Make your system boot the way you want it to by editing your Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) file.
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Make your system boot the way you want it to by editing your Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) file.
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In a new white paper, the Cardea Project at Linux Foundation Public Health demonstrates a complete, decentralized, open source system for sharing medical data in a privacy-preserving way with machine readable governance for establishing trust.
The Cardea Project began as a response to the global Covid-19 pandemic and the need for countries and airlines to admit travelers. As Covid shut down air travel and presented an existential threat to countries whose economies depended on tourism, SITA Aero, the largest provider of IT technology to the air transport sector, saw decentralized identity technology as the ideal solution to manage a proof of Covid test status for travel.
With a verifiable credential, a traveler could hold their health data and not only prove they had a specific test at a specific time, they could use it—or a derivative credential—to prove their test status to enter hotels and hospitality spaces without having to divulge any personal information. Entities that needed to verify a traveler’s test status could, in turn, avoid the complexity of direct integrations with healthcare providers and the challenge of complying with onerous health data privacy law.
Developed by Indicio with SITA and the government of Aruba, the technology was successfully trialed in 2021 and the code specifically developed for the project was donated to Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) as a way for any public health authority to implement an open source, privacy-preserving way to manage Covid test and vaccination data. The Cardea codebase continues to develop at LFPH as Indicio, SITA, and the Cardea Community Group extend its features and applications beyond Covid-related data.
On May 22, 2022 at the 15th KuppingerCole European Identity and Cloud Conference in Berlin, SITA won the Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identity Award for its implementation of decentralized identity in Aruba.
The new white paper from the Cardea Project provides an in-depth examination of the background to Cardea, the transformational power of decentralized identity technology, how it works, the implementation in Aruba, and how it can be deployed to authenticate and share multiple kinds of health data in privacy-preserving ways. As the white paper notes:
“…Cardea is more than a solution for managing COVID-19 testing; it is a way to manage any health-related process where critical and personal information needs to be shared and verified in a way that enables privacy and enhances security. It is able to meet the requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, and in doing so enable use cases that range from simple proof of identity to interoperating ecosystems encompassing multiple cloud services, organizations, and sectors, where data needs to be, and can be, shared in immediately actionable ways.
Open source, interoperable decentralized identity technology is the only viable way to manage both the challenges of the present—where entire health systems can be held at ransom through identity-based breaches—and the opportunities presented by a digital future where digital twins, smart hospitals, and spatial web applications will reshape how healthcare is managed and delivered.”
The white paper is available here. The community development group meets weekly on Thursdays at 9:00am PST—please join us!
This article was originally published on the Linux Foundation Public Health project’s blog.
The post Sharing Health Data while Preserving Privacy: The Cardea Project appeared first on Linux Foundation.
So, I am old enough to remember when the U.S. Congress temporarily intervened in a patent dispute over the technology that powered BlackBerries. A U.S. Federal judge ordered the BlackBerry service to shutdown until the matter was resolved, and Congress determined that BlackBerry service was too integral to commerce to be allowed to be turned off. Eventually, RIM settled the patent dispute and the BlackBerry rode off into technology oblivion.
I am not here to argue the merits of this nearly 20-year-old case (in fact, I coincidentally had friends on both legal teams), but it was when I was introduced to the idea of companies that purchase patents with the goal of using this purchased right to extract money from other companies.
Patents are an important legal protection to foster innovation, but, like all systems, it isn’t perfect.
At this week’s Open Source Summit North America, we heard from Kevin Jakel with Unified Patents. Kevin is a patent attorney who saw the damage being done to innovation by patent trolls – more kindly known as non-practicing entities (NPEs).
Kevin points out that patents are intellectual property designed to protect inventions, granting a time-bound legal monopoly, but they are only a sword, not a shield. You can use it to stop people, but it doesn’t give you a right to do anything. He emphasizes, “You are vulnerable even if you invented something. Someone can come at you with other patents.”
Kevin has watched a whole industry develop where patents are purchased by other entities, who then go after successful individuals or companies who they claim are infringing on the patents they now legally own (but is not something they invented). In fact, 88% of all high-tech patent litigation is from an NPE.
NPEs are rational actors using the legal system to their advantage, and they are driven by the fact that almost all of the time the defendant decides to settle to avoid the costs of defending the litigation. This perpetuates the problem by both reducing the risk to the NPEs and also giving them funds to purchase additional patents for future campaigns.
In regards to open source software, the problem is on the rise and is only going to get worse without strategic, consistent action to combat it.
