The two new courses were created in partnership with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Continuous Delivery Foundation

SAN FRANCISCO – GITOPS SUMMIT – June 22, 2021 – Today at GitOps Summit, The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, and Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the open-source software foundation that seeks to improve the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed, have announced the immediate availability of two new, online training courses focused on GitOps, or operation by pull request, a powerful developer workflow that enables organizations to unlock the promise of cloud native continuous delivery. 

Cloud native technologies enable organizations to scale rapidly and deliver software faster than ever before. GitOps is the set of practices that enable developers to carry out tasks that traditionally fell to operations personnel. As development practices evolve, GitOps is becoming an essential skill for many job roles. These two new online, self-paced training courses are designed to teach the skills necessary to begin implementing GitOps practices:

Introduction to GitOps (LFS169)

LFS169 is a free introductory course providing foundational knowledge about key GitOps principles, tools and practices, to help build an operational framework for cloud native applications primarily running on Kubernetes. The course explains how to set up and automate a continuous delivery pipeline to Kubernetes, leading to increased productivity and efficiency for tech roles.

This course walks through a series of demonstrations with a fully functional GitOps environment, which explains the true power of GitOps and how it can help build infrastructures, deploy applications, and even do progressive releases, all via pull requests and git-based workflows. By the end of this course, participants will be familiar with the need for GitOps, and understand the different reconciliation patterns and implementation options available, helping them make the right technological choices for their particular needs.

GitOps: Continuous Delivery on Kubernetes with Flux (LFS269)

LFS269 will benefit software developers interested in learning how to deploy their cloud native applications using familiar GitHub-based workflows and GitOps practices; quality assurance engineers interested in setting up continuous delivery pipelines, and implementing canary analysis, A/B testing, etc. on Kubernetes; site reliability engineers interested in automating deployment workflows and setting up multi-tenant, multi-cluster GitOps-based Continuous Delivery workflows and incorporating them with existing Continuous Integration and monitoring setups; and anyone looking to understand the landscape of GitOps and learn how to choose and implement the right tools.

This course provides a deep dive into GitOps principles and practices, and how to implement them using Flux CD, a CNCF project. Flux CD uses a reconciliation approach to keep Kubernetes clusters in sync using Git repositories as the source of truth. This course helps build essential Git and Kubernetes knowledge for a GitOps practitioner by setting up Flux v2 on an existing Kubernetes cluster, automating the deployment of Kubernetes manifests with Flux, and incorporating Kustomize and Helm to create customizable deployments. It explains how to set up notifications and monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana and Slack, integrate Flux with Tekton-based workflows to set up CI/CD pipelines, build release strategies, including canary, A/B testing, and blue/green, deploying to multi-cluster and multi-tenant environments, integrate GitOps with service meshes such as Linkerd, and Istio, securing GitOps workflows with Flux, and much more.

“GitOps is an essential methodology for shifting left and using cloud native effectively. We are already seeing the demand for it with the adoption of CNCF projects like Argo and Flux,” said Priyanka Sharma, General Manager of the Cloud Native Computing foundation. “I am thrilled that we now offer two GitOps courses so developers of all levels can build a foundation and learn how to integrate GitOps with Kubernetes. I encourage every practitioner to check it out!”

“Our partnership with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has resulted in the creation of this high quality course for software developers who want a better understanding of the GitOps landscape. It includes information on integrating Flux CD with Tekton-based workflows, a great example of CNCF and CDF projects closely working together. By taking the course, you will be able to evaluate and implement GitOps to meet your development needs,” said Tracy Miranda, Executive Director of the Continuous Delivery Foundation. “The launch of these courses is a result of the strong increase in demand for cloud-native applications. This program will directly benefit those interested in expanding their Git and Kubernetes knowledge and following best practices for GitOps techniques.”

Introduction to GitOps consists of 3-4 hours of course material including video lessons. It is available at no cost for up to a year.

GitOps: Continuous Delivery on Kubernetes with Flux consists of 30-40 hours of course material, including video lessons, hands-on labs, and more. The $299 course fee includes a full year of access to all materials.

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 500 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io. 

