The FCC's robocaller penalties are growing as the agency tracks down and terminates their operations -- this time resulting in a record $300 million forfeiture. From a report: But whether and when that money will be paid is, as always, something of an open question. The robocaller in this case was known by a variety of names and had been scamming people since 2018, as the FCC announcement explains: "This enterprise operated a complex scheme designed to facilitate the sale of vehicle service contracts under the false and misleading claim of selling auto warranties. Two of the central players of the operation, Roy M. Cox and Aaron Michael Jones, were under lifetime bans against making telemarketing calls following lawsuits by the Federal Trade Commission and State of Texas. The multi-national enterprise did business as Sumco Panama, Virtual Telecom, Davis Telecom, Geist Telecom, Fugle Telecom, Tech Direct, Mobi Telecom, and Posting Express."

Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015. From a report: Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday. Rebecca Pow, the minister for environmental quality and resilience, said the policy had "helped to stop billions of single-use carrier bags littering our neighbourhoods or heading to landfill." The government claimed the average person in England now bought just two single-use carrier bags a year from major retailers.

Campaigners welcomed the finding but said the statistic did not account for all types of plastic bag . They also questioned the timing of the announcement, made as experts said plans for 100 new North Sea oil and gas wells, announced the same day by the prime minister would "send a wrecking ball through the UK's climate commitments." A 5p charge for carrier bags was introduced in English supermarkets in 2015. In 2021, the charge was increased to 10p and extended to all businesses. Since then, the number of plastic bags used across all retailers had fallen 35%, from 627m in 2019-20 to 406m in 2022-23, Defra said. Wales had introduced a 5p charge in 2011, Northern Ireland followed suit in 2013 and Scotland did so in 2014. Scotland and Northern Ireland have since raised their charges to 10p and 25p respectively.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: China will place export controls on drone and drone equipment in order to "safeguard national security and interests," its commerce ministry announced Monday, in a move that could impact the war in Ukraine. The restrictions on equipment will require vendors to seek permission to export certain drone engines, lasers, imaging, communications and radar gear, and anti-drone systems. Consumer-grade drones with certain specifications are also subject to the controls, which come into effect September 1. All civilian drones not included in the controls are prohibited from being exported for military purposes, an unidentified ministry spokesperson said in an online statement. "China's modest expansion of the scope of drone control this time is an important measure to demonstrate its commitment as a responsible major country to implement global security initiatives and maintain world peace," the statement said, adding that China has "consistently opposed the use of civilian drones for military purposes."

More than 50% of drones sold in the US are made by Shenzhen-based DJI, the world's top drone manufacturer, with DJI models popular among US public safety agencies, according to two US lawmakers. They earlier this year introduced legislation that would restrict the company from operating on US communications infrastructure. The US last year placed sweeping controls banning Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license. Beijing last month imposed export controls on two elements essential for manufacturing semiconductors. The controls go into effect August 1.

Drones have already figured into US-China tensions. The US added DJI to an investment blacklist in 2021, alleging that the firm played a role in facilitating human rights abuses against China's Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic and religious minorities in the far western region of Xinjiang. The company was already on the US entity list, barring it from buying American technology. DJI denied having done anything to justify being placed on the list. On Tuesday, following the ministry announcement, DJI released a statement on its website saying it has never designed or marketed equipment for military purposes and would "actively cooperate" with the new export control policy.

Amazon is rolling out its virtual health clinic service nationwide, the company announced Tuesday. From a report: The e-retailer launched the service, called Amazon Clinic, last November, touting it as a virtual platform for users to connect with health-care providers to treat common conditions like sinus infections, acne, and migraines. Users select their condition, choose a provider, then answer a brief questionnaire. Depending on where they live, users can choose to connect with a clinician over video or text message. Amazon does not provide the telemedicine services itself, but instead provides Amazon Clinic as a platform to connect telemedicine partners with patients. Current partners include Curai Health, Hello Alpha, SteadyMD and Wheel.

