British Telecom has chosen Ubuntu OpenStack, developed by open-source specialist Canonical, as the cloud platform that will help support the introduction of 5G and fibre-to-the-premises connectivity in the UK. As part of the deal, Canonical will provide the open-source virtual infrastructure manager (VIM) that will enable BT – and by extension, its mobile network EE – to run network functions as code, reducing the need for specialized telco hardware. (Source: The Registrar)

Roughly five months following the debut of Ludwig, Uber’s open source and no-code deep learning toolkit, the ride-hailing company today detailed improvements with the latest version: Ludwig 0.2. Among them are new tools and over 50 bug fixes, plus Comet.ml integration, the addition of Google’s BERT natural language model, and support for new feature types including audio, speech, geospatial, time, and date. (Source: VentureBeat)

Red Hat has released a minor beta update to RHEL 8 to improve manageability and add new security enhancements and new drivers to the operating system. RHEL 8 was announced in May this year as a successor to RHEL 7. One of the highlights of RHEL 8 was an image builder, which helps users to create custom system images in a variety of formats. With RHEL 8.1 Beta, Image Builder is extended to support more configuration options for adding users and SSH keys. New image formats have also been added to support cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform and Alibaba Cloud. With these additions, RHEL 8.1 Beta now supports every major cloud infrastructure platform including AWS, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and VMWare. Source: TFiR, Red Hat

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 5.3-rc1. He wrote in the mailing list, “This is a pretty big release, judging by the commit count. Not the biggest ever (that honor still goes to 4.9-rc1, which was exceptionally big), and we’ve had a couple of comparable ones (4.12, 4.15 and 4.19 were also big merge windows), but it’s definitely up there. Source: LKML

Ubisoft will join the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a corporate Gold member. Not only will Ubisoft help funding online support for Blender developers, Ubisoft Animation Studio – a department of Ubisoft Film and Television – will also use Blender for their productions and assign developers to contribute to Blender’s open source projects. Ubisoft is a leading creator, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and services, with a rich portfolio of world-renowned brands, including Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Watch Dogs, Tom Clancy’s video game series, Rayman, Far Cry and Watch Dogs.  Pierrot Jacquet, Head of Production at Ubisoft Animation Studio says “Blender was for us an obvious choice: Its strong and engaged community paired up with the vision carried by the Blender Foundation makes it one of the most creative DCC of the market.” Source: Ubisoft

The OpenWhisk open source serverless platform hit graduation status as a Top-Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation. The designation comes as the serverless ecosystem continues its rapid evolution in meeting the production needs of organizations. The OpenWhisk project itself was initially born out of IBM, which donated its beta-level code into the Apache Incubator project in late 2016. IBM was using that codebase to support functions running on its IBM Cloud. Source: SDX Central

Microsoft is working to standardize data-sharing terms via pre-designed licensing agreements, the first of which now are available for preview and comment. Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Chief IP Counsel Erich Andersen said that Microsoft is trying to bring open-source-license-like structure to data-sharing agreements. The OSI maintains a number of pre-approved licenses, such as the Apache License, BSD License, MIT License, etc., which companies can use to license their source code. Microsoft officials said they believe these kinds of agreements could alleviate the need of companies to spend months or years negotiating and creating data-sharing governance agreements. Source: ZDNet

IBM recently developed three artificial intelligence tools that could help medical researchers fight cancer. Now, the company has decided to make all three tools open-source, meaning scientists will be able to use them in their research whenever they please, according to ZDNet. The tools are designed to streamline the cancer drug development process and help scientists stay on top of newly-published research — so, if they prove useful, it could mean more cancer treatments coming through the pipeline more rapidly than before. “Our goal is to deepen our understanding of cancer to equip industries and academia with the knowledge that could potentially one day help fuel new treatments and therapies,” IBM wrote in the release.

Source: Futurism.com

In an effort to bolster the development of cars capable of driving themselves around without human supervision, Lyft today released an autonomous vehicle data set that the company is calling the largest of its kind. It’s freely available in the existing nuScenes format, which was initially developed by Aptiv.

“Autonomous vehicles are expected to dramatically redefine the future of transportation. When fully realized, this technology promises to unlock a myriad of societal, environmental, and economic benefits,” said Lyft. “With this, we aim to empower the community, stimulate further development, and share our insights into future opportunities from the perspective of an advanced industrial autonomous vehicles program.”

Source: Venture Beat