About the Continuous Delivery Foundation

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) seeks to improve the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed. The CDF is a vendor-neutral organization that is establishing best practices of software delivery automation, propelling education and adoption of CD tools, and facilitating cross-pollination across emerging technologies. The CDF is home to many of the fastest-growing projects for CD, including Jenkins, Jenkins X, Tekton, and Spinnaker. The CDF is part of the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about the CDF, please visit https://cd.foundation.

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.

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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Derek Weeks brings proven leadership to accelerate growth in open source innovation and security

SAN FRANCISCO, June 22, 2021 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the appointment of a key addition to its executive management team, Derek Weeks, who joins the organization in the newly created role of SVP and Chief Marketing Officer. Weeks will oversee all developer and product marketing, brand strategy, direct and digital marketing, acquisition and retention marketing, analytics and marketing operations, and communications for The Linux Foundation.

As an accomplished enterprise software executive, Weeks brings over 25 years of experience in product, corporate, brand, and community marketing to the Linux Foundation. Weeks most recently helped create new market categories in open source software development and security as a marketing executive at Sonatype, while he also built massive online developer communities as a co-founder of All Day DevOps. Prior to Sonatype, Weeks held global marketing leadership positions for software portfolios in private and public companies, including: Global 360 (acquired by OpenText), Systar (acquired by Axway), Hyperformix (acquired by CA, Inc.), and Hewlett-Packard in the US and Germany.

Weeks has received wide recognition for his achievements in the industry where he has been named to the DevOps 100 by TechBeacon, distinguished as the DevOps Evangelist of the Year by DevOps.com, and received the Industry Executive of the Year from Advanced Technology Academic Research Center (ATARC). Weeks, who spent his adolescent years growing up and working in Silicon Valley, holds a degree from San Jose State University in International Business.

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said, “Derek is a natural addition to our leadership team as he is a highly experienced, much-admired marketing and community leader. Finding the right CMO, with a proven track record of helping open source professionals innovate faster while also recognizing the need for improved security across software supply chains they rely upon, was critical. I am delighted to have Derek join us. He has an impressive track record of growing organizations to massive scale, championing open source security research, and building some of the industry’s largest communities for education and collaboration.”

“Open source software is fueling a massive tidal wave of transformation across all industries, and I couldn’t think of a more exciting time to come onboard this exceptional team at The Linux Foundation,” said Weeks. “With its respected position in the community, I look forward to driving growth and further elevating the organization’s contributions to open software, hardware, data, and standards that serve millions of developers worldwide.”

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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Target, Schwarz Gruppe, Wegmans, Microsoft, Veritone and Deutsche Telekom lead standards effort to advance voice assistance

SAN FRANCISCO, June 22, 2021 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the Open Voice Network, an open source association dedicated to advancing open standards that support the adoption of AI-enabled voice assistance systems. Founding members include Target, Schwarz Gruppe, Wegmans Food Markets, Microsoft, Veritone, and Deutsche Telekom.

Organizations are beginning to develop, design and manage their own voice assistant systems that are independent of today’s general-purpose voice platforms. This transition is being driven by the desire to manage the entirety of the user experience – from the sound of the voice, the sonic branding and the content – to integrating voice assistance into multiple business processes and brand environments from the call center, to the branch office and the store. Perhaps most importantly, organizations know they must protect the consumer and the proprietary data that flows through voice. The Open Voice Network will support this evolution by delivering standards and usage guidelines for voice assistant systems that are trustworthy, inclusive and open.

“At Target, we’re continuously exploring and embracing new technologies that can help provide joyful, easy and convenient experiences for our guests. We look forward to working with the Open Voice Network community to create global standards and share best practices that will enable businesses to accelerate innovation in this space and better serve consumers,” said Joel Crabb, Vice President, Architecture, Target Corporation. “The Linux Foundation, with its role in advancing open source for all, is the perfect home for this initiative.”

Voice is expected to be a primary digital interface going forward and will result in a hybrid ecosystem of general-purpose platforms and independent voice assistants that demand interoperability between conversational agents of different platforms and voice assistants. Open Voice Network is dedicated to supporting this transformation with industry guidance on the voice-specific protection of user privacy and data security.

