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How to create Bash scripts using external variables and embedded scripts

Use external variables and embedded scripts to enhance your Bash programming with interactive scripts.
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Learn the networking basics every sysadmin needs to know

Networking is one of a sysadmin’s most important duties, so make sure you have the essentials covered.
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Announcing new event focused on Building Cybersecurity into the Software Supply Chain, August 18, Virtual

Modern day supply chains leave greater potential for vulnerabilities, and supply chain security should be a high priority for organizations. Vulnerabilities could be catastrophic, and lead to unnecessary costs, inefficient delivery schedules and a loss of intellectual property. 

In addition, over the last few years, supply chains have increasingly been exposed as a major weak point in organizational security. While security may be top of mind within company walls, you are only as strong as your most vulnerable supplier.

We are excited to bring the community a new event where folks can learn directly from experts who have been working on how to solve these vulnerabilities for almost a decade, to find out how to best protect their supply chain and mitigate potential disaster.

Anyone involved in ensuring their company’s supply chain is secure including security professionals, executive leadership and tech leaders.

The event is free to attend, and will take place virtually on August 18. It is comprised of nine sessions covering all aspects of protecting the supply chain, including talks on:

Generating SBOMs for IoT at Build TimeSecuring GCC & GLIBCBuilding Signing, Distributing SPDX SBOMs as Artifact Reference TypeSoftware Supply Chain Integrity with Sigstore

View all sessions, speakers and register to attend here.

The post Announcing new event focused on Building Cybersecurity into the Software Supply Chain, August 18, Virtual appeared first on Linux Foundation.

The Linux Foundation, Prometeo, IBM, and Partners Announce New Firefighter Safety Open Source Project

Prometeo Platform S.L. is open sourcing ‘Pyrrha’ to monitor and act on firefighters’ health and safety as they battle blazes, with support from Samsung

SAN FRANCISCO — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host Pyrrha, created and contributed by Prometeo Platform S.L., in collaboration with IBM to help accelerate the development and deployment of firefighter safety technology around the world. In 2019, Prometeo was named the winner of the Call for Code Global Challenge and since then their technology has been further developed with updated hardware and enhanced software through work with the IBM volunteer Service Corps and leading ecosystem partners.

Climate change has created more dangerous conditions for firefighters by increasing the risk and extent of wildfires around the world. From Australia’s 2020 brushfires, to record-breaking wildfires in Spain and the Western United States, fires in recent years have increased in number, severity, and destruction, while posing greater immediate and long-term health risks to firefighters who battle these blazes. According to Cal Fire, California is already experiencing a 26% increase in 2021 wildfire activity and a 58% increase in acres burned compared to 2020.

Through the Pyrrha open source project, Prometeo, the Linux Foundation, and IBM aim to accelerate innovation around firefighter health monitoring and safety. By partnering with leading companies from the Call for Code ecosystem like Samsung, the goal is to customize and scale the solution around the world in an effort to help save lives.

“Samsung and IBM have collaborated for many years to create industry leading technologies that solve challenging societal and business problems. Now we’re excited to work together to advance tech for good and help combat the effects of climate change,” said Executive Vice President of Samsung B2B Mobile KC Choi. “As a huge proponent of open source technology, we see Call for Code as a unique opportunity to deploy real world solutions based on open source technologies. We’re excited to be able to equip award-winning teams like Prometeo with resources to strengthen their solution as it is actively tested, deployed, and now made available in open source. We also look forward to increasing our own participation in Call for Code.”

The Prometeo solution was created by a nurse, a firefighter, and developers as a system that uses artificial intelligence and the internet of things to guard the safety of firefighters. Over the past two years through collaboration with Call for Code ecosystem partners, Prometeo has improved its technology across offline usage, through integration with mobile phones and watches to provided two-way alerts, and in capturing the averages of toxin exposure over time. Through field tests in Spain in early 2020 and 2021, the technology has incorporated firefighter feedback and amassed anonymized technical data to improve the solution end-to-end.

“Pyrrha is another example of the power of open source to accelerate technology innovation that can save lives,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “We are happy to support and host the development of Pyrrha and the community that is building and using it.”