With Tuesday's announcement, users in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., can access Amazon Clinic via video visits. Due to regulatory issues, message-based chat on Amazon Clinic is only available in 34 states. Nworah Ayogu, the chief medical officer and general manager of Amazon Clinic, told CNBC in an interview that the company vets the quality of each provider and their internal operations to determine "they have stood up as a provider group." The e-commerce giant also makes sure the provider groups are staffed across all 50 states "to be able to deliver care in a timely response," Ayogu added.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the international tech news site Rest of World: In an open letter earlier this year, Neal Mohan, the recently appointed head of YouTube, made a pledge to creators that better translation tools were coming. Now, YouTube is delivering on that promise with Aloud — a free tool that automatically dubs videos using synthetic voices, raising creators' hopes and putting new pressure on dubbing firms that already cater to YouTubers.

At the VidCon convention in late June, YouTube announced a pilot for Aloud. The tool first generates a transcription of a video's audio, which a creator can edit before selecting their preferred language and style of synthetic voice. The dub can take just minutes to generate.

The pilot currently includes the option to dub videos into English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The company has said more languages are coming — likely including Bahasa Indonesia and Hindi, which are already advertised on the Aloud website. Hundreds of creators have already signed up to test the tool. "Our long-term goal is to be able to dub between any two languages, and as part of that goal we will continue to pilot and learn from dubbing content in different regions," Buddhika Kottahachchi, co-founder of Aloud and the recently appointed head of product for YouTube Dubbing, told Rest of World. "Helping a creator expand beyond their primary language can help them reach new audiences..."

In the lead up to the pilot announcement, YouTube also released a new product feature that allows viewers to select between multiple dubbing tracks on a single video, similar to the current option for subtitles.
Here's a video of YouTube's announcement, with five"audio tracks" (in different languages) available if you click the "gear" icon. While YouTube's top stars hire dubbing services, many smaller creators can't afford them, the article points out. "By offering Aloud for free, YouTube is setting up a new swath of creators to access dubs for the first time...

"YouTube's new push into automated dubbing is a serious challenge for existing dubbing companies, which are now forced to compete with a free competitor built into the platform."

Friday America's Department of Energy announced plans to re-purpose some of the land it owns — "portions of which were previously used in the nation's nuclear weapons program" — for generating clean energy. They'll be leasing them out for "utility-scale clean energy projects" in an initiative called "Cleanup to Clean Energy."

The agency has identified 70,000 acres for potential development, in New Mexico, Nevada, South Carolina, Idaho, and Washington: "We are going to transform the lands we have used over decades for nuclear security and environmental remediation by working closely with tribes and local communities together with partners in the private sector to build some of the largest clean energy projects in the world," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "Through the Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative, the Department of Energy will leverage areas that were previously used to protect our national security and will repurpose them to the same end — this time, generating clean energy that will help save the planet and protect our energy independence."
The announcement notes that in December 2021, President Biden directed U.S. federal agencies to "authorize use of their real property assets, including land for the development of new clean electricity generation and storage through leases, grants, permits, or other mechanisms."

"As the leading Federal agency on clean energy research and development, DOE has both a unique opportunity and a clear responsibility to lead by example and identify creative solutions to achieve the President's mandate."

Python's Global Interpreter Lock "allows only one thread to hold the control of the Python interpreter," according to the tutorial site Real Python. (They add, "it can be a performance bottleneck in CPU-bound and multi-threaded code.")

Friday the Python Steering Council "announced its intent to accept PEP 703 (Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython), with initial support possibly showing up in the 3.13 release," reports LWN.net.

From the Steering Council's announcement: It's clear that the overall sentiment is positive, both for the general idea and for PEP 703 specifically. The Steering Council is also largely positive on both. We intend to accept PEP 703, although we're still working on the acceptance details...

Our base assumptions are:

- Long-term (probably 5+ years), the no-GIL build should be the only build. We do not want to create a permanent split between with-GIL and no-GIL builds (and extension modules).

- We want to be very careful with backward compatibility. We do not want another Python 3 situation, so any changes in third-party code needed to accommodate no-GIL builds should just work in with-GIL builds (although backward compatibility with older Python versions will still need to be addressed). This is not Python 4. We are still considering the requirements we want to place on ABI compatibility and other details for the two builds and the effect on backward compatibility.