Kevin started Unified Patents with the goal of solving this problem without incentivizing further NPE activity. He wants to increase the risk for NPEs so that they are incentivized to not pursue non-existent claims. Because NPEs are rational actors, they are going to weigh risks vs. rewards before making any decisions.
How does Unified Patents do this? They use a three-step process:
Detect – Patent Troll Campaigns
Disrupt – Patent Troll Assertions
Deter – Further Patent Troll Investment
Unified Patents works on behalf of 11 technology areas (they call them Zones). They added an Open Source Zone in 2019 with the help of the Linux Foundation, Open Invention Network, and Microsoft. They look for demands being filed in court, and then they selectively pick patent trolls out of the group and challenge them, attempting to disrupt the process. They take the patent back to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and see if the patent should have ever existed in the first place. Typically, patent trolls look for broad patents so they can sue lots of companies, making their investment more profitable and less risky. This means it is so broad that it probably should never have been awarded in the first place.
The result – they end up killing a lot of patents that should have never been issued but are being exploited by patent trolls, stifling innovation. The goal is to slow them down and eventually bring them to a stop as quickly as they can. Then, the next time they go to look for a patent, they look somewhere else.
And it is working. The image below shows some of the open source projects that Unified Patents has actively protected since 2019.
The Linux Foundation participates in Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone to help protect the individuals and organizations innovating every day. We encourage you to join the fight and create a true deterrence for patent trolls. It is the only way to extinguish this threat.
Learn more at unifiedpatents.com/join.
And if you are a die-hard fan of the BlackBerry’s iconic keyboard, my apologies for dredging up the painful memory of your loss.
The post Ensuring Patents Foster Innovation in Open Source appeared first on Linux Foundation.
You can use the numeric codes returned by shell scripts or Ansible playbooks to identify problems and test the code.
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If you are interested in online and in-person training and certifications in open source software development and key open source software, such as Linux and Kubernetes, see our special discount just for readers of this post. Scroll to the end.
Tomorrow night, in the skies over Congress Bridge in Austin, Texas, 300 drones will work in concert to provide a lightshow to entertain but also inform about the power of open source software to drive innovation in our world, making an impact in every life, every day.
Backing up a bit, open source software often conjures up inaccurate visions and presumptions that just aren’t true. No need to conjure those up – we all know what they are. The reality is that open source software (OSS) has transformed our world and become the backbone of our digital economy and the foundation of our digital world.
The reality is that open source software (OSS) has transformed our world and become the backbone of our digital economy and the foundation of our digital world.
Some quick, fun facts:
In vertical software stacks across industries, open source penetration ranges from 20 to 85 percent of the overall software used
Linux fuels 90%+ of web servers and Internet-connected devices
The Android mobile operating system is built on the Linux kernel
Immensely popular libraries and tools to build web applications, such as: AMP, Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Marko, Node.js and so many more are open source
The world’s top 100 supercomputers run Linux
100% of mainframe customers use Linux
The major cloud-service providers – AWS, Google, and Microsoft – all utilize open-source software to run their services and host open-source solutions delivered through the cloud
Open source software is about organizations coming together to collectively solve common problems so they can separately innovate and differentiate on top of the common baseline. They see they are better off pooling resources to make the baseline better. Sometimes it is called “coopetition.” It generally means that while companies may be in competition with each other in certain areas, they can still cooperate on others.
I borrowed from a well-known tagline from my childhood in the headline – open source does bring good things to life.
Drones were introduced to the world through military applications and then toys we could all easily fly (well, my personal track record is abysmal). But the reality is that drones are seeing a variety of commercial applications, such as energy facility inspection for oil, gas, and solar, search and rescue, firefighting, and more, with new uses coming online all of the time. We aren’t at The Jetsons level yet, but they are making our lives easier and safer (and some really cool aerial shots).
Much of that innovation comes from open source coopetition.
The Linux Foundation hosts the Dronecode Foundation, which fosters open source code and standards critical to the worldwide drone industry. In a recent blog post, the general manager, Ramón Roche, discusses some of the ways open source has created an ecosystem of interoperability, which leads to users having more choice and flexibility.
Ramón recounts how it all started with the creation of Pixhawk, open standards for drone hardware, with the goal to make drones fly autonomously using computer vision. Working to overcome the lack of computing power and technology in 2008, Lorenz Meier, then a student, set out to build the necessary flight control software and hardware. Realizing the task’s scale, he sought the help of fourteen fellow students, many of whom were more experienced than him, to make it happen. They built Pixhawk and kick started an open source community around various technologies. It, “enabled talented people worldwide to collaborate and create a full-scale solution that was reusable and standardized. By giving their technology a permissive open source license, they opened it to everyone for use and collaboration.”
