Life into Osquery

    The Linux Foundation Breathes New Life into Osquery

    Facebook’s useful but neglected DevOps tool Osquery has gotten a new lease on life, thanks to The Linux Foundation.  

    Anyone who has been tasked with monitoring the security of server instances in a data center or cloud knows how laborious and time-consuming it can be. Osquery, a project started by Facebook, aims to lessen this burden by reframing how developers engage with their infrastructures. DevOps professionals can use Osquery to expose an operating system as a high-performance relational database, making it possible to use SQL commands to access data about a system, just as they would for a database. 

    Osquery works on Mac, Linux and Windows systems and is provided as an open source download via GitHub. Although Osquery was developed by Facebook to monitor and safeguard the security of its own platform, the social media giant quickly realized the utility of the platform would extend to other enterprises that depend upon insight into the low-level behavior of operating systems. 

    Facebook publicly released the project’s code and documentation in 2014, in response to feedback from a small number of other companies that tested Osquery. The public availability of Osquery resulted in a number of major companies including Airbnb, Dropbox, Netflix, Etsy and Uber to bring Osquery into their software development environments. Nevertheless, users have voiced frustrations with Facebook’s handling of Osquery, and have accused the internet giant of neglecting the project.

    To address those complaints, The Linux Foundation has taken over the mantel of Osquery and recently announced the formation of a new foundation to support the Osquery community. 

    The new Osquery Foundation brings together engineers and developers from Dactiv, Facebook, Kolide, Trail of Bits, Uptycs and many others committed to supporting the project with technical contributions and long-term stewardship. A Technical Advisory Board will be created to handle the shift in management from Facebook to the Osquery Foundation and will oversee the priorities initiated by the foundation’s members.

    This restructuring of management promises to extend the usability of the project as a number of developers contribute to the codebase.

    “Osquery has drastically simplified the process of operating system monitoring, which has unlocked new methods for securing infrastructure, detecting anomalies and more. We look forward to working with the Osquery community to develop the foundation in a manner that will continue to foster the growth and adoption of Osquery while supporting the community’s diverse needs,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation.

    Developers working to maintain the security of their systems believe it would be wise to incorporate Osquery into their workflow. “Although Osquery will never do everything that a security team needs, it gets about 80% of what you need for endpoint insight in one package,” said Doug Wilson, director of security for Uptycs.

    Although the platform requires some configuration, developers familiar with SQL will feel accustomed to using Osquery to retrieve information about their systems. Furthermore, Osquery’s cross-platform support and customizability make it especially attractive to businesses with newer types of infrastructures and ones that work at scale. 

    The move away from Facebook toward a more community-friendly foundation is sure to breathe new life into the project, and as development on Osquery expands, it is likely to become a more valuable resource for security teams moving forward.

    This article was co-authored by Tyler Ohlhorst, research analyst and freelance copy editor and copywriter at Magnum Consulting.

    — Frank Ohlhorst

  • Cloudbees Joins Linux Foundation’s Automotive Grade Linux Project To Help Car Manufacturers Drive Shorter Development Cycles, Accelerate Software Quality

    World’s first provider of end-to-end continuous software delivery management (SDM) to help automotive technology organizations create more time for experimentation, quality and safety

    April 30, 2019 – CloudBees, the enterprise DevOps leader powering the continuous economy, today announced it has joined Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort changing the way automotive manufacturers build software. AGL is an open source project at the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source technology.

    With more smart cars and other devices being developed, automotive and hardware manufacturers are competing more diligently at the software level. CloudBees helps these organizations create more time for experimentation and innovation by accelerating build times and shortening functional, performance and security testing cycles. For example, just 25 CloudBees customers using its build and test acceleration platform, CloudBees Accelerator, saved more than three million developer hours from 459,331 build jobs worldwide in March alone – totaling more than 20 million developer hours saved in the last 10 months. Those 20 million hours represent 500,000 40-hour weeks or 9,615 years that developers in these organizations were able to devote to new innovation.

    “It’s an exciting time to be part of the Automotive Grade Linux community as the ecosystem continues to strengthen and grow,” said Dan Cauchy, executive director of Automotive Grade Linux at the Linux Foundation. “We are excited to welcome CloudBees as a new member, and we look forward to leveraging their expertise in continuous delivery and application release automation.”