- Before we commit to switching entirely to the no-GIL build, we need to see community support for it. We can't just flip the default and expect the community to figure out what work they need to do to support it. We, the core devs, need to gain experience with the new build mode and all it entails. We will probably need to figure out new C APIs and Python APIs as we sort out thread safety in existing code. We also need to bring along the rest of the Python community as we gain those insights and make sure the changes we want to make, and the changes we want them to make, are palatable.

- We want to be able to change our mind if it turns out, any time before we make no-GIL the default, that it's just going to be too disruptive for too little gain. Such a decision could mean rolling back all of the work, so until we're certain we want to make no-GIL the default, code specific to no-GIL should be somewhat identifiable.
The current plan is to "add the no-GIL build as an experimental build mode, presumably in 3.13... [A]fter we have confidence that there is enough community support to make production use of no-GIL viable, we make the no-GIL build supported but not the default (yet), and set a target date/Python version for making it the default... We expect this to take at least a year or two, possibly more."

"Long-term, we want no-GIL to be the default, and to remove any vestiges of the GIL (without unnecessarily breaking backward compatibility)... We think it may take as much as five years to get to this stage."

Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel of the Federal Communications Commission proposes a new broadband standard of 100Mbps downloads and 20Mbps uploads, replacing the 2015's 25Mbps/3Mbps metric. From a report: "In today's world, everyone needs access to affordable, high-speed Internet, no exceptions," Rosenworcel said in the announcement today. "It's time to connect everyone, everywhere. Anything short of 100 percent is just not good enough." Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

The FCC's previous Section 706 reports analyzed availability and included data on adoption but didn't consider affordability. In her announcement today, Rosenworcel said she "recently shared with her colleagues an updated Notice of Inquiry that would kick off the agency's evaluation of the state of broadband across the country, as required by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. Chairwoman Rosenworcel proposes that the Commission consider several crucial characteristics of broadband deployment, including affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access, when determining whether broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to 'all Americans.'"

An anonymous reader shares a report: In January, artificial intelligence powerhouse OpenAI announced a tool that could save the world -- or at least preserve the sanity of professors and teachers -- by detecting whether a piece of content had been created using generative AI tools like its own ChatGPT. Half a year later, that tool is dead, killed because it couldn't do what it was designed to do.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI quietly unplugged its AI detection tool, AI Classifier, last week because of "its low rate of accuracy," the firm said. The explanation was not in a new announcement, but added in a note added to the blog post that first announced the tool. The link to OpenAI's classifier is no longer available. "We are working to incorporate feedback and are currently researching more effective provenance techniques for text, and have made a commitment to develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated," OpenAI wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Google is rolling out ChromeOS 115 as a bigger-than-usual update with a number of user-facing additions over the coming days. Amidst I/O 2023, Google announced the beta availability of Android App Streaming from your Pixel (4a+) or Xiaomi (12T, 12T Pro, 13, 13 Pro) phone running Android 13 and newer with Cross-Device Services installed. It's now entering stable with ChromeOS 115 so that you can stream apps from your mobile device to your Chromebook. This is framed as letting you "complete quick tasks like replying to a conversation, checking on the status of a rideshare or delivery, and editing your shopping list."

Android apps, which open in a phone-sized window, can be launched via the Phone Hub where you get a row of Recent apps at the bottom of the panel with the ability to browse all compatible "Apps from your phone." Applications can also open when you tap through a messaging notification. When opening PDFs in the Gallery app, ChromeOS 115 adds a signature tool. Appearing next to Draw in the top toolbar, you can add a signature, which is much easier with a touchscreen than a trackpad and save it for future use. You can place it in any document and resize the signature to ensure line fit. Lastly, Google has updated the keyboard Shortcuts app with "new navigation and taxonomy," improved search, and a "refreshed shortcut visualization" that better shows what to press.

Meanwhile, this is unmentioned in the stable release notes, but ChromeOS 115 is testing better windowing options in the beta channel. Hovering over the expand/minimize button in the top-right corner control group will show you a new layout menu. There's Split (half), Partial, Full and Float. That last option is new and makes it so that the window is always on top, just like Picture-in-Picture (PiP) for video. The other options were previously accessed by dragging a window and moving to the left/right side of the screen until an overlay appears. This approach is much more accessible and hopefully sees a wide launch soon. The announcement can be read here.