The innovation and technological backbone we see in drones is thanks to open software, hardware, and standards. Dronecode’s blog has interviews with Max Tubman of Freefly Systems talks about how open standards are enabling interoperability of various payloads amongst partners in the Open Ecosystem. Also, Bobby Watts of Watts Innovation explains the power of standardization and how it has streamlined their interoperability with other ecosystem partners like Gremsy and Drone Rescue Systems.
The innovation and technological backbone we see in drones is thanks to open software, hardware, and standards
Check out both interviews here and read about what is next.
The story of open source driving innovation in the drone industry is just one of thousands of examples of how open source is driving global innovation. Whether you know it or not, you use open source software every minute of every hour of every day.
Use promo code DRONE25 here to receive up to 25% off of Linux Foundation’s training, taken by millions of students around the world. Expires on June 30, 2022. View the whole catalog, from AI and blockchain to web and application development, we have something for you.
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In recent years, DevOps, which aligns incentives and the flow of work across the organization, has become the standard way of building software. By focusing on improving the flow of value, the software development lifecycle has become much more efficient and effective, leading to positive outcomes for everyone involved. However software development and IT operations aren’t the only teams involved in the software delivery process. With increasing cybersecurity threats, it has never been more important to unify cybersecurity and other stakeholders into an effective and united value stream aligned towards continuous delivery.
At the most basic level, there is nothing separating DevSecOps from the DevOps model. However, security, and a culture designed to put security at the forefront has often been an afterthought for many organizations. But in a modern world, as costs and concerns mount from increased security attacks, it must become more prominent. It is possible to provide continuous delivery, in a secure fashion. In fact, CD enhances the security profile. Getting there takes a dedication to people, culture, process, and lastly technology, breaking down silos and unifying multi-disciplinary skill sets. Organizations can optimize and align their value streams towards continuous improvement across the entire organization.
To help educate and inform program managers and software leaders on secure and continuous software delivery, the Linux Foundation is releasing a new, free online training course, Introduction to DevSecOps for Managers (LFS180x) on the edX platform. Pre-enrollment is now open, though the course material will not be available to learners until July 20. The course focuses on providing managers and leaders with an introduction to the foundational knowledge required to lead digital organizations through their DevSecOps journey and transformation.
LFS180x starts off by discussing what DevSecOps is and why it is important. It then provides an overview of DevSecOps technologies and principles using a simple-to-follow “Tech like I’m 10” approach. Next, the course covers topics such as value stream management, platform as product, and engineering organization improvement, all driving towards defining Continuous Delivery and explaining why it is so foundational for any organization. The course also focuses on culture, metrics, cybersecurity, and agile contracting. Upon completion, participants will understand the fundamentals required in order to successfully transform any software development organization into a digital leader.
The course was developed by Dr. Rob Slaughter and Bryan Finster. Rob is an Air Force veteran and the CEO of Defense Unicorns, a company focused on secure air gap software delivery, he is the former co-founder and Director of the Department of Defense’s DevSecOps platform team, Platform One, co-founder of the United States Space Force Space CAMP software factory, and current member of the Navy software factory Project Blue. Bryan is a software engineer and value stream architect with over 25 years experience as a software engineer and leading development teams delivering highly available systems for large enterprises. He founded and led the Walmart DevOps Dojo which focused on a hands-on, immersive learning approach to helping teams solve the problem of “why can’t we safely deliver today’s changes to production today?” He is the co-author of “Modern Cybersecurity: Tales from the Near-Distant Future”, the author of the “5 Minute DevOps” blog, and one of the maintainers of MinimumCD.org. He is currently a value stream architect at Defense Unicorns at Platform One.
Enroll today to start your journey to mastering DevSecOps practices on July 20!
The post Learn the Principles of DevSecOps in New, Free Training Course appeared first on Linux Foundation.
Many software projects are not prepared to build securely by default, which is why the Linux Foundation and Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) partnered with technology industry leaders to create Sigstore, a set of tools and a standard for signing, verifying and protecting software. Sigstore is one of several innovative technologies that have emerged to improve the integrity of the software supply chain, reducing the friction developers face in implementing security within their daily work.
To make it easier to use Sigstore’s toolkit to its full potential, OpenSSF and Linux Foundation Training & Certification are releasing a free online training course, Securing Your Software Supply Chain with Sigstore (LFS182x). This course is designed with end users of Sigstore tooling in mind: software developers, DevOps engineers, security engineers, software maintainers, and related roles. To make the best use of this course, you will need to be familiar with Linux terminals and using command line tools. You will also need to have intermediate knowledge of cloud computing and DevOps concepts, such as using and building containers and CI/CD systems like GitHub Actions, many of which can be learned through other free Linux Foundation Training & Certification courses.