“On behalf of the Prometeo team, we want to extend our deepest thanks to our many partners who have contributed to improve this solution and help protect firefighters,” said Salome Valero, co-founder of Prometeo. “We set out to create technology that would equip firefighters with personalized monitoring of their exposure to toxic substances. Through the contributions of our partners and the open source community, that dream is becoming a reality through the Pyrrha open source project.”

In addition to the Linux Foundation, IBM and Samsung, Prometeo’s ecosystem partners in the Pyrrha community include a variety of leading tech companies and institutions:

Arrow Electronics has helped improve Prometeo’s IoT devices.GRAF/Bombers de la Generalitat de Catalunya facilitated multiple rounds of field testing of  testing with Prometeo’s technology during controlled burns in Spain. The Pau Costa Foundation is helping connect Prometeo with a global community of firefighters, and exploring opportunities for further field testing.Peli has contributed their expertise in creating firefighter gear to help enhance Prometeo’s hardware.Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona has contributed lab access and technical expertise to help calibrate devices.

IBM and The Linux Foundation have a rich history of deploying projects that help drive progress in society through innovation. The winner of the 2018 Call for Code Global Challenge, Project OWL, contributed its IoT device firmware in March 2020 as the ClusterDuck Protocol. Since then, more than a dozen Call for Code deployment projects have been open sourced for communities that need them most, with solutions ranging from disaster-response, to mitigating climate change, and promoting racial justice.

The Pyrrha project community encourages new users to contribute and to deploy the software in new environments around the world. Priorities for short term updates include adapting the hardware for usage in new locations, improving the analysis of toxin exposure  over time, and further improving the mobile and smartphone capabilities. For more information, please visit: ​https://pyrrha-platform.org.

The 2021 Call for Code Global Challenge invites the world’s software developers and innovators to combat climate change with open source-powered technology. Call for Code’s diverse and like-minded global ecosystem of experts, companies, foundations, universities, and celebrities continues to expand. It includes UN World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator experts, Arrow Electronics, Black Girls Code, Caribbean Girls Hack, charity: water, Clinton Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative University, Heifer International, Ingram Micro, Intuit, Kode With Klossy, NearForm, United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, United Way, and World Institute on Disability.

For more information and to begin contributing, please visit: https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/solutions/projects/get-started/ & https://github.com/Pyrrha-Platform

About Call for Code 
Developers have revolutionized the way people live and interact with virtually everyone and everything. Where most people see challenges, developers see possibilities. That’s why David Clark, the CEO of David Clark Cause, created Call for Code in 2018, and launched it alongside Founding Partner IBM and Charitable Partner UN Human Rights. Since then, Call for Code has scaled to include an annual University Challenge in addition to regional prizes and the creation of Call for Code for Racial Justice. This multi-year global initiative is a rallying cry to developers to use their mastery of the latest technologies to drive positive and long-lasting change across the world through code. Call for Code Global Challenge winning solutions are further developed, incubated, and deployed as sustainable open source projects to ensure they can drive positive change. To learn more about past winners and their progress, visit IBM Developer.

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. The 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.

Media Contact

Jennifer Cloer
for the Linux Foundation
503-867-2304
jennifer@storychangesculture.com

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Interested in a Cloud Computing Career? This Roadmap Can Point the Way

Like many people, you might be thinking about a career in the fast growing field of cloud computing. It’s a smart move, with the Open Source Jobs Report finding that possessing cloud computing skills has the biggest impact on hiring decisions amongst technical hiring managers surveyed. And recent data have shown that job openings for cloud computing professionals have skyrocketed the last few years. 

The problem for most is determining how and where to start. If you are new to the IT sector, jumping straight into cloud and cloud native technologies is nearly impossible without first gaining an understanding of the infrastructure technologies on which the cloud is built. That’s why we’ve developed the roadmap below, outlining the knowledge and skills needed to successfully pursue a cloud career.

To start, you need to understand Linux. Over 90% of public cloud instances are running on Linux, and if you aren’t proficient in the Linux command line interface, you won’t get very far working in the cloud. You also need to understand DevOps – a term referring to the combination of development and operations which traditionally were separate in the IT space. The vast majority of organizations today use DevOps practices to deploy to the cloud, so you need to understand those practices. 

