"Terraform, arguably the most popular Infrastructure as Code products, has been forked after the parent company HashiCorp changed its license from the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to the Business Source License v1.1 (BSL)," writes long-time Slashdot reader ochinko. "Our view is that we're actually not the fork because we're just changing the name but it's the same project under the same license," Sebastian Stadil, co-founder and CEO of DevOps automation biz Scalr told The Register. "Our position is that the fork is actually HashiCorp that has forked its own projects under a different license." From the report: HashiCorp's decision to issue new licensing terms for its software follows a path trodden by numerous other organizations formed around open source projects to limit what competitors can do with project code. As the biz acknowledged in its statement about the transition, firms like Cockroach Labs, Confluent Sentry, Couchbase, Elastic, MariaDB, MongoDB, and Redis Labs have similarly adopted less-permissive software licenses to create a barrier for competitors. You can see the OpenTF manifesto here.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares what's new in the release of Linux 6.5: The biggest news for servers -- and cloud Linux users -- is AMD Ryzen processors' P-State support. This support should mean better performance and power use across CPU cores. Intel Alder Lake CPUs have also received improved load balancing in a related development. RISC-V architecture fans will be pleased to find Linux now has Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) support. ACPI is used in Linux and other operating systems for power management. It's vital for laptops and other battery-powered systems.

For better security, people using virtual machines or sandboxes based on Usermode Linux for testing, or running multiple versions of Linux at once, now have Landlock support. Landock is a Linux Security Module that enables applications to sandbox themselves by selecting access rights to directories. It's designed to be used by unprivileged processes while following the system security policy. To make talking with the rest of the world easier, Linux 6.5 now supports USB 4v2. This new USB-C standard will support up to an eye-watering 120Gbps. And while we're still getting used to Wi-Fi 6E, the Wi-Fi Alliance is already working on bringing us Wi-Fi 7. When Wi-Fi 7 arrives, with its theoretical maximum speed of 46Gbps, Linux will be ready. As usual, the new Linux has many more built-in audio and graphics drivers. The Bcachefs filesystem didn't make it into Linux 6.5, notes Vaughan-Nichols. "While the Bcachefs filesystem looks good, there's been a lot of developers fighting about the development process. These personal arguments have led Torvalds to decide not to incorporate Bcachefs into Linux 6.5."

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.5's delivery in a brief post on August 27.

Free and open software have transformed the tech industry. But we still have a lot to work out to make them healthy, equitable enterprises. From a report: When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn't have known that the machine would ignite a revolution. While the early decades of software development generally ran on a culture of open access, this new printer ran on inaccessible proprietary software, much to the horror of Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at the university.

A few years later, Stallman released GNU, an operating system designed to be a free alternative to one of the dominant operating systems at the time: Unix. The free-software movement was born, with a simple premise: for the good of the world, all code should be open, without restriction or commercial intervention. Forty years later, tech companies are making billions on proprietary software, and much of the technology around us is inscrutable. But while Stallman's movement may look like a failed experiment, the free and open-source software movement is not only alive and well; it has become a keystone of the tech industry.

It's time for the open source Rambos to stop fighting and agree that developers care more about software's access and ease of use than the purity of its license, reads a piece on InfoWorld. From the report: The open source war is over, however much some want to continue soldiering on. Recently Meta (Facebook) released Llama 2, a powerful large language model (LLM) with more than 70 billion parameters. In the past, Meta had restricted use of its LLMs to research purposes, but with Llama 2, Meta opened it up; the only restriction is that it can't be used for commercial purposes. Only a handful of companies have the computational horsepower to deploy it at scale (Google, Amazon, and very, very few others).

This means, of course, it's not "open source" according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, "They drew first blood!" and "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!", insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 "open source." They're right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don't seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick "open enough." It's not that open source doesn't matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed. More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, "Younger [developers] today are about POSS -- post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub." In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in "epic clusterf-s" or that "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases."

And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven't entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or "open enough," software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep. In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won't matter. They won't matter because "open source" doesn't really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we're in the midst of the post-open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Open source project Moq (pronounced "Mock") has drawn sharp criticism for quietly including a controversial dependency in its latest release. Distributed on the NuGet software registry, Moq sees over 100,000 downloads on any given day, and has been downloaded over 476 million times over the course of its lifetime. [...] Last week, one of Moq's owners, Daniel Cazzulino (kzu), who also maintains the SponsorLink project, added SponsorLink to Moq versions 4.20.0 and above. This move sent shock waves across the open source ecosystem largely for two reasons -- while Cazzulino has every right to change his project Moq, he did not notify the user base prior to bundling the dependency, and SponsorLink DLLs contain obfuscated code, making it is hard to reverse engineer, and not quite "open source."