This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development. The Register reports: Version 1.0 of Slackware was announced on the July 16, 1993, and project lead Patrick Volkerding, who still maintains the distribution today, celebrated with a modest announcement: "Hey folks! It's time to acknowledge another one of those milestones... 30 (!) years since I made the post linked below announcing Slackware's first stable release after months of beta testing. Thanks to all of our dedicated contributors, loyal users, and those who have helped us to keep the lights on here. It's really been a remarkable journey that I couldn't have anticipated starting out back in 1993. Cheers! :-)"

Blizzard Entertainment is bringing its PC games to Steam, starting with the release of Overwatch 2 on Valve's digital storefront on Aug. 10, Blizzard announced Wednesday. Polygon reports: The Windows PC version of Overwatch 2, like many of Blizzard's PC games, is currently only available through Battle.net. But with Microsoft's impending acquisition of Activision Blizzard and declining player engagement in the game, the maker of Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch appears to be changing its strategy. Blizzard says it will bring "a selection" of its games to Steam, but did not specify which titles beyond Overwatch 2 will make the jump from Battle.net. (A few classic Blizzard games, including the original Diablo and the first two Warcraft games, are available through GOG.com.)

The acceptance of Steam as a platform for Blizzard's games is part of the studio's evolution, the company said in a blog post. "[O]ne of the ideas pushing us forward is meeting players around the world where they are, and making our games as easy as possible to access and play," the company said. "We want to give everyone a chance to experience our universes with old friends while making new ones, no matter how they choose to play." In its announcement, Blizzard said it's not moving away from Battle.net. But, it explained, "as we've evolved, the industry has evolved too -- gaming is no longer just for specific communities as it was when Battle.net launched over two decades ago, gaming is for everyone -- and though we remain committed to continually investing in and supporting Battle.net, we want to break down the barriers to make it easier for players everywhere to find and enjoy our games."

Blizzard says that players on Steam will still need a Battle.net account connected to Overwatch 2 to play the game. The Steam version will support Steam achievements and friends lists, but Blizzard did not announce Steam Deck support. Overwatch 2 can now be wishlisted through Steam. As for Blizzard's future plans for other game releases on Steam, the company said it will be "sharing more about potential other games coming to the platform when the time is right."

With no formal announcement, Netflix removed its $9.99 "Basic" subscription tier for anybody trying to sign up for a new account or resubscribe in the U.S. and UK. From a report: Now your two options are to pay $5.50 more per month for the "Standard" plan, or otherwise suffer through constant ad interruptions with what's now been dubbed "Standard with ads."

All the changes are listed on the service's help center page. The company noted that the Basic plan "is no longer available for new or rejoining members. If you are currently on the Basic plan, you can remain on this plan until you change plans or cancel your account." Netflix pulled the same move in Canada last month, again without any official announcement. The company has been extra cagey about its latest subscription plan shakeup, which could lead to some rather nasty surprises for anybody who leaves Netflix but comes back later hoping to sign up for the $10 ad-free option.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [T]he NYPD announced it's piloting test drones to fly over at-risk neighborhoods and make public announcements during emergencies. On Sunday, at the tail end of a weekend of heavy rainfall and flooding, New York City's emergency notification system tweeted that the NYPD would be "conducting a test of remote-piloted public messaging capabilities" at a location confirmed to AM New York as Hook Creek Park in Queens. The NYPD told AM New York that the drones were being tested to make announcements during weather-related emergencies, and were being tested in advance of more flooding expected this weekend. The comments suggest that public announcement drones could be deployed in a real-world scenario very soon.

Besides the eeriness of a drone instructing New Yorkers during life-threatening emergencies, the test raises questions about the NYPD's compliance with laws that require the agency to alert the public when deploying surveillance technology. The NYPD is required to post an impact statement and use policy on its website and seek public comment 90 days prior to deploying new surveillance technology to comply with the 2020 POST Act. However, according to the law, the NYPD merely has to amend old use policies if it is using previously existing surveillance tech for new purposes. For its use policy for unmanned aircraft, finalized in April 2021, there is no mention of the emergency announcements. The document says, "In situations where deployment of NYPD (drones) has not been foreseen or prescribed in policy, the highest uniformed member of the NYPD, the Chief of Department, will decide if deployment is appropriate and lawful. In accordance with the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, an addendum to this impact and use policy will be prepared as necessary to describe any additional uses of UAS." No such addendum appears on the website. "This plan just isn't going to fly. The city already has countless ways of reaching New Yorkers, and it would take thousands of drones to reach the whole city," Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project told Motherboard by email.

