Vertical industries are under constant pressure to innovate, facing the challenges of supply chains, diverse customer requirements, regulations, and a lack of talent to do everything leadership may envision in any complex business. 

These industries understand that their ownership of intellectual property for parts of their software stack is limiting business opportunities and expensive to develop and maintain. To accelerate adoption, openly working together on common infrastructure components presents more opportunities for business growth.

Our members in the automotive, motion picture, fintech, telecommunications, energy, and public health verticals have transformed their business processes and assets into software-defined assets. They are now building strategic frameworks that give them a competitive edge that only open source can provide. In 2021, verticals and new members continued innovating with newly formed communities in the agriculture industry and AAA-class 3D engines for entertainment and simulation.

While all of these vertical industries have unique open source projects and communities, they also share a common thread: All realize that open collaboration presents opportunities to reduce costs, cut time to market, increase quality, and open new areas of competition. The ability to achieve these results on a collective basis pushes innovation forward across respective industries.

Gaming and Simulation: Open3D Foundation and Open3D Engine

The Linux Foundation welcomed the Open 3D Foundation into its community of families in July of 2021. The first project in the foundation was the Open 3D Engine known as O3DE. Amazon Web Services donated it under an Apache 2.0 and MIT licensing model. The mission of the Open 3D Engine is to make an open source, fully-featured, high-fidelity, real-time 3D engine for building games and simulations available to every industry.

Since its inception, it has raised $2.7 million in commitments from 26 partners in over two years. It has received signed commitments from a range of companies such as Adobe, Intel, AWS, Niantic, Huawei, SideFX, HERE, and others.

The foundation is focused on industries that utilize 3D technologies. This includes video games, automotive, simulation, robotics, energy, real estate, training, film, special effects, machine learning, aerospace, and many other verticals.

Since its inception, it has grown to over 3600 stars, 1100 forks of the repository, 1,500 Discord users, and 500+ active members are online. It has increased to over 130 authors of code, 7000 file changes, 2,000,000 changes to lines of code, and a vibrant & active self-sustaining support community averaging 500 messages & minutes per day.

Motion Pictures and Visual Effects: The Academy Software Foundation

The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) has continued to make an impact on the open source technologies that empower the motion picture and visual effects industries. To date, ASWF boasts 32 members and hosts 14 projects and working groups. 

Key achievements in 2021 include:

MaterialX being contributed as a project by Lucasfilm. MaterialX originated at Lucasfilm in 2012. It has grown into the central format for material description at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) since the production of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The launch of the ASWF Assets Repository that gives open communities access to production-grade digital assets for testing, demonstration, and education purposes.

The launch of OpenColorIO v2.0, which is the output of three years in development and boasts numerous feature and performance improvements. In addition, a growing number of vendors are adopting their products and services, which is cementing OpenColorIO as an industry standard.

ASWF has seen the collaboration and sustainability of each of the projects and working groups it hosts increase, with each project seeing increases in organizational diversity and contributions in 2021 compared to the year before joining the ASWF.

ASWF looks forward to 2022 as it focuses on addressing new technology spaces such as virtual production.

Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)

Over the last decade, the Linux Foundation worked with industry leaders like Toyota and others to launch Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). AGL was established to build a common open source software platform to eliminate the fragmentation plaguing the automotive industry. AGL is the only organization with a mission to address all in-vehicle software, including infotainment, instrument cluster, telematics, heads-up display, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and autonomous driving.

The AGL community is reducing that fragmentation by combining the best of open source to create the AGL Unified Code Base (UCB), a single, shared, open source software platform for the entire industry. The UCB includes an operating system, middleware, and application framework and can serve as the de facto industry standard for infotainment, telematics, and instrument cluster applications. Sharing an open source platform allows for code reuse and a more efficient development process as developers and suppliers can build their solution once and deploy that same solution for multiple automakers. 