    Today, more than 130 AGL members are working together to develop a common open source platform that can serve as the de facto industry standard for infotainment, telematics and instrument cluster applications. Adopting an open platform across the industry enables automakers and suppliers to share and reuse the same code base, which reduces development costs, decreases time-to-market for new products and reduces fragmentation across the industry.

    “For car technology organizations, getting new software off the assembly line and onto the road faster matters, but a more rapid innovation cycle is not possible with lengthy builds and testing cycles,” said Anders Wallgren, vice president of technology strategy, CloudBees. “CloudBees is an engine to help these development and engineering teams create safer car technology, faster, by accelerating builds and optimizing tests, thus creating more time to iterate and experiment.”

    Additional Resources

    Visit the AGL website

    Learn more about CloudBees Accelerator

    Read more about the addition of CloudBees Accelerator and CloudBees Flow to the CloudBees product suite

    About CloudBees
    CloudBees is powering the continuous economy by offering the world’s first end-to-end continuous software delivery management system (SDM). For millions of developers and product teams driving innovation for businesses large or small, SDM builds on continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to enable all functions and teams within and around the software delivery organization to best work together to amplify value creation.

    CloudBees is the CI, CD and application release orchestration (ARO) powerhouse, built on the commercial success of its products as well as its open source leadership. CloudBees is the largest contributor to Jenkins and Jenkins X, and a founding member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). From startups with full-stack developers practicing NoOps to large Fortune 100 companies, CloudBees enables all software-driven organizations to intelligently deploy the right capabilities at the right time.

    Over 3,500 of the world’s best-known brands and over 50% of the Fortune 500, invest in CloudBees because of its ability to work across any cloud, in any development environment and to balance corporate governance and control with developer flexibility and freedom. CloudBees is home to the world’s leading DevOps experts, helping thousands of companies harness the power of “continuous everything” and putting them on the fastest path from great idea, to great software, to great business value.

    Backed by Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures, Delta-v Capital, Golub Capital and Unusual Ventures, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite team of continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps professionals. Follow CloudBees on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

  • CLOUDBEES WORKS WITH JENKINS AND JENKINS X PROJECTS, LINUX FOUNDATION, GOOGLE TO LAUNCH CONTINUOUS DELIVERY FOUNDATION

    Industry group creates foundation for development and promotion of open source CD-related projects

    LONDON, UK – March 12, 2019 4:05PM – CloudBees, the enterprise DevOps leader powering the continuous economy, today announced the launch of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CD Foundation or CDF), a new foundation that will operate under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. CloudBees led the launch initiative, in collaboration with the Jenkins Community, Google and the Linux Foundation itself.

    The CDF will focus squarely on developing, nurturing and promoting open source projects, best practices and industry specifications related to continuous delivery. The CDF will house a variety of open source projects, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Spinnaker and Tekton. Additional projects are expected to join, with the goal of bringing together a continuous delivery (CD) ecosystem to build specifications and projects around portability and interoperability. CloudBees will participate as a founding member and will contribute technologies and resources to the project on an ongoing basis.

    “The time has come for a robust, vendor-neutral organization dedicated to advancing continuous delivery,” said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, creator of Jenkins and CTO at CloudBees. “The CDF represents an opportunity to raise the awareness of CD beyond the technology people. For projects like Jenkins and Jenkins X, it represents a whole new level of maturity. We look forward to helping the CDF grow the CD ecosystem and foster collaboration between top developers, end users and vendors.”

    The CDF will create a way for other commercial companies to invest in the growth and success of open source projects like Jenkins, helping to extend the project and the ecosystem around it. It also will give top developers, end users and vendors the ability to advocate for open source CD solutions, share ideas and promote open standards in the DevOps space.

    Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, said the move of the Jenkins project to the CDF enhances CloudBees’ longstanding support of the Jenkins community. “We believe this is the right path for the Jenkins and Jenkins X projects, as well as the industry,” Labourey said. “To date, CloudBees has been the primary supporter of all things Jenkins – and that support will unequivocally continue. However, the move of Jenkins to the CDF means the project will grow even more quickly than it has, with more contributors behind it. The CDF was a CloudBees-driven initiative, and we see it as vital to furthering CD. It benefits us all to do this.”

    The CDF will be staffed and operated by the Linux Foundation. Members are expected to include a cross-section of cloud infrastructure providers, DevOps vendors, enterprise software providers, system integrators and end users from many different industries.