Upon completing this course, participants will be able to inform their organization’s security strategy and build software more securely by default. The hope is this will help you address attacks and vulnerabilities that can emerge at any step of the software supply chain, from writing to packaging and distributing software to end users.
Enroll today and improve your organization’s software development cybersecurity best practices.
The post Free Training Course Teaches How to Secure a Software Supply Chain with Sigstore appeared first on Linux Foundation.
With the help of a container and OpenShift’s “import from Git” functionality, you can onboard a Rust application onto OpenShift quickly.
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SAN FRANCISCO – June 22, 2022 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and edX, a leading global online learning platform from 2U, Inc. (Nasdaq: TWOU), have released the 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report, examining the demand for open source talent and trends among open source professionals.
The need for open source talent is strong in light of continuing cloud adoption and digital transformation across industries. As the COVID pandemic wanes, both retention and recruitment have become more difficult than ever, with 73% of professionals reporting it would be easy to find a new role and 93% of employers struggling to find enough skilled talent. Although the majority of open source professionals (63%) reported their employment did not change in the past year, one-in-three did report they either left or changed jobs, which puts additional pressure on employers trying to hold onto staff with necessary skills. While this may not reach levels of a “Great Resignation”, this turnover is putting more pressure on companies.
“Every business has struggled with recruiting and retaining talent this past year, and the open source industry has been no different,” said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. “Organizations that want to ensure they have the talent to meet their business goals need to not only differentiate themselves to attract that talent, but also look at ways to close the skills gap by developing net new and existing talent. This report provides insights and actionable steps they can take to make that happen.”
“This year’s report found that certifications have become increasingly important as organizations continue to look for ways to close skills gaps. We see modular, stackable learning as the future of education and it’s promising to see employers continuing to recognize these alternative paths to gain the skills needed for today’s jobs,” said Anant Agarwal, edX Founder and 2U Chief Open Education Officer.
The tenth annual Open Source Jobs Report examines trends in open source careers, which skills are most in-demand, the motivation for open source professionals, and how employers attract and retain qualified talent. Key findings from the Open Source Jobs Report include:
There remains a shortage of qualified open source talent: The vast majority of employers (93%) report difficulty finding sufficient talent with open source skills. This trend is not going away with nearly half (46%) of employers planning to increase their open source hiring in the next six months, and 73% of open source professionals stating it would be easy to find a new role should they choose to move on.
Compensation has become a greater differentiating factor: Financial incentives including salary and bonuses are the most common means of keeping talent, with two-in-three open source professionals saying a higher salary would deter them from leaving a job. With flex time and remote work becoming the industry standard, lifestyle benefits are becoming less of a consideration, making financial incentives a bigger differentiator.
Certifications hit new levels of importance: An overwhelming number of employers (90%) stated that they will pay for employees to obtain certifications, and 81% of professionals plan to add certifications this year, demonstrating the weight these credentials hold. The 69% of employers who are more likely to hire an open source professional with a certification also reinforces that in light of talent shortages, prior experience is becoming less of a requirement as long as someone can demonstrate they possess the skills to do the job.
Cloud’s continued dominance: Cloud and container technology skills remain the most in demand this year, with 69% of employers seeking hires with these skills, and 71% of open source professionals agreeing these skills are in high demand. This is unsurprising with 77% of companies surveyed reporting they grew their use of cloud in the past year. Linux skills remain in high demand as well (61% of hiring managers) which is unsurprising considering how much Linux underpins cloud computing.
Cybersecurity concerns are mounting: Cybersecurity skills have the fourth biggest impact on hiring decisions, reported by 40% of employers, trailing only cloud, Linux and DevOps. Amongst professionals, 77% state they would benefit from additional cybersecurity training, demonstrating that although the importance of security is being recognized more, there is work to be done to truly secure technology deployments.
Companies are willing to spend more to avoid delaying projects: The most common way to close skills gaps currently according to hiring managers is training (43%), followed by 41% who say they hire consultants to fill these gaps, an expensive alternative and an increase from the 37% reporting this last year. This aligns with the only 16% who are willing to delay projects, demonstrating digital transformation activities are being prioritized even if they require costly consultants.
This year’s report is based on survey responses from 1,672 open source professionals and 559 respondents with responsibility for hiring open source professionals. Surveys were fielded online during the month of March 2022.