"The drones are a terrible way to alert New Yorkers, but they are a great way to creep us out. More alarmingly, the NYPD is once again violating the landmark Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which requires public notice and comment before deploying new surveillance systems." Cahn added: "No gadget is going to be a substitute for effective city management and communication practices."

Logitech has acquired Loupedeck -- the company behind the self-titled editing console beloved by streamers and creative professionals -- for an undisclosed sum, according to a press release published on Tuesday. From a report: It's one of many recent steps that Logitech has taken to gain some ground in the streaming market against competing companies like Elgato, having similarly acquired Mevo -- a camera hardware and software company specializing in livestreaming -- in 2021. According to the press release, the partnership between Logitech and Loupedeck is designed to provide "a more seamless experience for creators," which could potentially provide Loupedeck hardware with more specialized presets out of the box and better integration with Streamlabs -- the streaming platform acquired by Logitech back in 2019.

Qualcomm and Meta will enable the social networking company's new large language model, Llama 2, to run on Qualcomm chips on phones and PCs starting in 2024, the companies announced today. From a report: So far, LLMs have primarily run in large server farms, on Nvidia graphics processors, due to the technology's vast needs for computational power and data, boosting Nvidia stock, which is up more than 220% this year. But the AI boom has largely missed the companies that make leading edge processors for phones and PCs, like Qualcomm. Its stock is up about 10% so far in 2023, trailing the NASDAQ's gain of 36%. The announcement on Tuesday suggests that Qualcomm wants to position its processors as well-suited for A.I. but "on the edge," or on a device, instead of "in the cloud." If large language models can run on phones instead of in large data centers, it could push down the significant cost of running A.I. models, and could lead to better and faster voice assistants and other apps.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered yet another astounding discovery," reports CNN, "spying an active supermassive black hole deeper into the universe than has ever been recorded." The black hole lies within CEERS 1019 — an extremely old galaxy likely formed 570 million years after the big bang — making it more than 13 billion years old. And scientists were perplexed to find just how small the celestial object's central black hole measures. "This black hole clocks in at about 9 million solar masses," according to a NASA news release. A solar mass is a unit equivalent to the mass of the sun in our home solar system — which is about 333,000 times larger than the Earth. That's "far less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes," according to NASA. "Those behemoths typically contain more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun — and they are easier to detect because they are much brighter."

The ability to bring such a dim, distant black hole into focus is a key feature of the Webb telescope, which uses highly sensitive instruments to detect otherwise invisible light...

The relative smallness of the black hole at CEER 1019's center is a mystery for scientists. It's not yet clear how such a small black hole formed in the early days of the universe, which was known to produce much larger gravity wells.
NASA's announcement emphasized the power of the James Webb Space Telescope. "Not only could the team untangle which emissions in the spectrum are from the black hole and which are from its host galaxy, they could also pinpoint how much gas the black hole is ingesting and determine its galaxy's star-formation rate."

The survey also recorded evidence of eleven new galaxies — which are still "churning out new stars," according to NASA. A member of the team says these new galaxies, "along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, might change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history."

The University of Southampton has an announcement. Slashdot reader pyroclast shared this report from ScienceDaily: Today an international team of researchers has chosen the location which best represents the beginnings of what could be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene.

A GSSP is an internationally agreed-upon reference point to show the start of a new geological period or epoch in layers of rock that have built up through the ages. It's been proposed by some geologists that we are now living in the Anthropocene — a new geological epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the world's climate and environment. The concept has significant implications for how we consider our impact on the planet. But there is disagreement in the scientific community about when the Anthropocene began, how it is evidenced and whether human influence has been substantial enough to constitute a new geological age, which usually span millions of years. To help answer these questions, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) set up the Anthropocene Working Group.