Once you’ve learned the fundamentals underpinning the cloud, you can start to learn the cloud technologies themselves. 91% of organizations running in the cloud are using Kubernetes, so it’s an ideal technology to focus on. 

To get your feet wet, you can start with some of our free courses:

Introduction to Linux
Introduction to DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering
Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies
Introduction to Kubernetes

After that, consider our Cloud Engineer Bootcamp if you want a more structured learning program, or check out our full array of cloud training and certification offerings

And don’t forget to view the Cloud Career Roadmap below for more insights!

Download full size version

The post Interested in a Cloud Computing Career? This Roadmap Can Point the Way appeared first on Linux Foundation – Training.

What’s a TAM and why might you want to be one?

The technical account manager (TAM) is a key customer service role in the enterprise. Here’s everything you need to know.
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Forcing Linux system password changes with the chage command

Users are generally slow to change passwords. Here’s how to nudge them into compliance.
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Measuring the Health of Open Source Communities

Abstract: Tracking different types of metrics is essential for free and open source communities. Metrics give project insights into specific efforts and help get a feel of the community’s general perception. For that, tools that can pull data from various sources and develop a visualization of this data will help projects make informed decisions.

If you manage or want to be part of an open source project, you might have wondered if the project is healthy or not and how to measure key performance indicators relating to project health. 

You could choose to analyze different aspects of the project, such as the technical health (such as number of forks on GitHub, number of contributors over time, and number of bugs reported over time), the financial health (such as the donations and revenues over time), the social aspects (such as social media mentions, post shares, and sentiment analysis across social media channels), and diversity and inclusion aspects (such as having a code of conduct, create event inclusion activities, color-blind-accessible materials in presentations, and project front-end designs). 

The question is, how do you measure such aspects? To determine if a project’s overall health, metrics should be computed and analyzed over time. It’s helpful to have such metrics in a dashboard to facilitate analysis and decision-making.

Why do metrics matter?

“The goal here is not to construct an enormous vacuum cleaner to suck every tiny detail of your community into a graph. The goal is instead to identify what we don’t know about our community and to use measurements as a means to understand those things better.”

The Art of Community – Jono Bacon

Open source software needs community. By knowing more about the community through different metrics, stakeholders can make informed decisions. For example, developers can select the best project to join, maintainers can decide which governance measures are effective, end-users can select the healthier project that will live longer (and prosper), and investors can select the best project to invest in [1]. 

Furthermore, Open Source Program Offices (OSPO), i.e., offices inside companies that aim to manage the open source ecosystems that the company depends on [5], can assess the project’s health and sustainability by analyzing different metrics. OSPO is becoming very popular because around 90% of the components of modern applications are open source [6]. Thus, measuring the risks of consuming, contributing to, and releasing open source software is very important to OSPO [5].

How do we define which metrics to evaluate?

  • Set your goals: Measuring without a goal is just pointless. Goals are concrete targets to know what the community wants to achieve [3].
  • Find reliable statistical sources: After defining your goals, you can then identify the source to help you achieve your goals. It is essential to find ways to get statistics on the most important goals [4]. Some statistics are apparent, such as on GitHub, you can collect the number of stars, number of forks, and number of contributors to a repository. It is also possible to get mailing lists subscribers and the project website visits. Some statistics are not so obvious, though, and you might need tools to help extract such numbers.
  • Interpret the statistics: Interpret the statistics regarding the “4 P’s”: People, Project, Process, and Partners [4]. 
    • Look at the numbers mostly related to the People in the community, such as contributors’ productivity, which channels have the most impact, etc. 
    • Then, look at the velocity and maturity of your Project, such as the number of PRs, and the number of issues. 
    • After that, look at the maturity of your Process, i.e., what’s your review process? How long does it take to solve an issue? 
    • Finally, look at the ecosystem view regarding your Partnersthat is, statistics on project dependencies and projects that depend on you.
  • Use dashboards to evaluate your metrics: Many existing tools help to create dashboards to analyze and measure open source community healthiness, such as LFX Insights, Bitergia, and GrimoireLab.
  • Make changes: After measuring, it is necessary to make changes based on those measurements.