"It seems that starting from version 4.20, SponsorLink is included," Germany-based software developer Georg Dangl reported referring to Moq's 4.20.0 release. "This is a closed-source project, provided as a DLL with obfuscated code, which seems to at least scan local data (git config?) and sends the hashed email of the current developer to a cloud service." The scanning capability is part of the .NET analyzer tool that runs during the build process, and is hard to disable, warns Dangl. "I can understand the reasoning behind it, but this is honestly pretty scary from a privacy standpoint."

SponsorLink describes itself as a means to integrate GitHub Sponsors into your libraries so that "users can be properly linked to their sponsorship to unlock features or simply get the recognition they deserve for supporting your project." GitHub user Mike (d0pare) decompiled the DLLs, and shared a rough reconstruction of the source code. The library, according to the analyst, "spawns external git process to get your email." It then calculates a SHA-256 hash of the email addresses and sends it to SponsorLink's CDN: hxxps://cdn.devlooped[.]com/sponsorlink. "Honestly Microsoft should blacklist this package working with the NuGet providers," writes Austin-based developer Travis Taylor. "The author can't be trusted. This was an incredibly stupid move that's just created a ton of work for lots of people." Following the backlash, Cazzulino updated the SponsorLink project's README with a lengthy "Privacy Considerations" section that clarifies that no actual email addresses, just their hashes, are being collected.

In February of 1994 Jon "maddog" Hall interviewed a young Linus Torvalds (then just 24). Nearly three decades later — as Hall approaches his 73rd birthday — he's shared a long essay looking back, but also assessing today's controversy about Red Hat's licensing of RHEL. A (slightly- condensed] excerpt: [O]ver time some customers developed a pattern of purchasing a small number of RHEL systems, then using the "bug-for-bug" compatible version of Red Hat from some other distribution. This, of course, saved the customer money, however it also reduced the amount of revenue that Red Hat received for the same amount of work. This forced Red Hat to charge more for each license they sold, or lay off Red Hat employees, or not do projects they might have otherwise funded. So recently Red Hat/IBM made a business decision to limit their customers to those who would buy a license from them for every single system that would run RHEL and only distribute their source-code and the information necessary on how to build that distribution to those customers. Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished.....this was, and is, the essence of the GPL.

Most, if not all, of the articles I have read have said something along the lines of "IBM/Red Hat seem to be following the GPL..but...but...but... the community! "

Which community? There are plenty of distributions for people who do not need the same level of engineering and support that IBM and Red Hat offer. Red Hat, and IBM, continue to send their changes for GPLed code "upstream" to flow down to all the other distributions. They continue to share ideas with the larger community. [...]

I now see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and beating their breasts and saying how they are going to protect the investment of people who want to use RHEL for free [...] So far I have seen four different distributions saying that they will continue the production of "not RHEL", generating even more distributions for the average user to say "which one should I use"? If they really want to do this, why not just work together to produce one good one? Why not make their own distributions a RHEL competitor? How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it? SuSE said that they would invest ten million dollars in developing a competitor to RHEL. Fantastic! COMPETE. Create an enterprise competitor to Red Hat with the same business channels, world-wide support team, etc. etc. You will find it is not inexpensive to do that. Ten million may get you started.

My answer to all this? RHEL customers will have to decide what they want to do. I am sure that IBM and Red Hat hope that their customers will see the value of RHEL and the support that Red Hat/IBM and their channel partners provide for it. The rest of the customers who just want to buy one copy of RHEL and then run a "free" distribution on all their other systems no matter how it is created, well it seems that IBM does not want to do business with them anymore, so they will have to go to other suppliers who have enterprise capable distributions of Linux and who can tolerate that type of customer. [...]

I want to make sure people know that I do not have any hate for people and companies who set business conditions as long as they do not violate the licenses they are under. Business is business.

However I will point out that as "evil" as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all of all the companies that support Open Source "Permissive Licenses", which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only "Closed Source" Licenses....who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made....these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are).

Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL.

For all the researchers, students, hobbyists and people with little or no money, there are literally hundreds of distributions that they can choose, and many that run across other interesting architectures that RHEL does not even address.
Hall answered questions from Slashdot users in 2000 and again in 2013.

Further reading: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2017.