"The sediments found at the bottom of Crawford Lake provide an exquisite record of recent environmental change over the last millennia," says Dr Simon Turner, Secretary of the Anthropocene Working Group from UCL. "Seasonal changes in water chemistry and ecology have created annual layers that can be sampled for multiple markers of historical human activity. It is this ability to precisely record and store this information as a geological archive that can be matched to historical global environmental changes which make sites such as Crawford Lake so important...."

Professor Andrew Cundy, Chair in Environmental Radiochemistry at the University of Southampton and member of the Anthropocene Working Group, explains: "The presence of plutonium gives us a stark indicator of when humanity became such a dominant force that it could leave a unique global 'fingerprint' on our planet. In nature, plutonium is only present in trace amounts. But in the early-1950s, when the first hydrogen bomb tests took place, we see an unprecedented increase and then spike in the levels of plutonium in core samples from around the world. We then see a decline in plutonium from the mid-1960s onwards when the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty came into effect."

Other geological indicators of human activity include high levels of ash from coal-fired power stations, high concentrations of heavy metals, such as lead, and the presence of plastic fibres and fragments. These coincide with 'The Great Acceleration' — a dramatic surge across a range of human activity, from transportation to energy use, starting in the mid-20th century and continuing today.
"Evidence from the sites will now be presented to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which will decide next year whether to ratify the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch."

Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: I'd been waiting for Oracle to throw its hat into the ring for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Linux source-code fight. I knew it was only a matter of time. On July 10, Oracle's Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, and Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development, declared: "IBM's actions are not in your best interest. By killing CentOS as a RHEL alternative and attacking AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, IBM is eliminating one way your customers save money and make a larger share of their wallet available to you."

In fact, Oracle now presents itself as an open-source Linux champion: "Oracle has always made Oracle Linux binaries and source freely available to all. We do not have subscription agreements that interfere with a subscriber's rights to redistribute Oracle Linux. On the other hand, IBM subscription agreements specify that you're in breach if you use those subscription services to exercise your GPLv2 rights." As of June 21, IBM no longer publicly releases RHEL source code -- in short, the gloves are off, and the fight's on. But this is also just the latest move in a fight that's older than many of you. [...]

Mike McGrath, Red Hat's vice president of core platforms, explained why Red Hat would no longer be releasing RHEL's code, but only CentOS Stream's code, because "thousands of [Red Hat] people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time ... We have to pay the people to do that work." That sentiment is certainly true. But I also feel that Oracle takes the worst possible spin, with Screven and Coekaerts commenting: "IBM doesn't want to continue publicly releasing RHEL source code because it has to pay its engineers? That seems odd, given that Red Hat as a successful independent open source company chose to publicly release RHEL source and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion."

So, what will Oracle do now? For starters, Oracle Linux will continue to be RHEL-compatible through RHEL 9.2. After that release -- and without access to the published RHEL source code -- there are no guarantees. But Screven and Coekaerts suggest that "if an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem." As for Oracle Linux's code: "Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community, and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution."

John.Banister writes: SUSE announced that they're spending $10 million on maintaining a fork of RHEL, with the source code of the fork to be freely available to all. I don't know that people who want to copy RHEL source will necessarily see copying the source of a fork as furthering their goals, but it could be that SUSE will build a nice alternative enterprise Linux to complement their current product. And, I reckon, better SUSE than Oracle, since I keep reading comments on people getting screwed by Oracle, but not so many on people getting screwed by SUSE. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes: This all started when Red Hat's VP of core platforms, Mike McGrath, declared, "CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal." That may not sound like much to you, but those were fighting words to many open-source and Linux distributors. According to Linux's fundamental license, the GPLv2, no restrictions can be placed on distributing the source code to those who've received the binaries. In the view of many in the open-source community, that's exactly what Red Hat has done.

Others see this as the latest step in the long dance between Red Hat's business licensing demands and open-source licensing. Red Hat has had conflicts with the RHEL clones since 2005, when Red Hat's trademarks were the issue of the day. Usually, these fights stayed confined to the RHEL and its immediate clone rivals. Not this time.

Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, SUSE CEO, said this: "For decades, collaboration and shared success have been the building blocks of our open-source community. We have a responsibility to defend these values. This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today." What does that mean? While SUSE will continue to invest in and support its own Linux distributions, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and openSUSE, SUSE plans on creating its own RHEL-compatible clone. Once completed, this new distro will be contributed to an open-source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.