Learning from examples

Different projects use different strategies to measure the project’s health. 

The CHAOSS Community creates analytics and metrics to help understand project health. They have many working groups, each one focusing on a specific kind of metric. For example,

  • The Diversity and Inclusion working group focuses on the diversity and inclusion in events, how diverse and inclusive the governance of a community is, and how healthy the community leadership is. 
  • The Evolution working group creates metrics for analyzing the type and frequency of activities involved in software development, improving the project quality, and community growth. 
  • The Value working group creates metrics for identifying the degree to which a project improves people’s lives beyond the software project, the degree to which the project is valuable to a user or contributor, and the degree to which the project is monetarily valuable from an organization point of view. 
  • The Risk working group creates metrics to understand the quality of a specific software package, potential intellectual property issues, and understand how transparent a given software package is concerning licenses, dependencies, etc.

The Mozilla project collaborated with Bitergia and Analyse & Tal to build an interactive network visualization of Mozilla’s contributor communities. By visualizing different metrics, they were able to find that Mozilla has not only one community but many communities concerning other areas of contributions, motivations, engagement levels, etc. Based on that, they built a report to visualize how these different communities are interconnected.

LFX Insights

Many projects such as Kubernetes and TARS use the LFX Insights tool to analyze their community. 

The LFX Insights dashboard helps project communities evaluate different metrics concerning open source development to grow a sustainable open source ecosystem. The tool has distinct features to support various stakeholders [2], such as

  • Maintainers and project leads can get a multi-dimensional reporting of the project, avoid maintainer burnout, ensure the project’s health, security, and sustainability.
  • Project marketers and community evangelists can use the metrics to attract new members, engage the community, and identify opportunities to increase awareness.
  • Members and corporate sponsors can know which community and software to engage in, communicate the impact within the community, and evaluate their employees’ open source contributions.
  • Open source developers can know where to focus their efforts, showcase their leadership and expertise, manage affiliations and their impact.

The source code repository includes the number of commits in total and by contributor, the number of contributors, the top contributors by commits, and the companies that mainly contribute to the project. Users can extract Pull requests (PRs) from many tools such as Gerrit and GitHub. Furthermore, users, maintainers, and contributors to Linux Foundation projects, such as TARS, can extract various metrics from LFX Insights. 

Similarly to commits, the number of PRs in total, by contributor, and by company. The tool also calculates the average time to review the PR and the PRs that are still to be merged. You can also extract metrics for issues and continuous integration tools. Besides that, LFX Insights allows projects to collect communication and collaboration information from different communication channels such as mailing lists, Slack, and Twitter.

Projects might have different goals when using LFX Insights. The TARS project, part of the TARS Foundation, uses the LFX Insights tool to have a big picture of each sub-project (such as TARSFramework, TARSGo, etc.). Through the dashboards created by the LFX Insights tool, the TARS community can know the statistics of each project and the community as a whole (see Figure 1 and 2).

Using LFX Insights tools, the TARS community analyzes how many people contribute to each project and which organizations contribute to TARS. Additionally, they extract the number of commits and lines of code contributed by each contributor. The TARS community believes that by analyzing such metrics, they can attract and retain more contributors.

About the authors: 

Isabella Ferreira is an Ambassador at the TARS Foundation, a cloud-native open-source microservice foundation under the Linux Foundation.

Mark Shan is the Chair at Tencent Open Source Alliance and also Board Chair of the TARS Foundation Governing Board. 

REFERENCES

[1] Jansen, Slinger. “Measuring the health of open source software ecosystems: Beyond the scope of project health.” Information and Software Technology 56.11 (2014): 1508-1519.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwTOrDg3LsI

[3] https://opensource.com/bus/16/8/measuring-community-health

[4] https://dzone.com/articles/-measuring-metrics-in-open-source-projects

[5] https://opensource.com/article/20/5/open-source-program-office

[6] https://fossa.com/blog/building-open-source-program-office-ospo/

Seven (more) things I wish I’d known before becoming a sysadmin

These seven things are given to you on a need-to-know basis, and you need to know.
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The Linux Foundation Announces Conference Schedule for Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021

Premier open source event covering the most critical and innovative open source topics gathers developers and technologists both in-person and virtually this September.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 22, 2021 —  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the full schedule for Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021, the leading conference for open source developers, technologists, and community leaders. The events are taking place September 27-30 in Seattle, Washington and are co-located with OSPOCon and Linux Security Summit, among others. The schedule can be viewed here and the keynote speakers can be viewed here.

