Cybersecurity alliance launches first open source messaging framework for security tools

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February 25, 2020

A new language framework designed to breach fragmentation gaps between cybersecurity tools has been released to the open source community. Launched by the Open Cybersecurity Alliance (OCA), a consortium of cybersecurity vendors including IBM, Crowdstrike, and McAfee, on Monday, the OCA said that OpenDXL Ontology is the “first open source language for connecting cybersecurity tools through a common messaging framework.”

OpenDXL Ontology, now available, aims to create a common language between cybersecurity tools and systems by removing the need for custom integrations between products that can be most effective when communicating with each other — such as endpoint systems, firewalls, and behavior monitors — but suffer from fragmentation and vendor-specific architecture.

[Source: ZDNet]

Open source licenses: What, which, and why

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 25, 2020

Most people have at least heard of open source software by now—and even have a fairly good idea of what it is. Its own luminaries argue incessantly about what to call it—with camps arguing for everything from Free to Libre to Open Source and every possible combination of the above—but the one thing every expert agrees on is that it’s not open source (or whatever) if it doesn’t have a clearly attributed license.

You can’t just publicly dump a bunch of source code without a license and say “whatever—it’s there, anybody can get it.” Due to the way copyright law works in most of the world, freely available code without an explicitly declared license is copyright by the author, all rights reserved. This means it’s just plain unsafe to use unlicensed code, published or not—there’s nothing stopping the author from coming after you and suing for royalties if you start using it.

[Source: Ars Technica]

‘Community-based’ Open Source on the Rise

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 25, 2020

As more enterprises embrace open source software for applications ranging from security and cloud management to databases and analytics, the steady shift away from proprietary software is coalescing around a “community-based” open source movement.

According to an annual snapshot on the state of enterprise open source tools released by open source leader Red Hat, expensive proprietary software licenses and fear of vendor lock-in are driving the enterprise embrace of open source code. As more hyper-scalers contribute code to cloud management and other projects, the Red Hat survey estimates that community-based open source software usage will reach 21 percent of companies surveyed by 2022.

[Source: EnterpriseAI]

Learn the main Linux OS components

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 21, 2020

Evolved from Unix, Linux provides users with a low-cost, secure way to manage their data center infrastructure. Due to its open source architecture, Linux can be tricky to learn and requires command-line interface knowledge as well as the expectation of inconsistent documentation.

In short, Linux is an OS. But Linux has some features and licensing options that set it apart from Microsoft and Apple OSes. To understand what Linux can do, it helps to understand the different Linux OS components and associated lingo.

Take a look at these terms to discover how the OS works and how it differs from Microsoft and Apple offerings.

[Source: TechTarget]

How to find what you’re looking for on Linux with find

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 21, 2020

There are a number of commands for finding files on Linux systems, but there are also a huge number of options that you can deploy when looking for them. For example, you can find files not just by their names, but by their owners and/or groups, their age, their size, the assigned permissions, the last time they were accessed, the associated inodes and even whether the files belong to an account or group that no longer exists on the system and so on.

You can also specify where a search should start, how deeply into the file system the search should reach and how much the search result will tell you about the files it finds. And all these criteria can be handled by the find command.

[Source: Network World]

Top 10 Most Used Open Source Software: Linux Foundation Report

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 21, 2020

Accounting for 80-90 percent of all software, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem is booming with high dependency usage by all sector companies. Accordingly, The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) in collaboration with Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science has released a census report titled “Vulnerabilities in the Core, a Preliminary Report and Census II of Open Source Software.”

Concluding the survey, the latest census report focusses on the health and security of foss usage. The result is based on data provided by partner Software Composition Analysis (SCA) companies and other application security companies.

[Source: Fossbytes]

Pixel 5 surfaces in Android Open Source Project, hints at mid-range chip

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 21, 2020

Every year, it seems Pixel leak season begins just a little bit earlier, like the holiday shopping season but for smartphone nerds. We’ve already seen an alleged render of the upcoming Google flagship, and possible codenames for the Pixel 5 and 5 XL — Redfin and Bramble — have turned up. Now, a code change submitted to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) contained comments that directly mention the Pixel 5. As spotted by 9to5Google, an AOSP code change regarding Android’s Linux kernel includes a comment about testing the change on a Pixel 4 but not on a Pixel 5.

You can read the comment in full below: “Bounds sanitizer in arch/arm64/kernel/cpufeature.c makes image unbootable for Pixel 4 at 4.14 kernel. I didn’t have a chance to test it on Pixel 5 with 4.19, and preemptively disabling UBSan there now to ensure bootability.” (emphasis mine)

[Source: MobileSyrup]

GamePad: A New Open Source And 100% Linux-Dedicated Game Platform

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 20, 2020

Do you also believe that “Linux is not a gaming platform”? Well, it may not be the first priority of gamers. Still, if you look at the recent contribution by Linux community developers, Linux has improved a lot with support for graphics drivers and new games to provide a better gaming experience.

On that account, GamePad, a new entrant in the open game platform, launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for its latest Linux gaming platform. Started in April 2019, GamePad is inspired by digital distribution platform, GOG (Good Old Games) for video games and films, to provide 100% Linux dedicated game platform.

[Source: Fossbytes]

Enterprise open source software is growing within innovative companies

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 20, 2020

Red Hat has been at the forefront of the global open source discussion, fighting for software freedom in the U.S Supreme Court, and offering free tech products for cloud infrastructure, automation, AI, and much more. After conducting research and interviewing IT leaders from around the world, Red Hat released a report examining the state of enterprise open source in 2020.

950 IT leaders, unaware that Red Hat was the research sponsor, were surveyed about their practices and opinions on enterprise open source software.

[Source: Jaxenter]

Amazon and commercial open source in the cloud: It’s complicated

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 20, 2020

Like many platform operators, Amazon has a love-hate relationship with those hosted on its platform. This is particularly true for open-source software creators, who see their products on offer on Amazon’s cloud on terms they are not happy with.

It’s a complicated relationship, which touches upon many aspects of technology, law, and social norms. The issue started becoming more pronounced and entering our turf on Big on Data, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) started offering top open-source data management products on its platform.

[Source: ZDNet]