“Voice is expected to be a primary interface to the digital world, connecting users to billions of sites, smart environments and AI bots. It is already increasingly being used beyond smart speakers to include applications in automobiles, smartphones and home electronics devices of all types. Key to enabling enterprise adoption of these capabilities and consumer comfort and familiarity is the implementation of open standards,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and general manager of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “The potential impact of voice on industries including commerce, transportation, healthcare and entertainment is staggering and we’re excited to bring it under the open governance model of the Linux foundation to grow the community and pave a way forward.”

“To speak is human, and voice is rapidly becoming the primary interaction modality between users and their devices and services at home and work. The more devices and services can interact openly and safely with one another, the more value we unlock for consumers and businesses across a wide spectrum of use cases, such as Conversational AI for customer service and commerce,” said Ali Dalloul, General Manager, Microsoft Azure AI, Strategy & Commercialization.

Much as open standards in the earliest days of the Internet brought a uniform way to exchange information and connect with any site anywhere, the Open Voice Network will bring the same standardized ease of development and use to voice assistant systems and conversational agents, leading to huge growth and value for businesses and consumers alike.  Voice assistance depends upon technologies like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Advanced Dialog Management (ADM) and Machine Learning (ML).  The Open Voice Network will initially be focused on the following areas:

●               Standards development: research and recommendations toward the global standards that will enable user choice, inclusivity, and trust.

●               Industry value and awareness: identification and sharing of conversational AI best practices that are both horizontal and specific to vertical industries, serving as the source of insight and value for voice assistance.

●               Advocacy: working with and through existing industry associations on relevant regulatory and legislative issues, including those of data privacy.

“Voice is transforming the relationships between brands and consumers,” said Rolf Schumann, Chief Digital Officer, Schwarz Gruppe. “Voice is changing the way we are interacting with our digital devices. For instance, when shopping through our smart home appliances. However, voice includes more information than a fingerprint and can entail data about the emotional state or mental health of a user. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to put data protection standards in place to protect the user’s privacy. This is the only way we will contribute to the future of voice.”

“Self-regulation of synthetic voice content creation and use, to protect the voice owner as well as establishing trust with the consumer is foundational,” said Ryan Steelberg, president and cofounder of Veritone. “Having an open network through Open Voice Network for education and global standards is the only way to keep pace with the rate of innovation and demand for influencer marketing. Veritone’s MARVEL.ai, a Voice as a Service solution, is proud to partner with Open Voice Network on building the best practices to protect the voice brands we work with across sports, media and entertainment.”

Membership to the Open Voice Network includes a commitment of resources in support of the its research, awareness and advocacy activities and active participation in the its symposia and workshops. The Linux Foundation open governance model will allow for community-wide contributions that will accelerate conversational AI standards rollout and adoption.

For more information, please visit: https://openvoicenetwork.org/

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.

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

Jennifer Cloer
for Linux Foundation and Open Voice Network
jennifer@storychangesculture.com
503-867-2304

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The Linux Foundation is pleased to announce the release of the CDLA-Permissive-2.0 license agreement, which is now available on the CDLA website at https://cdla.dev/permissive-2-0/. We believe that CDLA-Permissive-2.0 will meet a genuine need for a short, simple, and broadly permissive license agreement to enable wider sharing and usage of open data, particularly to bring clarity to the use of open data for artificial intelligence and machine learning models. 

We’re happy to announce that IBM and Microsoft are making data sets available today using CDLA-Permissive-2.0.

In this blog post, we’ll share some background about the original versions of the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA), why we worked with the community to develop the new CDLA-Permissive-2.0 agreement, and why we think it will benefit producers, users, and redistributors of open data sets.

Background: Why would you need an open data license agreement?

Licenses and license agreements are legal documents that define how content can be used, modified, and shared. They operate within the legal frameworks for copyrights, patents, and other rights that are established by laws and regulations around the world. These laws and regulations are not always clear and are not always in sync with one another.

Decades of practice have established a collection of open source software licenses and open content licenses that are widely used. These licenses typically work within the frameworks established by laws and regulations mentioned above to permit broad use, modification, and sharing of software and other copyrightable content in exchange for following the license requirements.

Open data is different. Various laws and regulations treat data differently from software or other creative content. Depending on what the data is and which country’s laws you’re looking at, the data often may not be subject to copyright protection, or it might be subject to different laws specific to databases, i.e., sui generis database rights in the European Union. 