    “As the market has shifted to containerized and cloud native technologies, the ecosystem of CI/CD systems, DevOps and related tools has radically changed. The number of available tools has increased, and there’s no defining industry specifications around pipelines and other CI/CD tools,” said Chris Aniszczyk, vice president of developer relations, Linux Foundation. “CloudBees, Google and the other CDF founding members recognize the need for a neutral home for collaboration and integration to solve this problem. The CDF will establish a community to advance industry best practices and innovation around CI/CD.”

    Additional Resources

     

    About CloudBees

    CloudBees is powering the continuous economy by building the world’s first end-to-end system for automating software delivery, the CloudBees Suite. The CloudBees Suite builds on emerging DevOps practices and continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) automation adding a layer of governance, visibility and insights necessary to achieve optimum efficiency and control new risks. Since every company in the world is now a software company, this new automated software delivery system is becoming the most mission-critical business system in the modern enterprise. As today’s clear leader in CI/CD, CloudBees is uniquely positioned to define and lead this new category. CloudBees puts companies on the fastest path to transforming great ideas into great software and returning value to the business more quickly.

    Backed by Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Verizon Ventures, Delta-v Capital, Golub Capital and Unusual Ventures, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite team of continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps professionals. Follow CloudBees on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

     

  • Linux Foundation to Host CHIPS Alliance Project to Propel Industry Innovation Through Open Source CPU Chip and SoC Design

    New Linux Foundation Project to Foster Flexible, Next-Generation Chip Design for Diverse Data-Centric Applications and Workloads

    SAN FRANCISCO – March 11, 2019 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced its intent to form the CHIPS Alliance project to host and curate high-quality open source code relevant to the design of silicon devices. CHIPS Alliance will foster a collaborative environment that will enable accelerated creation and deployment of more efficient and flexible chip designs for use in mobile, computing, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

    Early CHIPS Alliance backers include Esperanto, Google, SiFive and Western Digital, all committed to both open source hardware and continued momentum behind the free and open RISC-V architecture. “The RISC-V community is working to foster open source foundation technologies that will help unlock market innovation to move [artificial intelligence/machine learning and infrastructure composability] forward,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president of IDC’s Infrastructure Systems, Platforms, and Technologies Group, via a recent IDC report.

    The project will create an independent entity so companies and individuals can collaborate and contribute resources to make open source CPU chip and system-on-a-chip (SoC) design more accessible to the market.

    “Open collaboration has repeatedly proven to help industries accelerate time to market, achieve long-term maintainability, and create de facto standards,” said Mike Dolan, vice president of Strategic Programs, the Linux Foundation. “The same collaboration model applies to the hardware in a system, just as it does to software components. We are eager to host the CHIPS Alliance and invite more organizations to join the initiative to help propel collaborative innovation within the CPU and SoC markets.”

    CHIPS Alliance will follow governance practices consistent with other Linux Foundation projects, which will include a Board of Directors, a Technical Steering Committee, and community contributors who will work collectively to manage the project. Initial plans will focus on establishing a curation process aimed at providing the chip community with access to high-quality, enterprise grade hardware.

    Planned Contributions

    Google

    Google is planning to contribute a Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) based instruction stream generator environment for RISC-V cores. The environment provides configurable, highly

    stressful instruction sequences that can verify architectural and micro-architectural corner-cases of designs.

    Western Digital

    Western Digital is planning to contribute their high performance, 9-stage, dual issue, 32-bit SweRV Core, together with a test bench, and high performance SweRV Instruction set simulator. Additional contribution will be specification and early implementations of OmniXtend cache coherence protocol.

    SiFive

    SiFive was founded by the inventors of the free and open RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture, who, together with their colleagues at UC Berkeley, developed the first open-source RISC-V microprocessors and a new open-source hardware description language Chisel. This initial work at UC Berkeley also developed the RocketChip SoC generator, including the initial version of the TileLink coherent interconnect fabric.

    SiFive remains committed to maintaining and improving the RocketChip SoC generator and the TileLink interconnect fabric in open-source as a member of the CHIPS Alliance, and contributing to Chisel and the FIRRTL intermediate representation specification and transformation toolkit. SiFive will also contribute and maintain Diplomacy, the SoC parameter negotiation framework.

    To learn more about CHIPS Alliance, please visit chipsalliance.org.