Supported by eleven major automotive manufacturers, including the top three producers by worldwide volume (Volkswagen, Toyota, Daimler), AGL is deployed  in production vehicles today:

Toyota’s AGL-based infotainment system is now in Toyota and Lexus vehicles globally.The 2020/2021 Subaru Outback and Subaru Legacy use open source software from the AGL UCB for the Subaru Starlink infotainment platform.Mercedes-Benz Vans is using AGL as a foundation for a new onboard operating system for its commercial vehicles.

Amazon AWS joined AGL as a Platinum member in January 2021 and is leading AGL initiatives around IoT and Connected Car. 

In early 2021, AGL announced a new Expert Group for Container and Service Mesh, led by Amazon AWS. The Container and Mesh Expert Group are developing an in-vehicle container solution for AGL and creating a service mesh and orchestration framework that can be deployed as part of AGL.

The IVI Production Readiness Expert Group, led by Toyota, has made significant progress in 2021. This EG is focused on bringing AGL closer to a production-ready state. By early 2022, major code contributions are expected from Toyota on Flutter for embedded IVI, a new cutting edge UI and App development framework for infotainment systems. This will allow manufacturers to cut the development time and cost of deploying innovative new applications in the vehicle. 

The Virtualization EG, led by Panasonic, has been busy working on cutting-edge VirtIO technology. This allows consolidation of vehicle cockpit systems such as IVI, Instrument Cluster, and Heads-Up-Display to run on a single processor. It also enables innovative use cases such as using Android for infotainment and AGL for Instrument Cluster on a single virtualized CPU. The consolidated cockpit is a vision of the future, and it’s being developed today at AGL. 

AGL also had two milestone platform releases this year, Unified Code Base (UCB) 11.0 Kooky Koi in February and 12.0 Lucky Lamprey in July. These releases included several updates to graphics, audio, speech recognition, application and security frameworks, web apps, and Chromium. Both releases are based on the Yocto 3.1 Long-Term-Support board support packages.

New Industry Vertical‭: ‬Agriculture

In May 2021, the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the AgStack Foundation, the open source digital infrastructure project for the world’s agriculture ecosystem. Thirty-three percent of all food produced is wasted, while nine percent of the people in the world are hungry or malnourished. These societal drivers are compounded with legacy technology systems that are too slow and inefficient and can’t work across the growing and more complex agricultural supply chain. AgStack Foundation will improve global agriculture efficiency by creating, maintaining, and enhancing free, reusable, open, and specialized digital infrastructure for data and applications. AgStack will use collaboration and open source software to build the 21st-century digital infrastructure that will be a catalyst for innovation on new applications, efficiencies, and scale.

AgStack consists of an open repository to create and publish models, free and easy access to public data, interoperable frameworks for cross-project use, and topic-specific extensions and toolboxes. It will leverage existing technologies such as agriculture standards (AgGateway, UN-FAO, CAFA, USDA, and NASA-AR); public data (Landsat, Sentinel, NOAA and Soilgrids; models (UC-ANR IPM), and open source projects like Hyperledger, Kubernetes, Open Horizon, Postgres, Django and more.

Founding members and contributors include leaders from both the technology and agriculture industries and across sectors and geographies. Members and partners include Agralogics, Call for Code, Centricity Global, Digital Green, Farm Foundation, farmOS, HPE, IBM, Mixing Bowl & Better Food Ventures, NIAB, OpenTeam, Our Sci, Produce Marketing Association, Purdue University / OATS & Agricultural Informatics Lab, the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC-ANR) and University of California Santa Barbara SmartFarm Project.

New Industry Vertical‭: ‬AI Voice Technologies

In June, the Linux Foundation 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 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.

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.

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.