Additionally, data may be consumed, transformed, and incorporated into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models in ways that are different from how software and other creative content are used. Because of all of this, assumptions made in commonly-used licenses for software and creative content might not apply in expected ways to open data.

Choice is often a good thing, but too many choices can be problematic. To be clear, there are other licenses in use today for open data use cases. In particular, licenses and instruments from Creative Commons (such as CC-BY-4.0 and CC0-1.0) are used to share data sets and creative content. It was also important in drafting the CDLA agreements to enable collaboration with similar licenses. The CDLA agreements are in no way meant as a criticism of those alternatives, but rather the CDLA agreements are focused on addressing newer concerns born out of AI and ML use cases. AI and ML models generated from open data are the primary use case organizations have struggled with — CDLA was designed to address those concerns. Our goal was to strike a balance between updated choices and too many options.

First steps: CDLA version 1.0

Several years ago, in talking with members of the Linux Foundation member counsel community, we began collaborating to develop a license agreement that would clearly enable use, modification, and open data sharing, with a particular eye to AI and ML applications.

In October 2017, The Linux Foundation launched version 1.0 of the CDLA. The CDLA was intended to provide clear and explicit rights for recipients of data under CDLA to use, share and modify the data for any purpose. Importantly, it also explicitly permitted using the results from analyzed data to create AI and ML models, without any of the obligations that apply under the CDLA to sharing the data itself. It was launched with two initial types: a Permissive variant, with attribution-style obligations, and a Sharing variant, with a “copyleft”-style reciprocal commitment when resharing the raw data.

The CDLA-Permissive-1.0 agreement saw some amount of uptake and use. However, subsequent feedback revealed that some potential licensors and users of data under the CDLA-Permissive-1.0 agreement found it to be overly complex for non-lawyers to use. Many of its provisions were targeted at addressing specific and nuanced considerations for open data under various legal frameworks. While these considerations were worthwhile, we saw that communities may balance that specificity and clarity against the value of a concise set of easily comprehensible terms to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

Partly in response to this, in 2019, Microsoft launched the Open Use of Data Agreement (O-UDA-1.0) to provide a more concise and simplified set of terms around the sharing and use of data for similar purposes. Microsoft graciously contributed stewardship of the O-UDA-1.0 to the CDLA effort. Given the overlapping scope of the O-UDA-1.0 and the CDLA-Permissive-1.0, we saw an opportunity to converge on a new draft for a CDLA-Permissive-2.0. 

Moving to version 2.0: Simplifying, clarifying, and making it easier

Following conversations with various stakeholders and after a review and feedback period with the Linux Foundation Member Counsel community, we have prepared and released CDLA-Permissive-2.0. 

In response to perceptions of CDLA-Permissive-1.0 as overly complex, CDLA-Permissive-2.0 is short and uses plain language to express the grant of permissions and requirements. Like version 1.0, the version 2.0 agreement maintains the clear rights to use, share and modify the data, as well as to use without restriction any “Results” generated through computational analysis of the data.

Unlike version 1.0, the new CDLA-Permissive-2.0 is less than a page in length.

The only obligation it imposes when sharing data is to “make available the text of this agreement with the shared Data,” including the disclaimer of warranties and liability. 

In a sense, you might compare its general “character” to that of the simpler permissive open source licenses, such as the MIT or BSD-2-Clause licenses, albeit specific to data (and with even more limited obligations).

One key point of feedback from users of the license and lawyers from organizations involved in Open Data were the challenges involved with associating attribution information with data (or versions of data sets). 

Although “attribution-style” provisions may be common in permissive open source software licenses, there was feedback that:

As data technologies continue to evolve beyond what the CDLA drafters might anticipate today, it is unclear whether typical ways of sharing attributions for open source software will fit well with open data sharing. 

Removing this as a mandated requirement was seen as preferable.

Recipients of Data under CDLA-Permissive-2.0 may still choose to provide attribution about the data sources. Attribution will often be important for appropriate norms in communities, and understanding its origination source is often a key aspect of why an open data set will have value. The CDLA-Permissive-2.0 simply does not make it a condition of sharing data.