Bram Moolenaar was Vim's creator/maintainer/benevolent-dictator for life. Early this morning his family shared sad news on the Vim-announce Google Group. "It is with a heavy heart that we have to inform you that Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023." Moolenaar was 62 years old, and died from "a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks."

"Bram dedicated a large part of his life to VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of."

Anyone who's used Vim has seen evidence of Moolenaar's generosity. "Vim is Charityware," Moolenaar wrote in its pioneering license. "You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to make a donation for needy children in Uganda." Moolenaar pioneered the concept of charityware decades ago, and also helped to popularize its adoption. To this day Vim users can still view the license by typing the command :help Uganda or :help ICCF. And Vim's sponsor FAQ notes that "Each registered Vim user and sponsor who donates at least 10 euro will be able to vote for new features."

Moolenaar's personal web site also includes photos from his travels around the world, and YouTube has some videos of talks and interviews with Moolenaar.

He was still committing changes to Vim up until a month ago.

In the comments below long-time Slashdot reader bads shares a link to a post from long-time Vim contributor Christian Brabandt : Bram was a great leader to the Vim community and I really enjoyed working with him over the past years, since I became involved with the development of Vim almost 20 years ago.

Bram was of great inspiration in creating a great community, helping people with his charity and he was a great mentor. And now he left too soon. We lost a great leader and I regret never having met him in person.

However to all of the community: I will continue and I hope all of the other contributors will also keep up the good work. I do have access to the Vim homepage and the Vim organization (not sure if all the rights, but I am sure we will work on the details in the near future...) I hope together we will be able to continue successfully.

Meta on Wednesday introduced its open-source AI tool called AudioCraft that will help users to create music and audio based on text prompts. Reuters reports: The AI tool is bundled with three models, AudioGen, EnCodec and MusicGen, and works for music, sound, compression and generation, Meta said. MusicGen is trained using company-owned and specifically licensed music, it added. From Meta's press release: The AudioCraft family of models are capable of producing high-quality audio with long-term consistency, and they're easy to use. With AudioCraft, we simplify the overall design of generative models for audio compared to prior work in the field -- giving people the full recipe to play with the existing models that Meta has been developing over the past several years while also empowering them to push the limits and develop their own models.

AudioCraft works for music, sound, compression, and generation -- all in the same place. Because it's easy to build on and reuse, people who want to build better sound generators, compression algorithms, or music generators can do it all in the same code base and build on top of what others have done. Having a solid open source foundation will foster innovation and complement the way we produce and listen to audio and music in the future. With even more controls, we think MusicGen can turn into a new type of instrument -- just like synthesizers when they first appeared.

Some of the largest tech companies, including Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nvidia, have announced the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) to promote and develop Pixar's 3D Universal Scene Description technology. From the Linux Foundation: The alliance seeks to standardize the 3D ecosystem by advancing the capabilities of Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). By promoting greater interoperability of 3D tools and data, the alliance will enable developers and content creators to describe, compose, and simulate large-scale 3D projects and build an ever-widening range of 3D-enabled products and services. Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to collaboratively capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production, OpenUSD's power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.

The alliance will develop written specifications detailing the features of OpenUSD. This will enable greater compatibility and wider adoption, integration, and implementation, and allows inclusion by other standards bodies into their specifications. The Linux Foundation's JDF was chosen to house the project, as it will enable open, efficient, and effective development of OpenUSD specifications, while providing a path to recognition through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). AOUSD will also provide the primary forum for the collaborative definition of enhancements to the technology by the greater industry. The alliance invites a broad range of companies and organizations to join and participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD.

Earlier this week, Meta announced it has teamed up with Microsoft to launch Llama 2, its "open-source" large language model (LLM) that uses artificial intelligence to generate text, images, and code. In an opinion piece for The Register, long-time ZDNet contributor and technology analyst, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writes: "Meta is simply open source washing an open but ultimately proprietary LLM." From the report: As Amanda Brock, CEO of OpenUK, said, it's "not an OSI approved license but a significant release of Open Technology ... This is a step to moving AI from the hands of the few to the many, democratizing technology and building trust in its use and future through transparency." And for many developers, that may be enough. [...] But the devil is in the details when it comes to open source. And there, Meta, with its Llama 2 Community License Agreement, falls on its face. As The Register noted earlier, the community agreement forbids the use of Llama 2 to train other language models; and if the technology is used in an app or service with more than 700 million monthly users, a special license is required from Meta. Stefano Maffulli, the OSI's executive director, explained: "While I'm happy that Meta is pushing the bar of available access to powerful AI systems, I'm concerned about the confusion by some who celebrate LLaMa 2 as being open source: if it were, it wouldn't have any restrictions on commercial use (points 5 and 6 of the Open Source Definition). As it is, the terms Meta has applied only allow some commercial use. The keyword is some."