The full 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report is available to download here for free.
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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dbrown@linuxfoundation.org
The post Open Source Technology Careers Become More Lucrative as Open Source Software Becomes Dominant and Talent Gaps Persist appeared first on Linux Foundation.
BOSTON — June 21, 2022 — Snyk, the leader in developer security, and The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the results of their first joint research report, The State of Open Source Security.
The results detail the significant security risks resulting from the widespread use of open source software within modern application development as well as how many organizations are currently ill-prepared to effectively manage these risks. Specifically, the report found:
Over four out of every ten (41%) organizations don’t have high confidence in their open source software security;
The average application development project has 49 vulnerabilities and 80 direct dependencies (open source code called by a project); and,
The time it takes to fix vulnerabilities in open source projects has steadily increased, more than doubling from 49 days in 2018 to 110 days in 2021.
“Software developers today have their own supply chains – instead of assembling car parts, they are assembling code by patching together existing open source components with their unique code. While this leads to increased productivity and innovation, it has also created significant security concerns,” said Matt Jarvis, Director, Developer Relations, Snyk. “This first-of-its-kind report found widespread evidence suggesting industry naivete about the state of open source security today. Together with The Linux Foundation, we plan to leverage these findings to further educate and equip the world’s developers, empowering them to continue building fast, while also staying secure.”
“While open source software undoubtedly makes developers more efficient and accelerates innovation, the way modern applications are assembled also makes them more challenging to secure,” said Brian Behlendorf, General Manager, Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). “This research clearly shows the risk is real, and the industry must work even more closely together in order to move away from poor open source or software supply chain security practices.” (You can read the OpenSSF’s blog post about the report here)
Snyk and The Linux Foundation will be discussing the report’s full findings as well as recommended actions to improve the security of open source software development during a number of upcoming events:
Session at Open Source Summit North America in Austin, TX, titled, “Addressing Cybersecurity Challenges in Open Source Software,” taking place Tuesday, June 21, at 12 p.m. local time (CT).
Webinar taking place Tuesday, June 28, at 1 p.m. ET, to register, visit here.
Webinar taking place Wednesday, June 29, at 9 a.m. ET, to register, visit here.
Modern application development teams are leveraging code from all sorts of places. They reuse code from other applications they’ve built and search code repositories to find open source components that provide the functionality they need. The use of open source requires a new way of thinking about developer security that many organizations have not yet adopted.
Further consider:
Less than half (49%) of organizations have a security policy for OSS development or usage (and this number is a mere 27% for medium-to-large companies); and,
Three in ten (30%) organizations without an open source security policy openly recognize that no one on their team is currently directly addressing open source security.
When developers incorporate an open source component in their applications, they immediately become dependent on that component and are at risk if that component contains vulnerabilities. The report shows how real this risk is, with dozens of vulnerabilities discovered across many direct dependencies in each application evaluated.
This risk is also compounded by indirect, or transitive, dependencies, which are the dependencies of your dependencies. Many developers do not even know about these dependencies, making them even more challenging to track and secure.
That said, to some degree, survey respondents are aware of the security complexities created by open source in the software supply chain today:
Over one-quarter of survey respondents noted they are concerned about the security impact of their direct dependencies;
Only 18% of respondents said they are confident of the controls they have in place for their transitive dependencies; and,
Forty percent of all vulnerabilities were found in transitive dependencies.
As application development has increased in complexity, the security challenges faced by development teams have also become increasingly complex. While this makes development more efficient, the use of open source software adds to the remediation burden. The report found that fixing vulnerabilities in open source projects takes almost 20% longer (18.75%) than in proprietary projects.
The State of Open Source Security is a partnership between Snyk and The Linux Foundation, with support from OpenSSF, the Cloud Native Security Foundation, the Continuous Delivery Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. The report is based on a survey of over 550 respondents in the first quarter of 2022 as well as data from Snyk Open Source, which has scanned more than 1.3B open source projects.
Snyk is the leader in developer security. We empower the world’s developers to build secure applications and equip security teams to meet the demands of the digital world. Our developer-first approach ensures organizations can secure all of the critical components of their applications from code to cloud, leading to increased developer productivity, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, cost savings and an overall improved security posture. Snyk’s Developer Security Platform automatically integrates with a developer’s workflow and is purpose-built for security teams to collaborate with their development teams. Snyk is used by 1,500+ customers worldwide today, including industry leaders such as Asurion, Google, Intuit, MongoDB, New Relic, Revolut, and Salesforce.
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.
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