    SUPPORTING QUOTES

    Esperanto Technologies

    “Intellectual property for VLSI chip designs ought to be able to reap similar benefits as open source software has for years. We hope that the CHIPS Alliance will be a catalyst where all hardware designers feel comfortable both contributing and finding useful designs for their projects,” said Dave Ditzel, founder and CEO of Esperanto Technologies, Inc.

    Google

    “We are entering a new golden age of computer architecture highlighted by accelerators, rapid hardware development and open source architecture and implementations. Google is committed to fostering an open community of collaboration and innovation in both hardware and software,” said Dr. Amir Salek, senior director, Technical Infrastructure, Google Cloud. “TheCHIPS Alliance will provide the support and framework needed to nurture a vibrant open source hardware ecosystem for high-quality, well-verified and documented components to accelerate and simplify chip design.”

    SiFive

    “Semiconductor design starts have evaporated due to the skyrocketing cost of building a custom SoC,” said Yunsup Lee, co-founder and CTO, SiFive. “A healthy, vibrant semiconductor industry needs a significant number of design starts, and the CHIPS Alliance will fill this need. SiFive is excited to continue to work on and contribute to the RocketChip generator, Chisel and FIRRTL projects as we push the boundaries of open source innovation.”

    Western Digital

    “The data-centric universe continues to grow and expand in ways many of us never imagined,” said Dr. Zvonimir Bandic, senior director of next generation platforms architecture at Western Digital, a co-founder of RISC-V as well as CHIPS Alliance. “The CHIPS Alliance will provide access to an open source silicon solution that can democratize key memory and storage interfaces and enable revolutionary new data centric architectures. It paves the way for a new generation of compute devices and intelligent accelerators that are close to the memory and can transform how data is moved, shared, and consumed across a wide range of applications. By extending Western Digital’s commitment to the RISC-V architecture and instruction set, and teaming up with fellow industry leaders to form the CHIPS Alliance, we make another important stride forward toward unlocking the true potential of the data.”

    About the Linux Foundation

    Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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    The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

     

  • Open Mainframe Project Advances Modern Mainframe with Production Ready Zowe 1.0

    Less than 6 months after launch, this new Zowe release provides mainframes with new, intuitive, cloud-like interfaces 

    SAN FRANCISCO, February 11, 2019 – The Open Mainframe Project (OMP) announced today that Zowe, an open source software framework for the mainframe that strengthens integration with modern enterprise applications, is now production ready less than six months after launching. Any enterprise or solution developer can access the Zowe 1.0 source code or convenience build and incorporate it into their products or services with the agility and scalability of a cloud platform.

    Hosted by The Linux Foundation, the Open Mainframe Project is comprised of business and academic leaders within the mainframe community that collaborate to develop shared tool sets and resources. OMP launched Zowe, the first-ever open source project based on z/OS, last August to serve as an integration platform for the next generation of tools for administration, management and development on z/OS mainframes.

    Zowe 1.0 consists of core technologies enabling modern interfaces for web applications on z/OS, a new command line interface and expansion of platform REST API capabilities. This makes the z/OS environment more “cloud-like” and aims to improve integration in hybrid cloud environments.

    The Zowe framework provides interoperability and uses the latest web technologies among products and solutions from multiple vendors. It helps enable developers to use the familiar, industry-standard, open source tools to access mainframe resources and services. Since launch, there has been a huge community response with more than 1,700 beta downloads, 700 +members of the project’s communication tool (220+ daily active users) and more than 50 committers.

    “Mainframes are the foundation of businesses in every industry,” said John Mertic, Director of Program Management for the Linux Foundation and Open Mainframe Project. “Zowe breathes new life into mainframes and offers innovative possibilities for next generation applications. With Zowe 1.0, we’re developing secure, reliable and scalable computing that will ensure sustainability of mainframes for many years to come.”

    With the ever-increasing deployment of hybrid architectures, mainframes need to manage a bigger volume, variety and velocity of data and transactions. OMP is dedicated to modernizing the platform for mission critical apps and blockchain – where fast data access, transactional scale, and the highest level of trust are required. The Zowe framework is part of this mission as it will enable an ecosystem of software solutions intended to provide a simple, intuitive environment for a variety of IT professionals performing administrative, development, test and operation tasks on z/OS, and help onboard the next generation of mainframe users.