Maffulli then dove in deeper. "Open source means that developers and users are able to decide for themselves how and where to use the technology without the need to engage with another party; they have sovereignty over the technology they use. When read superficially, Llama's license says, 'You can't use this if you're Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Bytedance, Alibaba, or your startup grows as big.' It may sound like a reasonable clause, but it also implicitly says, 'You need to ask us for permission to create a tool that may solve world hunger' or anything big like that." Stephen O'Grady, open source licensing expert and RedMonk co-founder, explained it like this: "Imagine if Linux was open source unless you worked at Facebook." Exactly. Maffulli concluded: "That's why open source has never put restrictions on the field of use: you can't know beforehand what can happen in the future, good or bad."

The OSI isn't the only open-source-savvy group that's minding the Llama 2 license. Karen Sadler, lawyer and executive director at the Software Freedom Conservancy, dug into the license's language and found that "the Additional Commercial Terms in section 2 of the license agreement, which is a limitation on the number of users, makes it non-free and not open source." To Sadler, "it looks like Meta is trying to push a license that has some trappings of an open source license but, in fact, has the opposite result. Additionally, the Acceptable Use Policy, which the license requires adherence to, lists prohibited behaviors that are very expansively written and could be very subjectively applied -- if you send out a mass email, could it be considered spam? If there's reasonably critical material published, would it be considered defamatory?" Last, but far from least, she "didn't notice any public drafting or comment process for this license, which is necessary for any serious effort to introduce a new license."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is set to release a commercial version of LLaMA, its open-source large language model (LLM) that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate text, images, and code. LLaMA, which stands for Large Language Model Meta AI, was publicly announced in February as a small foundational model, and made available to researchers and academics. Now, the Financial Times is reporting that Meta is prepared to release the commercial version of the model, which would enable developers and businesses to build applications using the foundational model.

Since it's an open-source AI technology, commercial access to LLaMA gives businesses of all sizes the opportunity to adapt and improve the AI, accelerating technological innovation across various sectors and potentially leading to more robust models. Meta's LLaMA is available in 7, 13, 33, and 65 billion parameters, compared to ChatGPT's LLM, GPT-3.5, which has been confirmed to have 175 billion parameters. OpenAI hasn't said how many parameters GPT-4 has, but it's estimated to have over 1 trillion parameters -- the more parameters, the better the model can understand input and generate appropriate output.

Though open-source AI models already exist, launching Meta's LLaMA commercially is still a significant step, due to it being larger than many of the available open-source LLMs on the market, and the fact that it is from one of the biggest tech companies in the world. The launch means Meta is directly competing with Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google, and that competition could mean significant advancements in the AI field. Closed or proprietary software, like that used in OpenAI's ChatGPT, has drawn criticism over transparency and security.

Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone shares a report from Phoronix: With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do. Benny Vasquez, Chair of the Board for the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, wrote in a blog post yesterday: After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible*.

We will continue to aim to produce an enterprise-grade, long-term distribution of Linux that is aligned and ABI compatible with RHEL in response to our community's needs, to the extent it is possible to do, and such that software that runs on RHEL will run the same on AlmaLinux.

For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of "bug-for-bug compatibility" with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat's release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream."

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."

America's Federal Trade Commission is soliciting public comments on the business practices of cloud computing providers, trying to understand security risks and competitive dynamics. (Questions include "To what extent are particular segments of the economy reliant on a small handful of cloud service providers and what are the data security impacts of this reliance?") They've already received dozens of comments (including one from Red Hat).

But there's also three questions about open-source software:


"To what extent do cloud providers offer products based on open-source software?"

- "What is the impact of such offerings on competition?"

- "How have recent changes to the terms of open-source licenses affected cloud providers' ability to offer products based on open-source software?"


This has drawn a response from the Free Software Foundation — and they're urging others to join in. "Since it isn't every day that the FTC solicits public comments on subjects in which the free software community is so well-versed, let's take this opportunity to submit comments that support digital sovereignty." The hope is to persuade policy makers to make software freedom and privacy a central part of any future considerations made in the areas of storage, computation, and services. Such comments will be made part of the public record, so any participation promises to have a lasting impact...