OSS + ELC 2021 will feature a robust program of 250+ talks (keynote presentations, conference sessions, tutorials, and BoFs) covering the most essential and cutting edge topics touching open source today: Linux Systems, Dependability, AI & Data, DEI, Community Leadership, IoT, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Native Development, Databases, and of course, Embedded Linux. Plus the co-located OSPOCon, also announcing its conference agenda today, covers critical topics affecting open source program management offices. The events are being produced in a hybrid format, with both in-person and virtual participation available.

“These events cover the pivotal technologies at the core of software and hardware today, and shine a magnifying glass on innovation driving the change of tomorrow. This breadth of coverage, along with an audience ranging from students to kernel developers, is what makes this event a cornerstone gathering and learning place for the open source community,” says Angela Brown, SVP & General Manager of Events at The Linux Foundation. “We are so excited to gather in person with everyone again, and look forward to kicking off our fall schedule of in-person events in Seattle and engaging the community with wide ranging learning opportunities.”

Conference Session Highlights from Open Source Summit:

Wayfair Same-day Delivery: A Narrative in Painful Anecdotes about CI at Scale – Lelia Bray-Musso & Gary Preston White Jr., Wayfair EVE: A Secure API for the Edge that Delights App Developers – Kathy Giori, ZEDEDA Inc.A Rolling Stable Kernel Model – Sasha Levin, GoogleFunctional Safety Basics for Open Source Software Developers – Nicole Pappler & Prof. Dr. Andreas Bärwald, AlektoMetisSelf-serve Feature Engineering Platform Using Flyte and Feast – Ketan Umare, Union.ai

From Embedded Linux Conference:

OP-TEE: When Linux Loses Control – Clément Léger, BootlinFrom an Idea to a Patch in the Linux Mainline – Marta Rybczynska, SyslinbitYocto Continuous Integration in a Kube – Joshua Watt, Garmin

And from OSPOCon:

Ensuring OSS License Compliance the Easy Way – Tony Aiuto, GoogleEverything We’ve Learned from Three Years of Funding Open Source – Duane O’Brien, IndeedMVG – Minimum Viable Governance for Your Organization’s Open Collaboration Needs – Ashley Wolf & Justin Colannino, GitHub

Registration (in-person) is offered at the early price of US$850 through July 27. Academic, Student and Hobbyist Passes are available for US$275. Registration to attend virtually is US$50. 

Members of The Linux Foundation receive a 20 percent discount off registration and can contact events@linuxfoundation.org to request a member discount code. 

Diversity & Need-Based Scholarships and Travel Funding
Applications for diversity and need-based scholarships are currently being accepted here. The Linux Foundation’s Travel Fund is also accepting applications, with the goal of enabling open source developers and community members to attend events that they would otherwise be unable to attend due to a lack of funding. We place an emphasis on funding applicants who are from historically underrepresented or untapped groups and/or those of lower socioeconomic status. To learn more and apply, click here.

Health and Safety
In-person attendees will be required to be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus and will need to comply with all on-site health measures, in accordance with The Linux Foundation Code of Conduct. To learn more, visit the Health & Safety webpage and read our blog post.

Sponsor
Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference 2021 is made possible thanks to our sponsors, including Diamond Sponsors: Google, IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat, Platinum Sponsors: Huawei, Snyk, and SUSE, and Gold Sponsors: Cloud Native Computing Foundation, SODA Foundation, Styra, WhiteSource and Witekio. For information on becoming an event sponsor, click here or email us for more information and to speak to our team.

Press
Members of the press who would like to request a press pass to attend should contact Kristin O’Connell.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 2,000 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 linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation Events are where the world’s leading technologists meet, collaborate, learn and network in order to advance innovations that support the world’s largest shared technologies.

Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook for all the latest event updates and announcements.

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. 

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Media Contact

Kristin O’Connell
The Linux Foundation
koconnell@linuxfoundation.org

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