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support  Open3D Foundation, ASWF, AGL, AgStack, and Open Voice Network 

To learn how your organization can get involved with Open 3D Foundation, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with ASWF, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with AGL, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with AgStack, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with Open Voice Network, click here

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Community debuts Developer Badge Program to recognize, reward  developer contributions as it begins plans for Spring 2022 release, codenamed ‘Kamakura’

SAN FRANCISCO – December 1, 2021 – EdgeX Foundry, a Linux Foundation project under the  LF Edge project umbrella, today announced the release of version 2.1 of EdgeX, codenamed ‘Jakarta.’  The project’s ninth release, it follows the recent Ireland release, which was the project’s second major release (version 2.0). Jakarta is significant in that it is EdgeX’s first release to offer long term support (LTS). 

Long Term Support

“Only a few open-source projects offer long term support; the rapid change of open source projects and the effort needed to LTS is significant,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, at the Linux Foundation. “By including LTS, EdgeX demonstrates it understands the needs of the operational technology (OT) user base, and how products in this space must work and operate over longer periods of time than traditional IT solutions,” said Arpit Joshipura. “This is a big milestone for any open source community, and we are incredibly proud of EdgeX Foundry for this achievement.”

“Our Jakarta release is a stabilization release,” said Jim White, the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee  (TSC) Chairman and co-founder of the project.  “As such, it is our project community’s pledge to adopters that EdgeX offers you a stable version of the platform that you can expect the community to stand behind and support for a period of two years.  We stand with you in support of EdgeX in real world, commercial deployments of the platform.”

 The EdgeX long term support policy states that the community will work as quickly as possible and give “best effort and development priority to fix major flaws as soon as possible.”  Major flaws by the project are defined as 

bugs causing the system or service to crash and where there is no work around for the functionbugs for a feature/function that does not work and there is no work around for the functiona security issue deemed a critical or high-level CVE (per CVSS)

The project has further stipulated in its LTS policy that “no new major functionality (at the discretion of the TSC) will be added” to the LTS version after the release happens.

More information about the Jakarta release, including a list of new features, can be found here: https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org/display/FA/Jakarta. 

EdgeX Developer Badge Program

As a part of this release cycle, EdgeX  also announced a new EdgeX Developer Badge program.  EdgeX has created the Developer Badge program to thank those making initial impacts to the project by providing  something that they can use to highlight their efforts and volunteerism on social media platforms.   Contributors have started receiving an official digital badge (award through Credly) when 

they make their first contribution (their first GitHub Pull Request is accepted by the project and merged into one of the project’s code repositories)they fix two documented bugs of the project

Additional badges for other work may be awarded by the community in the future.

Kamakura Release – Spring 2022

The next EdgeX release, codenamed “Kamakura,” is set for Spring 2022.  The community has held its semi-annual planning session to lay out the goals and objectives of this release.  Kamakura is likely to be another dot-release that will again be backward compatible with all EdgeX 2.x releases (Ireland and Jakarta).  Major additions currently under consideration and being developed by the community include:

Initial north to south message bus.  Improved security secrets seeding and allowing for delayed service starts.Metrics collection. .Dynamic device profiles.  Better (native) Windows supportImprove testing – including real hardware testingA second version release of the EdgeX Command Line Interface (CLI) which,  compatible with EdgeX v2.x.

 Learn more about this release on the project’s Wiki site.

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.

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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. 

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Attackers are increasingly targeting software supply chains (the processes, repositories, and toolchains used for developing and delivering software). The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, ENISA, estimated in “Threat Landscape for Supply Chain Attacks” that there would be four times as many software supply chain attacks in 2021 as compared to 2020. The report states due to “…more robust security protection that [many] organizations have put in place [today], attackers successfully shifted towards suppliers.”

Governments around the world have noted and responded to this growing risk to the software supply chain. In May 2021, the US released an Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity to enhance software supply chain security, including providing software purchasers with a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). Similar efforts are underway around the world.

In 2021, our communities rose to the challenge of providing tools and best practices for the security hardening of the global software supply chains. Our efforts included launching Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) as a funded project, expanding Let’s Encrypt — the world’s largest certificate authority, ensuring the ISO standardization of SPDX as the SBOM standard, directing funds to identify and fix vulnerabilities in critical open source software, and building new training curriculum to improve secure coding practices.