    Zowe 1.0 represents a major milestone on the project’s technical roadmap. Key features for this release include:

    ○      Functional extensions, integration between different 3rd party products and applications

    ○      Updated docs that define extension points and provide sample applications and tutorials on how to integrate with or extend the Zowe framework

    ○      New pre-install scripts that can help identify and verify the appropriate pre-reqs prior to beginning the Zowe installation process

    ○      A Zowe API Mediation Layer that provides the foundation for a single point of access for mainframe service REST APIs and an optional single sign-on experience that leverages an organization’s existing System Authorization Facility, or SAF protocols, enabling programs and applications to use system authorization services to control access to different resources

    Additionally, Zowe earned the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Best Practice Badge, which means it is following best practices and conformance in driving secure software development and governance in open source. The Core Infrastructure Initiative is a collaborative, pre-emptive program and approach for strengthening cyber security that is widely supported by industry leaders like IBM, AWS, Google, VMWare and Cisco. The CII Best Practices Badge is a rigorous assessment of an open source project’s processes and infrastructure; other open source projects that has achieved the badge include Linux, Kubernetes and Node to name a few.

    The Open Mainframe Project will be on-site next week at THINK 2019 with several speaking sessions about Zowe and a happy hour. Visit the OMP website to learn more.

    Additional Resources:

    About the Open Mainframe Project

    The Open Mainframe Project is intended to serve as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment. With a vision of Open Source on the Mainframe as the standard for enterprise class systems and applications, the project’s mission is to Build community and adoption of Open Source on the mainframe by eliminating barriers to Open Source adoption on the mainframe, demonstrating value of the mainframe on technical and business levels, and strengthening collaboration points and resources for the community to thrive. Learn more about the project at https://www.openmainframeproject.org.

    About The Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

    The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

  • Tencent Supports Open Source Community With Linux Foundation Platinum Membership

    SAN FRANCISCO and BEIJING (LinuxCon China) – June 25, 2018 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announces Tencent has become the latest Platinum member of the foundation. Tencent is a leading provider of Internet value added services in China, offering some of China’s most popular websites, apps and services including QQ, Qzone, Tencent Cloud and Weixin/WeChat.

    Tencent has demonstrated a growing dedication to open source in recent years. It has used Linux extensively for many years, was one of the first companies to leverage the OpenDaylight SDN controller and was a founder of the China Open SDN (COS) committee. Tencent sponsors dozens of open source projects on GitHub, and is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Hyperledger, LF Networking and the Open Networking Foundation. In addition, Tencent is a founding Premier member of the recently-launched LF Deep Learning Foundation, which is focused on supporting various technical efforts in artificial intelligence. Tencent has previously announced it intends to contribute its Angel project, a high-performance distributed machine-learning platform tuned for big data/models, to the LF Deep Learning Foundation.

    Tencent’s Liu Xin will join The Linux Foundation Board of Directors. In addition to a seat on the board, as a Platinum member, Tencent will be able to take advantage of the foundation’s expertise in areas such as open source governance, legal and compliance, events, marketing and more. As a Platinum member, Tencent will be able to offer further support and resources to a wide variety of open source projects and their communities.

    “Becoming a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation clearly reinforces the importance of open source to Tencent, and its commitment to the open source community,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “As Tencent’s contributions to open source continue to accelerate, The Linux Foundation is thrilled to work more closely with the company to provide more resources and support to the community. We look forward to collaborating with Tencent to enable more innovation and development to spur the creation of new and exciting technologies in the days ahead.”

    “We are honored to be a Platinum member of The Linux Foundation. Open source is core Tencent’s technical strategy,” said Liu Xin, general manager of the Mobile Internet Group, Tencent. “We look forward to strengthening our relationship with the international open source community and promoting innovation in cutting edge technology. As a first step, we are contributing our open source microservices project TARS, and open source name service project Tseer, to The Linux Foundation. In addition, we plan to contribute our open source AI project Angel to the LF Deep Learning Foundation. Together, we will help to build a welcoming and energized global open source ecosystem.”

    More than 800 organizations are members of The Linux Foundation and the open source projects it hosts. AT&T, Cisco, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm, Samsung and VMware are also Platinum members. To learn more about Linux Foundation membership or to join the organization, visit https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/.

    About The Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

    The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.

    Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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    Media Contact

    Dan Brown

    The Linux Foundation

    PR@LinuxFoundation.org