[W]e have prepared the following points for consideration:


- When considering rules and regulations in technology that stand to protect people's fundamental civil liberties, it is important to start from the question, "does this decision improve digital sovereignty or diminish it?"

- In the case of computing, (e.g. word processing, spreadsheet, and graphic design programs), the typical options diminish digital sovereignty because the computations are being run on another computer under someone else's control, inaccessible to the end user, who therefore does not have the essential freedoms to share, modify, and study the computations (i.e. the program). The only real solution to this is to offer free "as in freedom" replacements of those programs, so that end users may maintain control over their computing.

- In the case of storage, today's typical options diminish digital sovereignty because many storage providers only provide unencrypted options for storage. It is imperative that individuals and businesses who choose third-party storage always have the choice to encrypt their storage, and the encryption keys must be entirely within the control of the end user, not the third-party provider.

- In the case of services (such as email, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing), while the source code that runs services need not necessarily be made public, end users deserve to be able to access such services via a free software client. In such cases, it is imperative that service providers implement a design of interoperability, so that end users may use the service with any choice of client.

- Free software allows end users to inspect the software for possible security flaws, while proprietary software does not. Therefore free software is the only realistic option for an end user to achieve verifiable security...


Unfortunately, the FTC's website requires nonfree JavaScript (reCAPTCHA, specifically) to comment on a document, and the FTC has declined repeated requests for instructions for how to submit comments by paper form.

If you're not in the habit of avoiding nonfree JavaScript for the sake of your freedom, which we recommend, you can also leave comments on the FTC's website. While you're there, let webmaster@ftc.gov know about the injustice of proprietary JavaScript and encourage them to respect the freedom of their users...

The deadline to submit is June 21, which is just enough time to publish something meaningful on the topic in support of free software.

TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers writes: Not to be outdone by Google, Meta has released its own AI-powered music generator -- and, unlike Google, open-sourced it. Called MusicGen, Meta's music-generating tool, a demo of which can be found here, can turn a text description (e.g. "An '80s driving pop song with heavy drums and synth pads in the background") into about 12 seconds of audio, give or take. MusicGen can optionally be "steered" with reference audio, like an existing song, in which case it'll try to follow both the description and melody.

Meta says that MusicGen was trained on 20,000 hours of music, including 10,000 "high-quality" licensed music tracks and 390,000 instrument-only tracks from ShutterStock and Pond5, a large stock media library. The company hasn't provided the code it used to train the model, but it has made available pre-trained models that anyone with the right hardware -- chiefly a GPU with around 16GB of memory -- can run.

So how does MusicGen perform? Well, I'd say -- though certainly not well enough to put human musicians out of a job. Its songs are reasonably melodic, at least for basic prompts like "ambient chiptunes music," and -- to my ears -- on par (if not slightly better) with the results from Google's AI music generator, MusicLM. But they won't win any awards.

Slashdot reader e065c8515d206cb0e190 shared the big announcement from Debian.org: After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm).

bookworm will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team...

This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as obsolete. 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for bookworm is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.

bookworm has more translated man pages than ever thanks to our translators who have made man-pages available in multiple languages such as: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. All of the systemd man pages are now completely available in German.

The Debian Med Blend introduces a new package: shiny-server which simplifies scientific web applications using R. We have kept to our efforts of providing Continuous Integration support for Debian Med team packages. Install the metapackages at version 3.8.x for Debian bookworm.

The Debian Astro Blend continues to provide a one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists with updates to almost all versions of the software packages in the blend. astap and planetary-system-stacker help with image stacking and astrometry resolution. openvlbi, the open source correlator, is now included.

Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced: users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled to take full advantage of the security feature.
9to5Linux has screenshots, and highlights some new features: Debian 12 also brings read/write support for APFS (Apple File System) with the apfsprogs and apfs-dkms utilities, a new tool called ntfs2btrfs that lets you convert NTFS drives to Btrfs, a new malloc implementation called mimalloc, a new kernel SMB server called ksmbd-tools, and support for the merged-usr root file system layout...

This release also includes completely new artwork called Emerald, designed (once again) by Juliette Taka. New fonts are also present in this major Debian release, along with a new fnt command-line tool for accessing 1,500 DFSG-compliant fonts.
Debian 12 "bookworm" ships with several desktop environments, including:

• Gnome 43,
• KDE Plasma 5.27,
• LXDE 11,
• LXQt 1.2.0,
• MATE 1.26,
• Xfce 4.18

This week the Linux Foundation and the National Spectrum Consortium "announced formal collaboration" on developing software prototypes and demonstrations for Open RAN (open radio access network):

The two organizations have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to solidify their working relationship and commitment to minimizing barriers to further R&D necessary for OpenRAN acceleration within the United States.