CDLA-Permissive-2.0 also removes some of the more confusing terms that we’ve learned were just simply unnecessary or not useful in the context of an open data collaboration. Removing these terms enables the CDLA-Permissive-2.0 to present the terms in a concise, easy to read format that we believe will be appreciated by data scientists, AI/ML users, lawyers, and users around the world where English is not a first language.

We hope and anticipate that open data communities will find it easy to adopt it for releases of their own data sets.

Voices from the Community

“The open source licensing and collaboration model has made AI accessible to everyone, and formalized a two-way street for organizations to use and contribute to projects with others helping accelerate applied AI research. CDLA-Permissive-2.0 is a major milestone in achieving that type of success in the Data domain, providing an open source license specific to data that enables access, sharing and using data among individuals and organizations. The LF AI & Data community appreciates the clarity and simplicity CDLA-Permissive-2.0 provides.” Dr. Ibrahim Haddad, Executive Director of LF AI & Data 

“We appreciate the simplicity of the CDLA-Permissive-2.0, and we appreciate the community ensuring compatibility with Creative Commons licensed data sets.” Catherine Stihler, CEO of Creative Commons

“IBM has been at the forefront of innovation in open data sets for some time and as a founding member of the Community Data License Agreement. We have created a rich collection of open data sets on our Data Asset eXchange that will now utilize the new CDLAv2, including the recent addition of CodeNet – a 14-million-sample dataset to develop machine learning models that can help in programming tasks.” Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow, Chief Scientist, IBM Research

“Sharing and collaborating with open data should be painless – and sharing agreements should be easy to understand and apply. We applaud the clear and understandable approach in the new CDLA-Permissive-2.0 agreement.” Jennifer Yokoyama, Vice President and Chief IP Counsel, Microsoft

“It’s exciting to see communities of legal and AI/ML experts come together to work on cross-organizational challenges to develop a framework to support data collaboration and sharing.” Nithya Ruff, Chair of the Board, The Linux Foundation and Executive Director, Open Source Program Office, Comcast

“Data is an essential component of how companies build their operations today, particularly around Open Data sets that are available for public use. At OpenUK, we welcome the CDLA-Permissive-2.0 license as a tool to make Open Data more available and more manageable over time, which will be key to addressing the challenges that organisations have coming up. This new approach will make it easier to collaborate around Open Data and we hope to use it in our upcoming work in this space.” Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK

“Verizon supports community efforts to develop clear and scalable solutions to legal issues around building artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we welcome the CDLA-Permissive-2.0 as a mechanism for data providers and software developers to work together in building new technology.” Meghna Sinha, VP – AI Center, Verizon

“Sony believes that the spread of clear and simple Open Data licenses like CDLA-2.0 activates Open Data ecosystem and contributes to innovation with AI. We support CDLA’s effort and hope CDLA will be used widely.” Hisashi Tamai, SVP, Sony Group Corporation

Data Sets Available under CDLA-Permissive-2.0

With today’s release of CDLA-Permissive-2.0, we are also pleased to announce several data sets that are now available under the new agreement. 

The IBM Center for Open Source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT) will begin to re-license its public datasets hosted here using the CDLA-Permissive 2.0, starting with Project CodeNet, a large-scale dataset with 14 million code samples developed to drive algorithmic innovations in AI for code tasks like code translation, code similarity, code classification, and code search.

Microsoft Research is announcing that the following data sets are now being made available under CDLA-Permissive-2.0:

The Hippocorpus dataset, which comprises diary-like short stories about recalled and imagined events to help examine the cognitive processes of remembering and imagining and their traces in language;The Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence data set, comprising analyses of text corpora over time to reveal trends in beliefs, interest, and sentiment about a topic;The Xbox Avatars Descriptions data set, a corpus of descriptions of Xbox avatars created by actual gamers;         A Dual Word Embeddings data set, trained on Bing queries, to facilitate information retrieval about documents; andA GPS Trajectory data set, containing 17,621 trajectories with a total distance of about 1.2 million kilometers and a total duration of 48,000+ hours.

Next Steps and Resources

If you’re interested in learning more, please check out the following resources:

The text of CDLA-Permissive-2.0 on the CDLA websiteThe updated CDLA FAQThe CDLA repositories on GitHub

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