Community Highlight: OpenSSF

The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) was elevated to a funded project at the LF in October 2021. The OpenSSF is a cross-industry collaboration that brings together leaders to improve the security of open source software (OSS) by building a broader community, targeted initiatives, and best practices. The OpenSSF premier members include: 1Password, AWS, Cisco, Citi, Dell Technologies, Ericsson, Facebook, Fidelity, GitHub, Google, Huawei, Intel, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, Red Hat, Snyk, and VMWare.

The OpenSSF began many initiatives in 2021, including:

Security Scorecard: automatically assesses many security-related heuristics to help estimate project securityAllstar: an automated tool to enforce some security policiesSecurity Reviews: collects security reviews of OSSSecurity Metrics Dashboard: provides easy access to security metrics/info about OSS projectsOSS Vulnerability Guide: a guide to coordinated vulnerability disclosure for open source software projectsOpen Source Vulnerability (OSV) SchemaSupply-Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA): security framework for software security and supply chain integrityPackage Feeds / Package Analysis: analyzes uploaded packages to identify potentially malicious ones

The OpenSSF also continued to refine its existing work, including its free courses on how to develop secure software (over 4,000 registrants combined) and the CII Best Practices Badge Program (over 4,000 participating projects and over 600 passing projects). 

Shepherding Software Standards

The Linux Foundation strongly supports efforts to build and drive the adoption of open source standards and infrastructure. These efforts include:

SPDX — an international standard for representing the metadata for SBOMs (ISO/IEC 5962)OpenChain — a standardized process management approach to identify inbound, internal, and outbound open software. It is primarily designed for compliance and has clear secondary use cases in security ( ISO 5230) Compliance tooling from Automating Compliance Tooling (ACT) projects (including OSS Review Toolkit, FOSSology, Tern), and the OpenChain reference workflow, being extended to add new use cases. Training on software transparency topics, including “Generating an SBOM“

Establishing Projects and Conferences to Improve Security

In addition to the projects listed earlier, the LF funds various projects to improve open source security. Some notables among them include:

sigstore — development work on this technology suite to enable developers to sign software artifacts securely. Signing materials are stored in a tamper-resistant public log. (The project is managed by Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University)Alpine Linux — vulnerability processing for this security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution.Alpine Linux, Arch Linux — reproducible builds for these two Linux distributions.OpenSSH, RPKI — development of infrastructure “plumbing” Clang, Linux kernel — compiling Linux kernel with clang and fix warnings found during the compiling processLinux kernel — security audits for signing/key management policies and vulnerability reporting modules, respectively)

The LF also fostered approaches to discuss and address supply chain attacks online and in virtual venues, including Building Cybersecurity into the Software Supply Chain Town Hall and SupplyChainSecurityCon.

Community Highlight: Internet Security Research Group ‬

Let’s Encrypt provides the digital infrastructure for a more secure and privacy-respecting Internet. It operates the world’s largest certificate authority, securing traffic for more than 250 million websites.

In late 2020, ISRG launched Prossimo, a project whose goal is to move the Internet’s security-sensitive software infrastructure to memory-safe code. Many of the most critical software vulnerabilities are memory safety issues in C and C++ code. While deploying fuzzing, static analysis, and code reviews can catch vulnerabilities, such mitigations do not eliminate all risks. Moreover, these security mitigation tactics consume considerable resources on an ongoing basis. In contrast, using memory-safe languages eliminates the entire class of issues. This year, Prossimo worked with Linux kernel, cURL, and Apache maintainers to introduce new memory-safe code to these critical, widely-used pieces of software.

ISRG’s latest project effort, Prio, is to operate a privacy-preserving metrics service. Prio uses a system that enables the collection of aggregate statistics such as application metrics. Apple and Google’s Covid-19 Exposure Notification Express app uses this service. ISRG Prio has processed over two billion metrics and is helping operators optimize the user experience based on aggregate, privacy-respecting telemetry metrics.