More open and flexible wireless networks ultimately increase vendor diversity and competition, prevent vendor lock-in, increase innovation in wireless networking technology, lower deployment and operational costs, and even increase security and energy efficiency. "We are eager to work with the NSC in creating a stable, open, secure reference stack for Open RAN," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. "By combining resources, we'll accelerate access to Open RAN and wireless technology across the United States across verticals and into government, academia, and small business."
The collaborations goals include:

• Establish an open source reference software architecture for Open RAN that will kickstart academic and commercial R&D by lowering the cost and complexity of entry

• Rally support from industry with guidance and funds to leap forward in a true open and secure RAN

This week the Linux Foundation announced the publication of The Open Source Opportunity for Microgrids: Five Ways to Drive Innovation and Overcome Market Barriers for Energy Resilience. "The research informs readers about microgrids — groups of distributed energy resources designed to improve energy resiliency, with the ability to operate as part of a larger electrical grid, or separately as an island."

The report highlights the current state of the microgrid market and explores the potential for open source technology to accelerate the adoption of microgrids worldwide... The report concludes that microgrids are an essential tool to improve energy resilience and advance decarbonization, and that the market faces a range of challenges that the open source ecosystem is well positioned to address.
Among other things, the report "examines how participation in relevant open source programs and activities can help address gaps and challenges," according to the announcement, "and accelerate the learning, development, and governance of microgrid initiatives." One focus of the report is "enabling market innovation toward energy resilience at scale, supporting the Energy sector to adopt proven open source-enabled business models, security benefits, and cost reductions demonstrated in the IT and Telecom industries."

And according to the foundation's senior vice president of research and communications, the report also "describes the opportunities for open source to accelerate the proliferation of microgrids as a mechanism for clean energy production and consumption."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: On the AWS News Blog, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr has published a kind of obituary for AWS Documentation on GitHub (RIP, 2018-2023). From the blog post:

"About five years ago I announced that AWS Documentation is Now Open Source and on GitHub. After a prolonged period of experimentation we will archive most of the repos starting the week of June 5th, and will devote all of our resources to directly improving the AWS documentation and website."

"The primary source for most of the AWS documentation is on internal systems that we had to manually sync with the GitHub repos. Despite the best efforts of our documentation team, keeping the public repos in sync with our internal ones has proven to be very difficult and time consuming, with several manual steps and some parallel editing. With 262 separate repos and thousands of feature launches every year, the overhead was very high and actually consumed precious time that could have been put to use in ways that more directly improved the quality of the documentation."

"Our intent was to increase value to our customers through openness and collaboration, but we learned through customer feedback that this wasn't necessarily the case. After carefully considering many options we decided to retire the repos and to invest all of our resources in making the content better."

Security guru Bruce Schneier and CS professor Jim Waldo think big tech has underestimated the impact of open source principles on AI research: In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didn't just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers immediately started modifying it, improving it, and getting it to do things no one else anticipated. And their results have been immediate, innovative, and an indication of how the future of this technology is going to play out. Training speeds have hugely increased, and the size of the models themselves has shrunk to the point that you can create and run them on a laptop. The world of A.I. research has dramatically changed.

This development hasn't made the same splash as other corporate announcements, but its effects will be much greater. It will wrest power from the large tech corporations, resulting in both much more innovation and a much more challenging regulatory landscape. The large corporations that had controlled these models warn that this free-for-all will lead to potentially dangerous developments, and problematic uses of the open technology have already been documented. But those who are working on the open models counter that a more democratic research environment is better than having this powerful technology controlled by a small number of corporations...

[B]uilding on public models like Meta's LLaMa, the open-source community has innovated in ways that allow results nearly as good as the huge models — but run on home machines with common data sets. What was once the reserve of the resource-rich has become a playground for anyone with curiosity, coding skills, and a good laptop.

Bigger may be better, but the open-source community is showing that smaller is often good enough. This opens the door to more efficient, accessible, and resource-friendly LLMs.
Low-cost customization will foster rapid innovation, the article argues, and "takes control away from large companies like Google and OpenAI." Although this may have one unforeseen consequence...

"Now that the open-source community is remixing LLMs, it's no longer possible to regulate the technology by dictating what research and development can be done; there are simply too many researchers doing too many different things in too many different countries."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 for submitting the article