These standardization efforts are made possible by the OpenSSF, the SPDX and OpenChain projects, and the ISRG.

To learn more about and get involved with OpenSSF, click here

To learn more about and get involved with the ISRG, click here

To learn more about the SPDX SBOM standard, click here

To learn more about the OpenChain standard, click here

The post Linux Foundation: Defending the Global Software Supply Chain from Cyberattacks in 2021 appeared first on Linux Foundation.

QIR Alliance is part of the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation work on open standards

SAN FRANCISCO, November 30, 2021 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the new QIR Alliance, a joint effort to establish an intermediate representation with the goal to facilitate interoperability within the quantum ecosystem and provide a representation suitable for current and future heterogenous quantum processors. Founding members include Honeywell, Microsoft, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Quantum Circuits Inc. and Rigetti Computing. 

QIR, or Quantum Intermediate Representation, is based on the popular open source LLVM compiler toolchain. QIR specifies a set of rules for representing quantum programs within the LLVM IR. Examples of QIR applications include using the standard LLVM infrastructure to write quantum optimizers that operate on QIR and target it to specific hardware backends or linking it with classical high performance libraries for quantum simulation.

“We expect there to be exciting advances in how classical and quantum computations can interact at the hardware level. The QIR Alliance will provide a single representation that can be used for both today’s restricted capabilities and the more powerful systems of the future,” said Bettina Heim, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft. “This will allow the community to experiment with and develop optimizations and code transformations that work in a variety of use cases.”

Quantum development SDKs and languages appear and evolve at a fast pace, along with new quantum processors with unique and distinct capabilities from each other. To provide interoperability between new languages and new hardware capabilities and reduce development effort from all parties, it is imperative for the ecosystem to develop and share a forward-looking intermediate representation that works with present and future quantum hardware.

“Quantum technology is still quite nascent but the promise grows every day,” said Seth Newberry, general manager of standards at Joint Development Foundation. “The QIR Alliance is poised to enable the open and technical development necessary to realize these promises. We’re very happy to provide a forum for this work.”

For more information, please visit: https://qir-alliance.org 

Member Quotes

Honeywell

“The Quantum-Intermediate Representation Alliance, also known as QIRA, is a key piece of the quantum computing ecosystem that enables quantum hardware suppliers and quantum software suppliers to reduce redundant efforts involved in implementing programming languages across quantum computer architectures,” said Alex Chernoguzov, Honeywell Quantum Chief Engineer, Honeywell.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

“ORNL is thrilled to be a part of the Quantum Intermediate Representation Alliance, which aims to develop a unified LLVM-based intermediate representation for quantum computing. A consistent IR of quantum programs will enable interoperability between quantum applications and hardware devices, making quantum computing more usable to researchers and developers. We look forward to contributing to the QIR specification and the associated compiler toolchain under this partnership,” said Thien Nguyen, Quantum Computer Science Researcher, Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Quantum Circuits Inc.

At QCI, we are very pleased to be participating in the QIR Alliance. The QIR approach represents a revolutionary advance in the representation of quantum circuits, enabling users to take full advantage of the unique capabilities of quantum computing systems across a variety of different hardware platforms,” said Tom Lubinski, Chief Software Architect of Quantum Circuits Inc.

Rigetti

“Rigetti has pioneered hybrid system architectures that are quickly becoming the predominant approach for cloud-based quantum computing” said David Rivas, SVP Systems & Services at Rigetti Computing. “The QIR Alliance is focusing on precisely the interface between quantum and classical compute, enabling rapid advances in quantum programming language design and execution systems. We’re thrilled to be working closely with this community to design the necessary compiler technology and develop implementations for Rigetti hardware.”

About Joint Development Foundation

Launched in 2015, the Joint Development Foundation (the Joint Development Foundation) is an independent non-profit organization that provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable groups to quickly establish and operate standards and source code development collaborations. More information about the Joint Development Foundation is available at http://www.jointdevelopment.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.

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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

Story Changes Culture

503-867-2304

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